CalBearMnM's Journal » Site Updates

WordPress Plugins Installed

mnm — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:39:07 +0000

Worked on adding pagination and fixed up the search page today.

Installed the following plugins:

Results count – for adding “pages x of y” in search
Search Unleashed – for better search indexing, highlights within excerpts, etc
WP-PageNavi – for pagination

Had problems with the Google Custom Search Plugin. Actually, the plugin seems to work fine. I think Google is having problems crawling my blog. It keeps returning my old journal in its results and I can’t seem to force it to check for the right pattern. I can’t find any results from my sitewide Google Analytics either. I updated my privacy settings to stop blocking search engines thinking that might be a problem but so far, no results. I may look into this more later.

Day 2 with WordPress

mnm — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:29:47 +0000

Thanks to Norman’s suggestion of creating an RSS feed of my old entries, I managed to import ALL my entries from my old blog into WordPress. I’m still wondering whether I should try to keep the old database updated. I also managed to integrate the WP blog into my site with my own header and footer. Fixed up the stylesheet a bit til I was satisfied. My next goal is categorizing and adding a title to all the rest of my posts. We’ll see how far I get with that one.

WordPress Installation

mnm — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:16:31 +0000

I’ve tried to avoid having to install outside applications into my site in hopes that I could build everything that is located within it’s pages. However, the limits of time have led me to succumb to conveninence. I’ve always wanted to have total control over my journal entries and this is the closest I could get to having that as well as having a lot of functionality I always wanted to add on. If you can’t beat em, join em.

Website Update

mnm — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been updating my front page quite a bit. Did you notice? I’ve just been switching up the left hand side notices. *shrug* I wanna try to pull my facebook status into it. I’ll look into that later. I also updated the background, font and border colors for all the pages to give each one an overall theme separate from each other. I was very happy to update the UI/navigation of my journal. Made me feel a lot better to update it so it doesn’t look so clunky anymore. Finally, I made sure my front page was HTML 4.01 and CSS validated again! My other pages probably aren’t but I’ll work on those later =P.

Website Update

mnm — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As I was practicing my Chinese, Alex introduced me to this wonderful website – zhongwen.com which helped me learn the meaning behind the characters. It’s pretty awesome in terms of getting to know the Chinese writing system. I feel like I’m learning how to read pictographs. They have a nifty feature which I could add to my website which generates new words (my only problem with it is even if I learn what the character means, I don’t know how to say it). I wanted to add this to my site so I created a space for it on the front page. I got into the mood of redecorating my home so I went ahead and created splash page images which rotate similarly to how I did the MTV Movie Awards International websites. I have yet to figure out how else to fill in the newly created space. Hopefully the new layout will make the first page look/feel more professional. Design inspiration comes over time.

Website Update

mnm — Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Updated timeline (and calendar) with weddings, chinese classes and doctor appointments.

Xanga Wishlist

mnm — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

For several years now, I’ve been struggling to do some sort of merging between my personal site and my Xanga site especially since these two sites are updated the most. I know I’m not the only one with this problem. Many friends either copy and paste their entries into both personal and xanga sites or just leave a link on the last entry. I do want the advantages of having entries within the xanga community especially with friends easily being able to know when latest entries are available. However, I also want an integration with my personal site.

I currently use my Xanga as mainly a photo journal – a quick way to let readers know what I’ve been up to while at the same time keeping entries consistent in its content.

Once in a while I attempt to iframe my personal site into an entry and update it everytime I add a journal entry. However, I hear that doing so tends to break subscription pages and it does get to be tedious.

Since I like organizing my entries, I started tagging to separate out my gallery entries and my journal entries. It is taking a while for me to go through every entry though so I’ve only managed to tag up to mid-07 or so. It would be cool to have these as main tabs at the top of my page to serve as navigation.

I have yet to see how far I can get with skinning my xanga page. The best idea I came up with to integrate my site and Xanga was to add in the header up top that is consistent on both xanga and my personal site. The downside is that I couldn’t do a file include so I will have to constantly update this if I make changes from within my personal site. I will probably continue playing around with Look and Feel functionality to see how far customization can go.

I was also thinking of making a gallery page on my site based on my photo journal updates on xanga but I couldn’t separate out my gallery tagged entries from the rest of my entries. I would put text entries on here but I have all my journal entries since 1999 on my site and I don’t want to break this trend. I still want my site to be the main portal for that.

I will continue to brainstorm about further integrating in hopes that one day the transition between the two will be seamless but for now, I only have this wishlist…

Xanga Wishlist:

- RSS feed of subscriptions.
- Modifiable RSS feed that filters via tags passed in as arguments in the URL.
- Modifiable RSS feed that allows user to specify number of entries that will be displayed.
- Mass tagging of entries.
- Downloadable database of entries.
- Automated functionality for entries from external RSS feeds to display as entries in Xanga to allow subscribers to view latest entries and add comments as they are added to the feed.
- RSS feed of comments based on entry ID#.
- User controlled functionality to show/hide blocks of images/video/text (such as spoiler tags).
- Privacy option to hide from search engines specifically.
- RSS feed available even when Xanga Lock is enabled.
- Ability to save Look & Feel settings into different skins.
- Feedback/suggestions page

[14:18] h3770k1tty: xanga needs its own api
- Xanga API

Website Updates

mnm — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been getting into website updates again recently. I love it when I’m on a roll =). I’ve added an unfinished HISTORY and TESTIMONY tab to my personal site. I’ve been tacking on bits and pieces of text I’ve written before and putting it in some sort of timeline order. I will flush it out more one day.

I’ve also been updating the EDUCATION part of my PORTFOLIO. Unfortunately, I don’t have complete details on everything but I put up as much as I could. Included are a ton of my old essays. It’s interesting to see how I used to write before. Note that my thoughts back then do not necessarily reflect my thoughts currently.

My Website

mnm — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Every now and then I get a burst of excitement over updating my website. Recently, I was looking at w3schools and came across a link that checked the as HTML 4.01 Strict validity of my site. So since Monday, I have been sweeping through my site, fixing it up and separating as much of the design from the code as possible so my style sheet is growing rapidly. It got me into trying to pretty it up a bit here and there so it’s more pleasing to the eye. It’s a slow process but it’s growing and improving over time. I have high hopes for the future of my site. I hope I keep up the motivation to work on it!

Website Update

mnm — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I spent the bulk of the day running rampant with the timeline page. wooohoo!

Website Reconstruction

mnm — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

*09/10, Wednesday – After having some time to myself due to Henry’s busy crazy launching schedule at work, I had time to list out my to do list again. I finally budged in terms of starting reconstruction of my website as I got inspired again to work on it! I’m excited to reorganize and redesign my website once again. I am looking forward to flushing out my pages so they are easy to navigate to and not cluttered. Hopefully the site will serve as a good resource. I’m not gonna do a whole big launch so you will notice the changes occur on my site as I go along. Don’t mind if you find broken stuff along the way! By the way, I nixed the comment section since hardly anyone touches it anyway and it was a lot of extra code =P.