No way this is real. But it would be really cool if it were.
Just the thought of it, all those bouncing bowling balls.
Category: Cool (page 8 of 11)
Something looks different, did Danny learn a new move?
The new additions are a great touch. Can you imagine if George Lucas had a platoon of Dance Troopers in the background while Obi-Wan and Darth Vader slugged it out?
Have I mentioned how easy it is to use WordPress child themes? I can’t stress it enough, never modify a WordPress theme. Create a child theme instead.
I just converted a blog from an old outdated Cutline theme to a SVN copy of Coraline. This is the WordPress.COM replacement for the Cutline theme. The old theme bugged me for a few reasons, mainly it was the lack of basic features such as Gravatar support. I had meant to clean it up but never got around to it.
It took me less than an hour to make the switch. I retrieved a copy of Coraline like so
$ cd wp-content/themes $ svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/coraline coraline
This keeps an unmodified copy of the Coraline theme. Once it’s in the WordPress.ORG website, I’ll replace it with that copy.
All I had to do was create a separate directory and create a style.css file with the following:
/**
* Theme Name: Coraline for Stefan's Stuff
* Description: Jan Dembowski's Coraline Child Theme
* Version: 1.0
* Template: coraline
*/
@import url("../coraline/style.css");
/* =Asides
---------------- */
.home #content .aside {
border-left: 1px solid red;
}
The old asides had a slightly different styling. I made copies of the header.php and footer.php files into my child theme directory and added an archives.php template. I modified one line in each of the copies.
I tossed in a rotate.php script and copies of the random banner images and I was all set. I did need to resize the old banner images from a width of 970 to 990 but that was it.
Child Themes are cool and once again I can keep the parent theme up to date without worrying about my changes.
The tune is catchy at least.
I’ve never heard of this band but flamethrower versus fire extinguisher looks like real Mythbuster material.
Update August 13th, 2011: I’ve switched over and am giving a new plugin a try. It’s called Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps (with sitemapindex and Multi-site support) and so far so good.
What really convinced me to look at this one is that the guys at WP Engine added it to their Curated Plugins list. If they are giving this a try then that’s really all justification I need.
Update July 23rd, 2011: These instructions still work for the newer 3.2.5 version as well. While this simple modification is useful, I plan to switch the to the 4.0 beta.
Update: Arne has posted an early test version on the WordPress support forums here. At this stage it’s not yet ready for release. If you would like to test that version, you can support Arne’s effort by downloading and reporting any issues to him on that thread.
I’m lazy and have not yet tried the early release version. 🙂
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WordPress 3.0’s Multisite feature is cool and useful. The Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator plugin is also cool and useful. Unfortunately Arne Brachhold’s excellent plugin does not work with multisite blogs.
If you activate the plugin on a multisite enabled WordPress install, you get this error message.
Which is a shame, but it did not take me a long time to find a work around. My setup is using multisite with sub-domains and with the Domain Mapping plugin. These instructions are for the 3.2.4 version of the plugin.
1. Modify the plugin
Edit the file wp-content/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/sitemap.php and comment out lines 53 to 58 to look like this
//Check for 3.0 multisite, NOT supported yet!
// if((defined(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’) && WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE) || (function_exists(‘is_multisite’) && is_multisite())) {
// if(function_exists(‘is_super_admin’) && is_super_admin()) {
// add_action(‘admin_notices’, array(‘GoogleSitemapGeneratorLoader’, ‘AddMultisiteWarning’));
// }
//
// return;
// }
You can delete these lines, but I prefer to comment them out. All this does is prevent the plugin from detecting the multisite setup and not becoming active.
2. Get your rewrite rules ready
In your blog’s .htaccess file add these lines above your WordPress rules
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml sitemap-%{SERVER_NAME}.xml [L]
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml.gz sitemap-%{SERVER_NAME}.xml.gz [L]
This will come in handy later.
3. Activate the plugin and set these options
Now on each of your sites in your WordPress network, activate the Google (XML) Sitemap plugin. Do not Network Activate it.
Now got to your XML-Sitemap options page and for “Location of your sitemap file” select Custom location.
In the custom location change your change the file name sitemap.xml to sitemap-yourblogservername.xml. My server name is blog.dembowski.net so I’m using sitemap-blog.dembowski.net.xml. Save the options.
Look in your WordPress installation’s root and check if you have sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz. If you do then delete them both.
Now at the top of that options page, click on “rebuild the sitemap manually” and confirm that your new sitemap-yourblogservername.xml has been created.
4. Test and confirm that this worked
Now test two things. Start by pointing your browser to http://yourblogservername/sitemap.xml and then http://yourblogservername/sitemap-yourblogservername.xml. If you setup your .htaccess rewrite rules correctly, then both URLs should work.
Load up your WordPress generated robots.txt file via http://yourblogservername/robots.txt and look at the Sitemap line. Mine reads like this
User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://blog.dembowski.net/sitemap-blog.dembowski.net.xml.gz
I have that rewrite rule in case the default location for the sitemap is used. When you load the sitemap via the normal location, the rewite rule sends it to the correct location. The second gziped sitemap URL is fine.
There should be no real sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz files in your blog’s root directory. Instead, each sitemap file should have your virtual WordPress network names instead.
5. Rinse and repeat
Repeat this process for each site in your WordPress Network and you can continue to use this sitemap plugin. You will need to activate the plugin in each of your sites and change sitemap.xml to include the site name just as I outline in step 3.
6. The caveat
If this works for you, great! But if it doesn’t, please don’t bug Arne. If and when he makes his plugin multisite compatible, then it will be probably a better solution than this one. I’m not seeing any PHP errors or warning in my log files, but there may be reasons why this is not a good idea.
Also, when you modify your copy of a plugin in the WordPress plugin repository and that plugin is updated you will lose your edits from step 1 when you update the plugin.
In the meanwhile, I can continue to use this excellent plugin.
Well, it’s free for a while. If you’ve never played, get it NOW. Especially if you own a Mac.
Very cool and when Portal 2 comes out, I’ll get it.
SNL at it’s best.
I don’t watch Saturday Night Live ever, but I’m sure glad you can catch the clip on Hulu.
I like playing with technology and I received an invite to Google Voice. I use an iPhone 3G so the integration is limited to a HTML5 web page running in Safari. The integration is not bad at all and the web page on my iPhone is very functional.
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I saw this on Twitter this morning. This is an amazing editing job.
You can see the non-split screen version here.
Today was a miserable day weather-wise but had one good thing going for it. The next town over had a model train show and the highlight was a N gauge train layout. It was a fun display and I took almost 300 photos. I shared 40 of them over here on Flickr. I also learned of a couple more train museums to visit in Long Island.
My son could have stayed there all day. The N gauge trains are about the size of one of my fingers and the detail was surprising. I shot most of the event with a Nikon 50mm f/1.8D lens and some shots with my Sigma 30mm f/1.4. I prefer to not bug people with a flash so most of my shots have a narrow depth of field. It’s a shame that I did not use the flash since the detail on those sets was amazing.
The Nikon 50mm is on loan and I am definitely getting the newer Nikon 50mm f/1.4G.
