Clipart & Fonts
Well, you can never have enough font or clipart, can you? At least that’s how I feel. Especially when it comes to retro clips and fonts. Here are some of the sites I use:
Clipart:
Fonts:
Both:
Visual Inspiration:
Web Developer Extention
If you are a web developer of any sort, you need Chris Pederick’s Web Developer extention for Firefox. (WHAT? You’re not using Firefox? Ok, then, you need to back up and get Firefox. Go here first.)
If you have Firefox installed, go to Chris’ site and get the Web Developer extention. I honestly do not know how I survived this long without it.
Some of the things it makes easy and quick:
- Displays anchors
- Displays cookies
- View HTTP Headers
- Validate CSS & HTML
- And a whole lot MORE!!!
This is the best, most worthwhile extention I have seen EVER! I would go so far as to say that it’s probably the most usable tool for a Web Developer.
Get it here. And don’t say I never gave you anything.
Thanks Chris!
Wheatgrass
OK, I have have been getting gradually worse at taking care of myself nutritionally. I mean, I want to eat better, live healthy, and take vitamins, but I just don’t. My body continues to crave greasy foods, fat, and sugar. But there is hope on the horizon. I like Jamba Juice and there is one just below my office. I have often been curious about the Wheatgrass shots. I’m sure they are healthy (at least they sound like they are) but it just sounded so digustingly gross. In fact here’s a litte story about how my daughter feels about it:
The whole family went to Jamba Juice the other day on the way back from the farm. They have the fresh wheatgrass growing on the counter for when you order it. As we were making our decsions about what we were getting, my oldest daughter asked what it was for. I told her that they squeeze the juice out of it to make a drink. She responded, “I don’t want to drink grass, daddy.”
I didn’t make her drink any.
So, today, I got a little brave and decided I would give it a shot (no pun intended). They serve a 1 oz and a 2 oz shot. I decided that being a newbie and all to the wheatgrass crowd, I would start off with the 1 oz. They offered a slice of orange with the shot. “How nice,” I thought. So foul that you need a something afterwards to wash it down. I decided I had better go with the orange slice as well.
They cut my grass, put it in the grinder, and poured my shot. It looked like pea green soup. I picked up the cup and figured I would just gulp it down. And you know what? It was not that bad. It was an interesting flavor. Not foul as I had expected, but rather it was sweet in a green kind of a way. I didn’t feel the need to quickly grab and suck down my orange slice to wash it down.
Maybe there is hope for me yet.
Taking a Stand
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been reading Jesus Freaks by dc Talk and The Voice of The Maryrs.
Today, I read an inspiring story of Valya Vaschenko, a 12 year old girl in the U.S.S.R. who, during the 1960s not only refused to take the oath of the Young Pioneers, but, while the school director began to recite the oath for her, Valya drowned him out by singing a hymn.
The story closed with this:
Again and again, in Russian schools, Christian children would stand up in class to pray out loud and to witness. These children were beaten and forced to leave their families, but others followed their example.
In 1963, prayer was banned in American public schools. What would have happened if American parents had taught their children not to submit to this decision? They would not have been beaten, and their parents would not have ended up in jail as in Russia.
Here in the United States, the First Amendment of our Constitutution guarantees us freedom of speech and freedom of religion. What have we done with that freedom? Must we wait until it is taken away as it was in Communist Russia or other dictatorial societies before we grow bold enough to stand up and proclaime Jesus before others?
There are several stories in this book that focus on the strong faith of the very young. Some of us older folk could take a lesson. And it should encourage us to raise God-fearing children who are not afraid of their faith, but rather celebrate it. That made me think of some lines from an old Keith Green song, Pledge My Head to Heaven, where after he pledges himself and his wife to God and His service, then he pledges his son:
Well I pledge my son to heaven for the gospel
Though he’s kicked and beaten, ridiculed, and scorned.
I will teach him to rejoice and lift a thankful praising voice,
And to be like Him who bore the nails and crown of thorns.
(complete lyrics available here)
Maybe we should stop trying to please the world and start trying to please God. We need to raise our kids to take a stand. I think the best way to teach them is to lead by example.
What will people think when they find out I’m a Jesus Freak?
What will people think when they find out it’s true?
I don’t really care if they label me a Jesus Freak,
There ain’t no denying the truth.-dc Talk, Jesus Freak
Wordpress Sidebar Images Hack
In my current theme (a mod of a mod of Kubrick which is becoming less of a mod and taking on a life of its 0wn), I wanted to change the headers in the sidebar to images. This was because I wanted to make use of a typewriter font so the headers would look like this:
I wanted these headers to be specific only to this theme so that I could still easily and fully switch themes. In doing this, I ran into a couple of small, but interesting “snags” that caused me to have to do a little bit of a hack to the theme. Once I got it working, I was pretty excited so I thought I would share the experience. I will actually discuss the examples on an unmodified version of Kubrick, which is the default theme for WordPress 1.5. This theme is located at /wp-content/themes/default/. I would suggest making a backup of this theme before you dig in to the hack, just in case you want to revert back for some reason.
First, I made the images for the headers I wanted using a font from: Free Typewriter Fonts. For the example, I used Teletype Regular. The headers I needed were:
- Pages
- Archives
- Categories
- Blogroll
- Meta
The Archives, Categories, and Meta were easy. I created the image, loaded it into the /images/ folder for my theme, then made some changes to sidebar.php (located in /wp-content/themes/default/. Backup the original file if you want to be able to back out of this.) for the theme.
In sidebar.php, go to line 42 and change it from this:
< ?php _e('Archives'); ?>
to this:
; ?/>/images/sbh_archives.gif” alt=”< ?php _e('Archives'); ?>“></h2>
</li>
<p></code></p>
<p>This is what you are going to do for most of these. Basically what you are doing is changing from just writing the word “Archives” putting an image from your themes directory in its place. To be nice, we still go ahead and write “Archives” as the alternate text if the image doesn’t load.</p>
<p>Next, we will finish the easy ones. Change <strong>line 48</strong> from:<br />
<code>
<li>
<h2>< ?php _e('Categories'); ?></h2>
</li>
<p></code><br />
to this:<br />
<code>
<li>
<h2><img src=)
/images/sbh_categories.gif” alt=”< ?php _e('Categories'); ?>“>
And line 57 from this:
< ?php _e('Meta'); ?>
to this:
; ?/>/images/sbh_meta.gif” alt=”< ?php _e('Meta'); ?>“></h2>
</li>
<p></code></p>
<p>Alright, easy ones out of the way. You’ve only really changed sidebar.php here and by so doing, you are able to switch to another theme and not affect the sidebar headers in that theme. Now for the tricky part.</p>
<p>To get the “Pages” and “Blogroll”, WordPress uses a function that is part of WordPress and not isolated in the theme. So what we are going to do is copy these functions to <strong>sidebar.php</strong> and rename them. That way, the original functions are intanct for WordPress to use when you are using some other theme, but when you use your modified theme, you can use the isolated function to load your header images.</p>
<p>I know that some of you are saying you don’t know php or how to code. It’s ok, this is going to be easy, and when you are done, you’ll feel quite accomplished!</p>
<p>First, in <strong>sidebar.php, line 40</strong>, change it from this:<br />
<code>< ?php wp_list_pages('title_li=<br />
<h2>‘ . __(’Pages’) . ” ); ?></code><br />
to this:<br />
<code>< ?php wp_list_pages_mytheme('title_li=<br />
<h2>‘ . __(’Pages’) . ” ); ?></code></p>
<p>Go to the folder <strong>/wp-includes/</strong> and find a file called <strong>template-functions-post.php</strong>. If you have an unmodified version of WordPress 1.5.1, you should find this fuction at <strong>line 309</strong>. It begins with <code>)
and ends at line 365 with } (just below $output;). Copy all of this.
Now go back to your sidebar.php and above
enter some blank lines. At the very top blank line (don’t leave any extra blank lines or you could cause a header error), put a < ?php and then enter some blank lines and put a ?> In between these tags, paste the function that we just copied.
Go to the top of the function where is says “wp_list_pages” and change it to “wp_list_pages_mytheme“. You’ve just recreated this function so you can use it only in this theme and modify it without effecting how WordPress will work with other themes.
Go down about 16 lines in the function to where is says $output .= '
‘;
and change this to:
$imagedir = get_stylesheet_directory_uri();
$headerimg = '
‘;
$output .= ‘
‘;
You’re almost home! Now just the Blogroll header is left.
Now I am realizing I should have given you one little change early on so we could do it by line number, but you probably have the hang of this by now, so look for the line that says:
< ?php get_links_list(); ?>
(After I added all those other functions and edits, I found it at line 118. Depending on how many empty lines you added above, you should find it about the same place.)
Change this to be:
< ?php get_links_list_mytheme(); ?>
Now guess what we are going to do? Oh, you are catching on. We have to go get the original function and add it to this page, then rename it. This function is found in: /wp-includes/links.php lines 516 - 567. Add this to the top of your new sidebar.php page just below the < ?php but before the function wp_list_pages_mytheme. Now change the following:
function get_links_list
change to:
function get_links_list_mytheme
About line 37 you will see a line that says: \n\t
\n\t
echo '
‘ . $cat['cat_name'] . “
\n”;
Change it to:
echo '
\n”;
![.$cat['cat_name'].]('.get_stylesheet_directory_uri().'/images/sbh_' . $cat['cat_name'] . )
That’s it! You are done. (I’ll add the images and the sidebar.php as a zip later for the lazy folks that would rather just “plug-n-play”.) Thanks for reading through my first published WordPress hack. I hope you could follow along and that you found it useful.
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