The Story of Abe

What is my online presence, why is that, and what do I want it to be?

What is my online presence?

I spend a lot of time cruising the internet.  Much of it is spent on a small number of websites.  I check ESPN.com at least once per day, I try to check out nytimes.com and haaretz.com also every now and again.  I usually have gmail open in the background.  The site I spend the most time on, though, is google reader.  I have a large number of subscriptions there.  From Chicago sports news to tech updates to web comics to torrent feeds to culture web magazines to really random stuff.

While I may read a lot, I subscribe to very few websites, and comment on even fewer.  [A few months ago, I got really excited about something I found, and commented about it on a website.  Seconds later someone pointed out how very wrong I was…]  There is something about logging in to sites that doesn’t click with me.  Even more so, commenting is a strangely public thing that I just don’t feel comfortable with. » Read the rest of this entry «

A while back, when I was just starting out this WordPress site, I posted about some of the adventures in setting this up.  Specifically, I wanted a widget that would show some random images from the media database.  My thinking was that I want people to be able to see some of the pictures that I’ve included in my posts without making the pictures the center of the blog.  This way, on every page there are four (but that’s a setting you can change) random pictures from across all my posts.  Pretty, but it needs to be able to link to the corresponding post to actually be useful.

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Well, I’ve just uploaded my second plugin to this site.  It’s not much, as it leans heavily on the built in link widget.  I wanted to list the links of the rest of my families websites in a specific order.  I could have hard coded it in, but that seems silly if there is a links function already built into WordPress.  But I couldn’t find anywhere to make a simple sorted list of a category.  Also, I am trying my hardest to avoid touching the core.  I don’t want to change something in a core file and then have an update erase it because that would be a nightmare to debug.  I can deal with a plugin I wrote using a depreciated function, that’s no big deal. » Read the rest of this entry «

In setting up my blog, I found that I like having the “Meta” widget active.  It has links to log into (and out of) the admin section, links to RSS feeds, and links to WordPress.org.  I don’t know how really useful it is, and maybe when I’ve developed more content I won’t want it.  But we’ll cross that bridge when the time comes.

However I did come across a problem.  Having put it in the sidebar, the “Meta” links just looked out of place and i thought it might be less obtrusive in the footer. » Read the rest of this entry «

I suppose, seeing as though I’m a web developer, my first post on my new WordPress blog should be about WordPress.

I first encountered WordPress a number of years ago when I was working on a project that never took off.  I was intrigued by the idea of a simple interface for bloggers, and especially the multi-blog features.

Last year I took on a large project that I ended up basing on the Joomla framework.  That was a very interesting experience.  I found some parts of Joomla to be fantastic for giving me a platform on which to create, but other times it was a stifling mass of code. In particular, I needed to create registration forms with numerous fields. I spent a significant amount of time downloading, installing, testing, and rejecting various Joomla form components.  I decided that I didn’t like any of them.  Mostly, it was the clunky way you created new forms.  They were trying so hard to create dynamic interfaces, but none of them were something I felt comfortable putting in front of the client without giving them a week long seminar in how to use it. » Read the rest of this entry «