Wannabe

I’ve been getting into Minecraft recently and decided I wanted to change up my skin I found it it’s really quite simple to make your own Minecraft skin – you just download the template from the site and you can change it in your favorite image editing software. I made a few skins below:

Foxu Shibaru:

Nanashi from Mar:

On a WordPress site I’ve been working on I’m using SlideDeck as a feature article slider on the homepage.  The only problem was I have additional articles populating underneath it and the articles from the SlideDeck were showing up down there as well.

We didn’t want that behavior so I researched how to filter out SlideDeck posts from the post loop.  At this time, it’s apparently easy to filter for content that has a custom meta-tag, but you can’t easily filter for content that doesn’t have a custom meta-tag applied to it.  It’s because when a post doesn’t have a custom met-tag attached to it that custom meta-tag doesn’t come up as “null” or “0″  it simply doesn’t come up at all.  So there’s no way to use query_posts to filter out SlideDeck posts, you have to make custom database query and use $wpdb->get_results.

This post from SlideDeck’s customer support website did most of the heavy lifting for me in putting together the exact query I needed to filter out only SlideDeck posts.  The only problem was that this gave me no insight as to how I could paginate the posts.  Thankfully google came to rescue once again and I found this post and this post which helped me piece together the script.  I posted my findings on SlideDeck’s customer service website, but I’m posted it here as well so I can easily find it again if I need it.

So for the code, inside loop.php before have_posts() I put…

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if(is_home()) {
    //query_posts(array( 'meta_key' => 'slidedeck_post_featured') );
    global $wpdb;
    $ppp = intval(get_query_var('posts_per_page'));
 
    $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
    $offset = ($paged-1) * $ppp;
    $sql = "SELECT p.*
        FROM {$wpdb->posts} AS p
        LEFT JOIN {$wpdb->postmeta} AS pm
        ON pm.post_id = p.ID AND pm.meta_key = %s
        WHERE p.post_status = %s AND p.post_type = %s AND pm.meta_value IS NULL
	ORDER BY p.post_date desc
        LIMIT $offset, $ppp";
    $posts = $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare( $sql, '_slidedeck_post_featured', 'publish', 'post' ));
}

if(is_home())  will make it so it will only filter out SlideDeck posts on the homepage, and apparently the have_posts() works exactly as it normally does even when I change the loop using $wpdb->get_results, which means I don’t have to do much to the rest of the page in order for this to work.  WordPress, you rock <3

This will paginate the posts according to the number of items I have set in the WordPress settings, but for some reason when I did this on the last page it printed out empty posts to fill out that page.

For instance, say I only have 7 posts left on the last page, but I have it set to show a maximum of 10 posts per page – it would print out 3 empty posts on that page.

To combat this I put the following code inside have_posts() so it wouldn’t print anything if the post ID was null.

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if(get_the_ID() > 0) {
    //html for posts
}

Pretty straight forward and everything has been working great so far

References

http://support.slidedeck.com/slidedeck/topics/wp_query_a_list_of_posts_not_featured_in_the_slide_deck?from_gsfn=true

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/custom-loop-pagination

http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2011/02/23/wordpress-pagination-woes-solved-i-hope/

A neat little App I found through Chris Pirillo is called “MyRealFont.”  With this App you can make your own font by drawing in each letter on your iPhone, then you can e-mail it to yourself as an actual TTF file you can install and use on your computer!

The interface was really simple and easy to use, but it’s difficult to draw anything really nice ^^;  I’d like to see if you could get a nice handwritten style font from this from using the iPad with a stylus.

But until I find myself with an iPad I’ll have to live with the scribbly font I made with my iPod x3

Download the App on iTunes

Download the font I made

For a project we wanted to bring in outside links and display them in a box on the homepage.  Instead of building out a whole custom system to handle the link, I suggested posing them through Facebook.

So in order to be able to style the feed however we wanted I put together a simple Curl code in PHP to pull in the Facebook Page RSS feed (every page has a feed it’ll be formated like this => http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=245091913103&format=rss20).

This will check if there’s a link inside the body of the status update and use that, but then default to the link to the status message in Facebook if that doesn’t exist.

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<?php
        $curl = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=245091913103&format=rss20");
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 0);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3");
        $xmlTwitter = curl_exec($curl);
        curl_close($curl);
 
        $xmlObjTwitter = simplexml_load_string($xmlTwitter);
        $tempCounter = 0;
 
        foreach ($xmlObjTwitter->channel->item as $item) {                    
            if ( $tempCounter < 9 ){
                preg_match('/(http|https|ftp)(.*?) (id|target)/i', $item->description, $matches);
                $matches[0] = str_replace('" id','',$matches[0]);
                echo '<li><a href="'.($matches[0] ? $matches[0] : $item->link).'" target="_blank">'.$item->title.'</a>
                <div>'.date('F jS, Y',strtotime($item->pubDate)).'</div></li>';
            }
 
            $tempCounter += 1;
        }
 
        echo '</ul>';
?>

As some of you may know 11/11 is the unofficial Pocky Day :3 So in order to celebrated what some have called the “Ultimate Pocky Day“, a.k.a. 11/11/11,  I am…eating Pocky :3 (but only the fancy kind!)