Warren Falk

I have set up a page to describe my idea for an elegant representation of data to replace the unelegant standard XML simply because I can’t bear to work with it anymore than I have to. This should also fit nicely as a component in an application framework I’ve been conceptualizing for some time now too.

For now, all I have is a draft. The hope is that the draft will be clear about the basic concept of elegant data representation. Later, I will add technical specifications to the draft once they are complete. I would also like comments and questions on the draft. (They can be posted here as comments).

Lynn and I on Valentines day wearing our shirts. Lynn bought me the “geek” shirt for my birthday, and bought herself this shirt a week later and hid it until Valentines day. We wore the shirts to the restaurant and received many comments on them. We even had a guy ask us if he could take our picture with his camera phone. (This is not his picture, though.  this picture was taken in our living room before we left).

I love wordpress, but if you want to use wordpress as photo blogging software, it is somewhat lacking. Especially if you want it to be quick, easy, and something my wife can do. I have seen a few people tackle photos in different ways, but what I was looking for didn’t seem to exist.

My photo blogger plugin allows you to center a post around an image. You begin the post by uploading an image. The system will keep the full quality image, and will also downsample an image for display. The downsampled image is resized to fit completely within independent maximum width and height specifications which are configurable.

A post is automatically created for you with the image attached and the display image placed inline complete with the code necessary to allow users to click the image and see when it was taken, and download or view the full quality version of it.

You can edit the post in the regular wordpress editor to add any extra text etc.

In the future, I expect to add the ability to show a “gallery” or something like that in the Categories list which will find all images and list the thumbnails and post titles.

The plugin is available for download here: wf-blogphoto.php.txt [warrenfalk.com]

If you’re new to wordpress plugins, simply download it, remove the .txt from the end and place in your wp-content/plugins folder.

The “contact” link has been sitting on the current version of my warrenfalk.com site which must be almost two years old if not more.  But it never actually did anything because I never got around to making it work.  Now I have.

Clicking “contact” shows a form on which you can enter a name, email, and a message, and even select a “priority” checkbox which will text my cellphone with the message.

I also have a “works” link on there now which I have to get around to building.  This will be a “portfolio” of some of my web design which I’m attempting to get back into.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on my wordpress installation lately. I migrated my blog to it, then built a theme for it, then trashed it and built another theme for it. I then put up a family weblog and built a theme for that. Then I built a plugin which facilitates photo blogging. It turned out so well, that I think I’ll polish that up some more and publish it. Just lateley I completed work on a website for my extended family on my Mom’s side, 816pine.com. I also built a theme for that one and am reusing my photo blogger plugin. I expect that blog to require some other new plugins also.

I’m quite impressed with wordpress. So far, it is the easiest blog software I’ve worked with. Creating themes is easy and fun, and the extensibility through plugins is also the best I’ve seen so far. I am able to run all my different blogs by modifying the config file to load the config based on the site domain name. The only issue so far is some poor calculation of the upload directory filesystem path and url path which forces you to share the upload path among all blogs. I solved that by making a modification to the code to translate the filesystem path from the url path which is now configurable via the options pages in the admin area as of 2.0.1.