Subject Matter Archive for ‘administrative’

So you might have noticed that I haven’t updated my blog recently…

The reason for that is because I am on a very impromptu hiatus right now.

Work and play (and blogging is a part of both for me) are currently on the backburner while I spend time with my family to help care for my mother who very recently suffered a hemorrhagic stroke on account of her previously unmanagable hypertension (overall health good, no risky lifestyle factors, etc which can be changed to help lower blood pressure) which had spiked up to 225 even WITH medications.

Geebuz.

Since it is only a minor stroke, things could certainly be worse, but dammit, things also could have been better, too!

So… yeah.

EMG over and out.

It is, it is!

Thanks to AddThis and my print-friendly CSS stylesheet, this blog is officially ‘Print Friendly’!

Remember what I said about the AddThis Printing feature printing out entire blogs instead of specific blog posts?

Well, I found out from the AddThis support team – thanks! – that AddThis has a specific Printing function called Printer Friendly which can enable a specific blog post to be printed out of a whole page of blog posts given the proper setup.

If you click on the ‘Share’ button at the bottom of this post, you will notice a Print Friendly option. If you click it, it will open up the blog post the button is associated with in a new viewing window/tab and will allow you to print that one post rather than doing the default ‘Print Whole Web Page’ function.

Pretty neat, huh?

At least… I think so!

Thanks again AddThis team; I really appreciate the tip and I’m really glad you implemented the Print Friendly functionality!

~ EMG

… is it…?

Over here it sure isn’t!

So after a few long months of having very empty Rabbit Hole and Giving Props widgets staring at me in the face asking me, “Why haven’t you worked on your links yet?”, I finally sat myself down to wrangle around with them and only them.

Three hours later (actually five, but the first two hours were kinda scattered around)…

Behold – my Giving Props list! *points to the sidebar Giving Props widget block*

What do you think?

The list isn’t fully finished yet as there are a few people and things that I need to add on, but you get the general idea, right?

Maaan, but the list ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be and it also ended up taking up more of my time and concentration than I thought it might!

Initially, the list was going to be a simple list of text-only links like the list of links in a typical Blogroll widget block (to maintain cohesion with the rest of my site which is very minimalistic in terms of graphics), but after thinking about ‘giving back to the community’…

I decided that maybe I could turn my simple Giving Props link block into a personal project to ‘give back’ to the people, services, and places who/that have helped me along my journey as a WordPress junkie, front-end web developer and designer, and blogger.

And that’s where all those icons/buttons come in.

To show my appreciation for these people, services, and places, I ended up creating sixteen – 16 so far! – unique slimline buttons for each and every one of these people, services, and places and boy oh boy, but did I have one heck of a blast doing so or what!

There are still more to come – there are still a few people yet whom I want to put in the list, but haven’t decided on the graphic for – but I think I’m doing good so far.

After I get the others done, I will officially send them off to their ‘owners’ and hopefully, I will hear back from some of the people and get some feedback on what they like or what they don’t like.

*crosses fingers*

… I hope nobody takes offense to what I’ve done.

~ EMG

So I’m using AddThis to Print that one blog post right there between that one post and that other post and… WHOOPS!

You know what happened?

I ended up Printing the entire blog – ACK!

Thankfully, I was only printing to PDF and the blog in question was my own and I have my blog settings set so that one page can only display a certain number of posts at any given time.

But… still.

The whole blog!

Man oh man.

I sent a support ticket to the AddThis team; hopefully I’ll get some sort of answer or workaround for this issue.

I can’t imagine that I might be the only person to have this issue unless… I’m the only person who tacks on the AddThis feature to every blog post on a page of posts?

We’ll see.

I’ll post again with more news when I find out what’s going on, but I figured I should let everyone know what’s going on in case someone else wants to try and Print a single post.

~ EMG

So uhmmm… whooops?

EDIT: Justin Thorp from the AddThis team directly replied to this post in a comment and said that the team is looking into resolving both issues! Thank you, Justin!

The newer version of the WordPress-specific AddThis coding (the one you can manually add to your posts that uses the php echo?) does NOT validate through W3C. It WORKS, but because of the ampersand and perhaps something else, W3C is going bonkers over it, offering up anywhere between 5 to 9 errors on account of it.

So if you visit the blog and validate it and see a million AddThis validation errors? That’s why.

And oh yes, the ‘Print’ functionality does not work for a single post if you have the AddThis coding enabled on say your main blog page where it appears multiple times – once on each post.

Instead of printing that one post, it will print the entire page – whooops!

I hope AddThis fixes that soon!

~ EMG

November 03, 2010: Just an Update

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this Bulletin Board and so I thought I would take care of it!

On the AddThis front, AddThis added a Print Friendly functionality to their repertoire of sharing functions a while ago which allows single posts to be printed straight from a blog’s main site rather than through the individual post view.

This was a feature I had inquired about in the community forum back when I was still learning the ropes and seeing it finally come true was – and still is – way WAY cool.

Also, in case my previous Bulletin Board post confused anybody, the W3C validation error was fixed very shortly after I discovered the bug and the issue was reported. Thanks especially to Justin Thorp who reported the bug to the developers who then fixed it!

As a token of my thanks for the awesome service the little button offers my site and for the awesome support I have received from the team since I have started using the AddThis service, I created a little button of my own which links to the AddThis website.

Check it out on my sidebar! Just scroll on down to where I’m Giving Props!

In relation to Giving Props, I’ll (HOPEFULLY) have all of my Giving Props buttons, links, and whatevers working and operational before December rolls around.

It’s been a seriously CrAzY ride for the past year starting from August of last year up until now and owing to the things that have happened, it’s hard to keep up with everything at times.

With that said, thanks for your patience and understanding!