ach, can’t get motivated for even the simplest of endeavours this month, getting out of the flat was a mission in itself today, in this permafrostian chill. okay, so it snowed, maybe once… but y’know.

for the lack of blogging, my apologies- i’m working on a project or three that, happily, don’t involve going outside so that’s keeping me busy. here’s one: Catgut Music (Owen’s website / blog) is rocking out. we’re about to add a whole new video section, so that’ll be fun. For now I want you to check out Owen’s Blog. It is a treasure.

i’ve recently setup a Wordpress Multi-User blog (on leithermagazine.com). always amazed how well the Wordpress stuff works out-of-the-box. WPMU relies on the same structure – many of the same rules / hacks and plugins – which i’ve learned through running this mess of a site over the years… so all this is nonsense is coming in handy.

also- my photography portfolio gets a good updating every now and then: check it out. what are you crazy kids up to? anyone still out there?

It probably took longer to actually upload this (using SVN) than it did to fix the bug! What an awful system that is.

Anyway: By way of a patch by John Berdard here’s my Wordpress plugin “Starred Review” which now works on Wordpress 2.8.4+

You can download Starred Review from the plugin homepage. Or by clicking the ‘update plugin’ button in your Wordpres Dashboard. I apologise for the time it took to fix this, ultimately the fix came from John- thanks a million!

I’m running Wordpress 2.8.4 and I love the Extended Live Archives Plugin. Unfortunately it would seem development has dried up and so I’ve resorted to many many forums and angry blog posts for help. Can’t find the answer- but I’ve collated the information out there into one file.

Understand this plugin patch doesn’t exactly work, it doesn’t show actually show the extended live archives- but structurally the back-end appears to be sound.

Attached is a hacked Extended Live Archive for anyone out there interested. I am not the author of this plugin- but couldn’t find any simple download out there that takes the modifications / hacks up to speed… let me know how it goes. Continue the discussion on this Wordpress Forum page if you could!

Note: do not update when asked. As you will overwrite the changes I’ve made.

Download: Extended Live Archives for Wordpress 2.8 [PHP 5 Required]

Update (6/09/09)
One of the commenters below, Eduardo, has very kindly offered his (previously unreleased) version of ELA which has made it through all kinds of patching and hacking to become a working Extended Live Archive under Wordpress 2.8+ Unfortunately it does not work on PHP 4 – so, thought I’d update the link (above) to offer his version. I’m still working on a fix for everyone– as is Charles who runs the official listing in the Wordpress Plugin Directory. Check both those links out.

Here’s a quick fix for a CSS issue that has plagued my K2 installations of the Extended Live Archive (or Better Live Archive as it is now called) plugin. See below, notice all the text is jumbled as if there were no line space between all the items. This appears in Safari / Firefox on the mac, I don’t know why this hasn’t been solved elsewhere.

You need to navigate to the plugin directory in your wordpress install, then under ‘af-extended-live-archive/includes/’ you’ll see a file called ef-ela-style.css open this in a text editor and change the lines:


#af-ela-post-chrono li, #af-ela-post-cats li, #af-ela-post-tags li {
position: relative;
font-size: 1.1em;
line-height: 1.7em;
color: #bbb;
margin: 0 15px;
padding: 1px 20px;
}


to:


#af-ela-post-chrono li, #af-ela-post-cats li, #af-ela-post-tags li {
position: relative;
font-size: 1.1em;
line-height: 1.7em;
height: 1.7em;
display: block;
color: #bbb;
margin: 0 15px;
padding: 1px 20px;
}


Enjoy. Oh, and Meta Comment has an Archive Page again!

i wanted to delete a plethora of posts on Meta Comment. mainly irrelevant and mostly useless i was close to just deleting everything pre-2009. fresh start. but i don’t like editing old posts, i hardly moderate comments- its a fun old world and reading some of my earlier stuff is always amusing (to me– and let’s get something straight it’s all about me).

the alternative plan was to separate the new posts from the (very) old… just this week i discovered a great hack for Wordpress that allows me to display a ‘this post is old’ banner on posts of a certain maturity. y’see when i switched over from iBlog there were a lot of formatting issues – not to mention missing images, broken links etc – i tried to weed them out over time, but got busy, so anything from ‘05/’06 is a real mess. yay for $date_check_age

this simple code checks the age of a post (set at 999 days or older here) then displays the ‘.expired’ element (must be defined in your CSS) only to visitors to those elderly posts… it doesn’t print (or echo?) the element in your new material. so:


< ?php
$date_check_age = '';
if (is_single()) {
$days = 999;
if (time() - strtotime($posts[0]->post_date_gmt) > ($days * 86400)) {
$date_check_age = 'this is an archived post' ;

}
}
?>

< ?php echo $date_check_age; ?>

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