I had a productive weekend. Michael was gone friday evening and most of the day Saturday, so I had a lot of computer alone time. I spent it working on 13thHour.net.

My idea was to get wordpress up and running as a “blog/news” front page of the site, and then using that same theme to make the rest of the pages on the site look the same. I played around with using wordpress for the entire site, but I wasn’t able to have the customization of page filenames that I wanted.

In the end I pretty much took the default theme, copied it to a new theme directory and modified it so that it has the old 13thHour page look to it. It took about 4-5 hours for me to get used to the whole structure of wordpress and modify what I needed to theme-wise, but it was pretty easy. I’m very impressed with how nicely structured wordpress is, the authors are very neat coders.

Once the theme work was done I had to get my hands dirty. I wanted to have member profile pages on the site, like the old site, but I didn’t want to have to maintain them myself. With the old site most of the profiles were out-dated, people would sometimes email me to update them and it was such a pain. So I was either going to do away with profiles entirely, or implement some way to let people do them themselves. This was my Sunday work.

I knew that there was profile information, put in through the admin interface, but where was it kept and displayed? Was there a page for it? As far as I could tell there wasn’t. And when you clicked on an author from wp_users_list it brought you to a list of all their posts. What a useless link! Luckily many people agree, and I was able to find some code on the wordpress site that let me make this into a profile page instead of a list of the user’s archives. Nice.

The only issue with it is that the wp_users_list command will only link to users if they’ve ever posted anything (since it links to their archives by default – no archives, no link), so if I use that all users will need to post something – not a huge problem, I am just telling everyone to post an “I made my profile!” post once they have. I’m not sure I’ll continue to use wp_users_list though, as all users have their own id number, and I could just manually create a list and update it when someone else is added. We’ll see.

Next step was to customize the fields for the profile page. I found a page that described how to add Jabber IM to it (very silly that it doesn’t have this as a field, it has AIM, YIM, ICQ and MSN..). I used this solution to add all the fields I needed: Birthday, Image link, Public Email, etc. This was the most exciting part of the whole project %) I don’t have the exact notes on how to do it with me, but I think I’ll post info about all the customizations I’ve made, if only for my reference, it was all pretty easy though.

By Sunday evening I had a working site installed on my primary workstation. Michael set up everything on the server and moved things over for me, then set up DNS. Around 8:30 last night we had DNS pointing to the shiney new site!

And now it’s up and running. I’m asking members to email (lyz@princessleia.com) or /msg me if they want an account. I want everyone in channel to have one, so they’ll have profiles, but I don’t have everyone’s current email addresses, so I need to be told so I can set up an account. And if people haven’t responded after a couple weeks I’ll start hunting them down to get their information %)

I’m so excited, it’s been almost 2 years since I’ve launched a new site with it’s own domain name.

But I didn’t spend *all* weekend on this.

Saturday I called up to see what she was up to. Ended up going out with her and to Limerick Diner for some food. Afterwards they were going to meet some friends so I went back home. Later that night they called me up again to tell me they were going to be eating with some people they knew at an Applebee’s
about 15 minutes from my house and wanted to know if I wanted to join them. Sure! So I hung out with them and some people I’d met before at one of ‘s parties. It was fun, but I think the waitress didn’t like us much. None of us were very hungry, and we were all hot, so most of us just ordered water and appetizers. Turns out the appetizers are half off after 9pm, the 5 people on our check spent less than $30 total, and we stayed there for quite a while watching home movies on a laptop. I wasn’t intentionally cheap! I swear!

It was after 1am when I got home, Michael still wasn’t home so I went to bed.

Non-computer-stuff Sunday was spent baking and cleaning.

We had some blueberries in the refrigerator that I bought for pancakes, but we never ended up making pancakes because it’s been too hot and yucky out to do morning cooking lately. But I needed to do something with the blueberries because they were close to going bad. So I went looking for a blueberry bread recipe. I found a pretty basic one that called for milk, water, flour, sugar and small amounts of the regular baking stuff. Unfortunately I ran out of milk, the recipe wanted 1 1/3 cup and I only had about 2/3 cup, so I hoped that making up the difference with water would be OK. It baked up nicely (have I mentioned that I love my new oven thermometer?) and smelled like blueberries. Unfortunately it mostly tastes like blueberries and flour (big surprise!). Oh well, I like blueberries and flour, especially with some butter on top. I’ll just find a better recipe next time.

Then I cleaned the house. Because of the heat we’ve not been doing the “big weekend cleanings” that we usually do, instead just doing spot cleaning as needed. So I finally did the big cleaning again. Got all the floors mopped and all. It was still too hot though, I was pretty tired from the heat afterwards. Oh I hate the summer!

Sunday night we drove up to Rita’s and got some yummie cold treats. I got a Cherry water ice + vanilla ice cream gelati and Michael got some Mango waterice. It was all good %d nice end to the weekend.