Tabi’s siblings, Todd and Leila, have come to stay with us for a couple of months. Here is Leila with Nadia, shortly after she came out from hiding behind the couch:

[soapbox]f9c3bc8a-515f-4c56-8191-bea51350f889[/soapbox]

She’s been a mix of happy and pissed. The video shows her happily eating food and being affectionate, but at the same time hissing and growling, even biting me at one point. Her brother is still under the bed, and has been there for the past 24 hours.

On a not-so-related topic, I was invited to the MSN Soapbox beta, Microsoft’s answer to YouTube. I find the interface of the service to be superior to Youtube and Google Video, but not by a lot. Since everyone and their mother uses Youtube, I figured that I’d be different and go with the new service.

Over the past few months at work I’ve been focused on Wordpress, particularly in the area of plugins. As much as I like this CMS, I find it to be terribly limited. Every problem I run across needs a user-contributed plugin to solve it; one of those issues is the inclusion of videos that use Flash-based players like YouTube. I came across an excellent plugin named Viper’s Video Quicktags. This plugin allows for easy insertion of all sorts of video formats, including YouTube and Google Video.

This is the part where I bring these seemingly random topics together: I uploaded Leila’s video to Soapbox, and then realized that the video plugin didn’t support it. I made some minor edits to the plugin to support it, and the above is the result of my work. Now I have to send the source code over to the author. Maybe it could be included in the next version of the plugin.

Recently at work we looked at some JavaScript apps that create nice-looking pop-up windows, which replace the boring old pop-ups that you see all over the Net. In particular, we looked at Greybox and Thickbox, both based on Lightbox. Whenever I see something neat like this in one of our team meetings, I look for a way to add it to my own bag of tricks. This is one one instance (of many) where I failed miserably.

I looked at two Wordpress plugins that would facilitate the use of the ‘boxes. Both written by the same developer, the Greybox WP plugin and the Thickbox WP plugin looked like an extremely simple way to add a little bit of flair to this site. I was wrong.

At first, Thickbox worked okay on anything that wasn’t a PHP file, which made it largely worthless to me as I wanted to display images from the gallery in a pop-up (you may notice that they all end in the PHP extension, not in JPGs as one would expect). I made my own edits, then some based on the work done by posters on the Thickbox developer’s site. At some point, I broke the plugin beyond repair, and nothing would appear anymore.

I moved on to Greybox. The developer demonstrates on his site how practically any file can be opened, so I would have no issues based on the extension of the file. Assuming it would meet my needs nicely, I went ahead with it. With this ‘box, I never got the anything to appear in the pop-up. I saw a flash of the Greybox, but then the page loaded in the browser without opening the pop-up.

I think I wasted enough time on these ‘boxes. Feel free to head over to one of the links above and see how they look when they work correctly.

Edit: Corrected spelling mistake. Also, I just wanted to say that I was not trying to say anything negative about any of the code that I linked to. The issue is solely on my part; I screwed something up.

Now that blogs have become very popular, the concept of a guestbook has become antiquated. Why have a single page for comments when your visitors can comment on every single post you make?

Guestbooks still have a place on the web, even if their use is decreasing. This blog still uses a guestbook. I have long since scrapped my poorly-written script that older versions of this site used, mainly because it was susceptible to spam. I replaced it with a simple yet little-used WordPress trick: create an empty page with comments enabled. That’s it. Performing that one step effectively creates a guestbook.

There is only one issue with it: the comments are listed in the order they were originally posted, forcing users to scroll to the bottom of the list to view the latest entry. WordPress does not have a built-in way to reverse the comment order, which makes sense. It is common practice in blogs to list comments in the order they were posted, whereas guestbooks are listed in reverse order. Since WordPress is a blog platform, I can’t fault them for that.

That is where the wp-zy-roc plugin comes in. Put simply, you change a single line in that empty page I mentioned earlier (after installing and activating the reverse order plugin). Once that is done, your comments are now in reverse order. I applied the plugin to this site in less than five minutes; see them in action in the guestbook and on the You Make Kitty Scared page.

Edit: Another great plugin is the category tagging one, which creates a tag cloud. After seeing Joe’s setup for his del.icio.us links, I thought it would be a nice change from the boring old unordered list of categories that we currently use. Take a look in the sidebar and let me know what you think.