Archive for January, 2008

How to have a happy home

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

This time last year, we bought this house. See how sad it was?

my new house in winter

All cold and empty and neglected. ( Poor house. So we bought it - rescued it really, loving it and now fixing it up. Admittedly, we haven’t got very far yet and there’s still boxes everywhere. But look at it now.

Huddled house

Doesn’t it look happer? I mean, even despite the better lighting and the still-falling-apart-ness.

I love you house. It’s okay, we’ll have you all better as soon as we can. Starting when the mountain of snow melts. (We’ve made lists. Lots of them.)


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Original post by Andrea

Customizing your install: the home page

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

The absolute first thing you want to do when your site is installed and running is change it off the default theme. There are actually two copies of kubrick bundled in MU. One is under the default folder, the other is under a theme folder called “home”. The only difference is this one makes use of the home.php file. You can see it in (naturally) wp-content/themes/home/home.php.

This follows WordPress’s template structure explained here. If you would like a relatively static home or landing page, this built in function is a handy way to get thing looking the way you want. Since you can literally put whatever you like it in, it can also be a nice workaround if you previously had some information on the main index page you’d like to integrate.

(As a side note, I feel it is a misnomer to call it a static page, when you’re running php on a dynamic page and can still pull in the loop of posts if you want.)

You can always whip up your own theme, if you are able, but then you probably won’t need the following advice if you can. ;) Pick a nice well-designed and flexible theme, then get ready to dig around in it. Strip out everything you don’t want, but unless you change the theme a serious amount, please leave the designer’s credit in there. It’s just a nice thing to do.

There have been a lot of new themes cropping up in a magazine-style format, and I find they lend themselves well to the main blog on an MU install. See Mimbo, The Morning After, and for paid, Revolution - just to name a few. More are cropping up weekly.

The most comon question I see in the forums is people asking how to pull the most recent posts from the site onto the front page.

Easy. I use this plugin, mostly because I asked my handy hubby to do the hard work of writing the SQLs. All I did then was called the function right on the index.php page of my chosen theme.

Other people have used the sitewide feed plugin, then parsed it to display on the main page. (This also involves pasting code.) An example of how to parse a feed is on the dashboard page. Read how it’s done and follow along in that file. (wp-admin/index.php and index-extra.php)

Another handy plugin for the main page is the List All plugin. You can create a full list of all blogs (excluding ones marked private), and even use it again to show only the last x created blogs.

See a working example on my main page at homeschooljournal. It uses the most recent posts plugin in the “Lastest Posts” section, pulls a feedburner feed with code provided by them to show the latest comments sitewide, and uses the list-all plugin to show the last 5 blogs created on the right sidebar.

Don’t forget to disable the theme in the backend so your users will not be able use it on their blog.

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Original post by Andrea

Two-fer

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Behold, a new freezer

I took the suggestion from Heidi in the comments and did indeed pull a two-in-one shot. First, my hair. GAH. Maybe we’ll move on. At least we cannot see the grey. We shan’t speak of it either, ‘kay?

Allrighty then. LOOKIT MY NEW FREEZER. Isn’t it shiny and white? And so, so empty. Actually, I noticed there was a block of shortening in there getting very cold. You know what that means? Pies. Meaghan pies.

Y’all should be way jealous.

Grocery day is on Thursday. Methinks this is gonna hurt a bit.

Coming up: I extoll the virtues of my new dryer. It is even more awesome and fabulous than the freezer. Seriously, I have to stop typing now and post or I’m just going to go on and on about it.

*bursts*


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Original post by Andrea

I am SO excited. Probably more than I should be.

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

The new things are coming today. We get a bedframe! And a new dryer! (OMG, it’s *huge* inside!) And a chest freeze! Then we can FILL IT with yummy goodness! And Sarah gets a box spring!

YAY! (insert Kermit arm flail here.)

When she asked about delivery, and what time, all I said was not before 10am, and she said they’d call first. There’s no call yet. I bet they’ll make me wait until the afternoon. I even cleaned. Yeah, it’s that serious. (Okay, technically I am in the middle of cleaning up some limited areas, but still. Go with me on this.)

Should I be this excited about new appliances? Please tell me you are as freaky as me. It’s okay, it’ll be between us.

Want pics? I should post pics, shouldn’t I?

Oh man, I have it bad.

I have to go watch out the window now. You know, in case they got tied up and forgot to call and just come lumbering down the road.


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Original post by Andrea

RD article

Monday, January 28th, 2008

For those outside Canada, here’s a scan Mom & Carl did for you. Enjoy!

ReadersDigest

See huge original (and readable) size here. I would have posted this earlier, but my connection crapped out on me and I had a meeting. (To which I was a minute late, but one guy said it was okay, cuz I’m a celebrity.)


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Original post by Andrea

I need a haircut

Monday, January 28th, 2008

I haven’t had a haircut in 10 months. It’s grown out to 4″, with 6″ on top. It’s driving me crazy. And all the blonde is gone.

Just thought you should know.


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Original post by Andrea

Meet Bobby

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

This is Bobby. Bobby came to live with us last weekend.

Meet Bobby

Bobby is a result of taking Emma (and the others) out for a wee bit of shopping, where we did not aim for the Dollar Store for a treat, but bumped it up a notch. This is what happens sometimes.

Now Bobby has made friends with Mr Bones and the Visible Woman. Sometimes I find Bobby and his parts in odd places, but mostly I’m just glad the CSI team has not stopped by.

Emma tells me that Visible woman and Mr Bones are an item, and in fact the parents of Bobby, but Bobby himself looks at us haughtily out of his one good eye, and Visible Woman already has a plastic fetus to take care of.

Yeah, I know. We ARE weird.


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Original post by Andrea

The payoff and warmth

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

First off, for the worriers, we’re quite warm now. I actually got overheated while sleeping. We have 3 space heaters and a construction heater - that last one pumps out more heat than the three other ones combined. Yes, it’s using quite a bit of extra power at the moment, but to be honest, it’s nothing like the power we were using in the last house. (It had an electric furnace, which got really, really pricey during the cold months.)

If you missed it in the comments below, a new circut board is finding its way to us, free of charge.

Now, if we hadn’t had heating issues, we would have got up early this mornign and headed in to Fredericton to spend the day shopping with a bit of the profit from the sale of the green house. Lest you get the impression we are now rolling in it, most of the modest profit went to pay off debt accumulated while paying for two houses. (note to self: don’t do THAT again.) Many of our purchases have been on a list for a year or more, at least.

And I still need a haircut. The last time was just before I went in for that surgery. Yes, that long ago - almost a year now. I’m quite shaggy and look nothing like my avatar splashed everywhere. I mean, even the blonde is gone (tho the spirit remains).

So, instead of leaving the house unattended for the whole day, we just went to town. Specifically the furniture store which we intended to visit a couple night ago. We got:

- a new box spring for Sarah (the old one would not fit down the stairs in the green house and had to be broken to remove)
- a bed frame for us (the last one we had was a homemade job by Ron, which has been dismantled for years)
- a chest freezer (medium-sized. We left our old one in the house before the green house, as it was too old to move, and ancient when I got it. We figured living close to the mall in the green house we wouldn’t really need one. I really need one. Expect more baking posts.)
- a NEW dryer.

Yeah, the dryer that stoped working a couple weeks ago is in fact unrepairable. Considering we bought it second hand ten years ago, Ron said it’s time for a new one.

You know, we started out married life getting many things second-hand, but appliances was one thing we learned along the way to just break down and get new. I can’t tell you how many stove, fridges, washers and now dryers we - okay *I* - have gone through in just under twenty years.

But I bet Ron can. D

Tuesday is delivery day. I’m going to squeal with joy, and probably Sarah will be quite happy too. To be honest, I really have been taking our latest developments in stride. I mean, it could always be worse, and no-heat-dead-dryer is really not all that bad when I still have electricity AND running water. We’ve been through worse than that, partly on purpose even, and not only survived but learned useful skills for right now.

So it’s all good. Or at least better.

After that we went to Global, a second-hand clothing chain, and got 2 sweaters and two pairs of pants for Ron (one with tags), two pairs of pants and four turtlenecks for me and 2 tshirts, all for $47. The funny part was I’m wearing black pants and a red turtleneck and the first outfit I tried on was… black pants and a red turtleneck. But they are different, I *swear*. (and they need to be replaced P )

You could say things are finally looking up.


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Original post by Andrea

Do’s and don’t for babies

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

Man, I sure could have used this advice way back in the day. I had to figure it all out on my own. Who knew?

And when you click on thru and see the pics, it sure does explain a lot. Especially why we called the first couple of kids “practise”.

(HT: friends on LJ)


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Original post by Andrea

New theme club, MU friendly

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

Small Potatoes, the designer of the theme I’m using on this blog, has realeased a FIVE DOLLAR theme club. Yeah, you read that right. $5 for at least 12 professionally designed and very slick themes over the course of a year.

I’ve exchanged a few emails about the specifics of MU, so he’s keeping that in mind for us site admins. You *can* put these themes up for your users to choose from. They’ll be quite happy, I think.

It’s been a busy week in terms of new things to tell you. D

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Original post by Andrea