They are too cool to go bad, in my own humble bloggy opinion. I had a formatting problem with the More Smilies plugin that just went totally south when I upgraded to a newer version of the plugin code. It hates the new version of WordPress (2.2) and will. not. play. nice.

The support in the forum – well, they tried. I know people like this plugin. This post is for you, in all honesty. If you have the more smilies plugin, it will not work in 2.2, and so far, no one is supporting it (not even the plugin author).

So, it’s gone. Disabled. That was scary, but I’m okay now. Why? Because I found this other smiley plugin, Custom Smileys. It LOVES WordPress 2.2! Yay! So I took my custom smiley set that I made for the more-smilies plugin and I threw them into the directory with the other custom smileys included with the Custom Smiley plugin, and I spent some time renaming them in the admin panel (yes, you can do it in the admin panel – no more package config file!), and then… you know what I did?

I added a few new smileys. (Look! Here’s a whole bunch! And here’s s’more!)

I’m not one of those anti-smiley bloggers. I pink puffy heart smileys. I’m creatively expressive that way, though.

So those of you looking for the fix for the more-smilies plugin for wordpress 2.2 because it broke your comment formatting, here’s your fix. Dump the More-Smilies plugin and replace it with Custom Smileys. You’ll be happy, and your headache will go away.

This happy smiley post brought to you by my new fantabulous smiley additions.

I’m not sure how it happened, but for those of you waiting to upgrade to WordPress 2.2 – you might want to wait a bit longer. The post preview that you know and love and have come to rely on to proof your posts prior to publishing has been changed. The post preview option isn’t even available until after you “save and continue editing” (even with the auto save feature), and then you notice a hyperlink to preview that opens up in a new window.

This, in my own humble opinion, was a big mistake.

These are the changes that were made in the core WordPress files. I am going to attempt to modify the code to see if I can’t get the iframe preview pane back – and I’ll let you know how that goes.

The crazy thing is, in the 2.2 list of changes this wasn’t even a suggestion. I can’t find any mention of it at all. In fact, what was mentioned was a request (here) to put the jump link to the preview pane back on the write post page. (Remember that?) If you’ll scroll down through the replies to that ticket (which reads “fixed”), you’ll see that it went completely south, the initial ticket wasn’t fixed – the whole function was changed to something entirely different than the original ticket requested.

I’ve opened up a topic on the WordPress-Extend-Ideas forum to put the preview back inline and allow users the option to turn it on or off. You can view the thread here, and if you’re so inclined, please leave a comment on the topic to let the head guru’s know whether or not this feature is important to you. If you’re a member of the wordpress support forum, your login info works here. If you’re not, consider registering – it’s a beneficial give and take community of WordPress users.

UPDATE: Download the preview frame plugin written by Rob @ Roblog

WordPress 2.2 is out!

This has been in the works for some time, it boasts a ton of new features and fixes. If you’re powered by WordPress, you will want this upgrade – but I highly suggest giving it a couple of weeks for the dust to settle first.

If you’re still on blogger – check out this new function:

A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.

If you’re ready to leave Blogger – I’ve got you covered, here’s a step-by-step how-to!

There are so many new features, you can have a look if you’re feeling techy!

Finally. After two weeks worth of wallowing in code to get the design just so – and endless hours of uploading information – typing, moving, pasting, recoding. It’s (almost) done, ready to launch at least. When my hand isn’t so much like a claw, I’ll continue on with some back end tweaking.

What’s going to happen to intricateart.com? Nothing! I’ve owned artistbynature.com for years. I needed a place to design “live” so I knew exactly what was going on, and could transfer files from one to the other. So I decided to double-domain. Once I finish the backend coding and get everything up to spec, I’ll overwrite my layout here at intricateart.com and have them running side by side until things are running smoothly. In case you’re wondering – I did all of that with one installation of wordpress, one theme. My brain needs this extended weekend!

I’ve desparately needed to re-organize my gallery. I offer so many things, and have so much available that it’s just downright hard to find. I do love to have my ducks in a row, and I think this new setup accomplishes that. Clean, professional, one of a kind unique gallery layout, and I’m all ready for some serious clients.

Please, check it out. Let me know how you like it!

Well, have a look, check around, this is it. It’s the streamlined, clutter-free version of me. Of course I still have to tweak a couple of little things, but I’ll get to that (and you won’t even notice). I’m even going to add some prints and possibly some notecard sets to my blog specific prints page.

Comments are now in a fun little popup window. Why not? It seemed so cute, I couldn’t resist.

Please, tell me you love it – I’ll even settle for “I’ll get used to it”.

(Seriously, you don’t have to appease me, I just prefer it that way.)

Hardware Tips, from me to you:

• Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not back there.
• If you can hear it humming, clean it.
• If you hear it screaming, hurry up.
• Never, ever let your computer get to growing fuzz on top of the dust, on top of lint.
• If your grid thingies are covered with solid fuzz on top of dust on top of lint, and you’re quite surprised to find a grid underneath and imagine that must be for air intake, consider cleaning it more often. Duh.
• Wear a breathing mask while cleaning.
• Purple Pigs, Cream Cheese Frosted Brownies and Vacuum Cleaners go well together at midnight.
• Joint compound really dries out your hands. Use lotion.

(oops, sorry about getting off track there, hic!)

Ooh and P.S.

• Digital photos make great reference material when putting it back together!

Finally, the long awaited (and long overdue, sorry ’bout that) instruction manual has arrived! For those of you “stuck with blogger”, “sick of blogger”, and who “want a real blog”, this is all the information you need rolled up into one tidy little post. If I forget anything, I’ll update it. If you know something I don’t know, tell me, and I’ll update that, too.

(updated 2.18.10)

My Friday has to be better than My Thursday. First, our Cardinal playing peekaboo out back, he’s just candy. Totally unrelated to yesterdays events.

Second, I have a question. Let’s say you get a gift, from someone you didn’t expect a gift from, someone you never talk to or even see. Let’s say you dream about the gift and how not right it feels to even accept it. What do you do?

Third, while all of my good friends were off bloghopping the TT, I was combating a hacker in my system. Here’s how it went: Leanne visits first blog left in comments. She opens the window, reads Thirteen Things, in the process the open window has gone inactive for no apparent reason 3 times. She has to click the window to activate it, then scroll. Opening comments, the comment page also went inactive several times, as though something is running in the foreground, but nothing is running in the foreground. She begins typing a comment, and the words start looking lkei tish because the cursor is being magically repositioned to the space before the letter she just typed. Thinking the blog she was visiting was cursed, she tries another TT. Same thing.

As you can see from my list of Thirteen’s I visited yesterday, I didn’t get far before I was cussing my fool head off and running Panda Activescan Pro on all three of the puters on our network, spending hours cleaning and eliminating.

U P D A T E D …. Nov. 21, 2005

I’ve updated this post to put it at the top. I’ve just activated this feature and will use it from here on out. If you’ve forgotton your user ID or password just drop me an e-mail and I will help you. Thanks for understanding!

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