Everybody's working for the weekend

While 4 straignt days of activity here at mimicvii.com had some people worried that Hell was on the verge of an Ice Age, luckily the weekend stepped in, did it’s part, and put a stop to that non-sense.   Those of me that actually do happen to visit this site should make a note that weekends are likely to be dead around here.   Very similar to the way this place is durring the other, normal dead times.

On another, almost related note…now that I’ve fixed a css issue on this site, I am finally able to make posts that are shorter in length than the random images I insert in every post, without it causing odd display issues.  As such, expect more useless, short posts!  Except on weekends.

Altered Beast

[Instert 16bit lightning strike and explosion here]

So I’m back from the MMO dead.  Luckily, only a couple months of my life lost on this one.

As is customary, my website tends to suffer the most from these distractions, because why would I want to waste time here when I could be grinding for phat loots?!  Unfortunately for Warhammer Online, the loots were lacking phat and the grinding kicked in way too soon.  Back to farming my Xbox for achievements…

Maybe a post or two thrown in here just to keep the place on it’s toes.  Speaking of toes, if this place has them, would they be webbed?  [Badoom-cha]  Thank you, I’ll be here all week, try the veal.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus

As the previous post no doubt indicates, I’m having a hard time coming up with something worth a damn to comment on.  As such, I’m forced to do something somewhat drastic.  Be prepared to endure a little something about me.

But not here, in this post, that would suck for everyone.  The info about me can be found in the frequently overlooked About page.  Note that the term frequently overlooked is a relative term.  A frequent overlooked page on a normal site means it’s at least seen occasionally.  A frequently overlooked page on a site that is itself frequently overlooked means the frequently overlooked page has probably never before been seen by human eyes.

In the event any of the 10′s of people who visit this site might have accidentally stumbled into that section before, and lived, it has actually been overhauled a bit.  Hold onto your potatoes because it now contains:

• The complete history of mimicvii.com – From it’s humble beginnings to it’s humble, now, times.
• A blurb or two about real life™ me – As opposed to something about the super cool, interweb version of me.
• An explanation for what the hell a mimicvii is – Finally, one of life’s great mysteries explained!

Photograph

After a couple of days fighting with the Fotobook plugin for WordPress, I am finally victorious.  As it is now my vanquished foe, it is required to do anything I wish.  Unfortunately, all it seems willing to do is fetch my Facebook photos, but it does do a well enough job of that.

The fighting was based upon the fact that the 3.1 version just wouldn’t work for me.  I dug through the code, reset/re-installed the plugin, tried a little voodoo, nothing worked.  As I was about to give up, I decided to give an older revision a try.  Luckily, the 3.0.7 version appears to work flawlessly.

The whole reason I even bothered with any of this is because the Fotobook plugin allows me to easily import photos from my Facebook albums directly into this site.  As such, I have now replaced the old gallery I was using with this one, which can be accessed through the Photos page.

Roman Forum

I finally figured out how to get my bbPress forum, visually, integrated into my WordPress site.  Feel free to drop in and call me names or something.

The forum itself integrates into the backend nicely since it is developed by the same people that made WordPress, but there is no way to integrate it into a WordPress theme without creating a matching theme by hand.  That is, unless that hand knows magic!

My magic is much less magical than others whom I’ve read have edited code to merge the two, but my method is much more simple.  If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that simple is good…and that I’m lazy, so simple is as good as it’s gonna get.

My method was to simply create a new page template based on my current theme’s page template.  I stripped out the post related code and replaced it with a simple iframe call to my forum.  I then created a new page within WordPress, left the content empty, pointed it to my newly created template, and violla, the css was wrong.  So I had to do a little tweaking to the css to get it just right, but overall I think it looks pretty good…or as I like to say, good enough.

Since it is just an iframe, it’s not perfect.  External links clicked inside the forum will cause the link to load inside the frame, and that just looks wierd, but thats too bad.

A book about faces

Excuse me while I am experimenting with some newfangled abilities to have my posts here show up on my Facebook page as notes and conversely have the comments posted to those notes sync back here.  It’s amazing what they can do with magic these days.

Assuming any of this even works. If it doesn’t, then I have lost all faith in magic and might have to turn to religion.

Next thing you know, myspace will suck less…

…and maybe I’m a chinese jet pilot.

Update: Either the Facebook rss reader has a fairly long refresh time or it just doesn’t work.  Hopefully it’s just slow else there seems to be little point in the feature.

Update: Post syncing = success. Comment syncing = fail.

Iron Man

Volume 7 of my often inactive website has gone live. This time around we’ll see how long I can go before this thing starts to collect dust again. I’m going to try and post here regularly…

The overall look is not finished, I need to “make it my own”, but the backend is up-to-date and functional. The old forum has been replaced with bbPress which integrates nicely into WordPress since it was created by the same group. Sadly, none of the old user accounts or posts were able to be migrated, so those will have to start from scratch.