justinbarkhuff

If anyone else has time to explore the site, I’d appreciate any additional feedback. I’m trying something new for navigation, and I’m curious if it’s working or not.

Thanks for the feedback Andrew. Clicking the magnifying class in the top right reveals the global navigation. That’s also where all the categorization can be found.

Several people have mentioned wanting to collapse posts after reading them. I’ll do some experimenting to try to improve that process.

@michaelh: My solution uses Flash, Javascript, and PHP.

The post-it note is a Flash SWF. Within the SWF, I have actionscript which expects the ‘status’ flash var to be specified. The actionscript sets the value of a dynamic text field to the value of the ‘status’ flash var.

I wrote a WordPress plugin to retrieve my latest tweet using Twitter’s API and write the necessary HTML/Javascript to embed the SWF and specify its flash vars. The value of the ‘status’ flash var is set to my latest tweet status.

Specifically, the final output of my WordPress plugin looks something like this:

<div class="tweet_pad" id="tweet_pad114739"><span>Gemma's got jury duty today.</span></div><script type="text/javascript">UFO.create({ movie:"https://www.barkhuff.com/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/tweet-pad/tweet-pad.swf",width:"310",height:"310",majorversion:"6",build:"0",wmode:"transparent",flashvars:"status=Gemma%27s+got+jury+duty+today."},"tweet_pad114739");</script></div>

The actionscript in my SWF looks something like this:

status_tf.text = _root.status;

Forgot about a WP plugin being used: All in One SEO Pack.

– Justin

It looks like alexrabe will integrate an official solution in an upcoming nextgen release.

Until then, if you want to display the gallery title on a gallery page, edit the ‘gallery.php’ file (it’s within the ‘view’ folder within your nextgen plugin folder), and add this code where you want the title to be displayed:

<?php echo $images[0]->title; ?>

This works for nextgen v.1.0.2.

Hope this helps.

If anyone is interested, you can download my Lightbox Slideshow photo gallery interface here:
https://www.justinbarkhuff.com/lab/lightbox_slideshow/

christykny: my wife creates all the videos on the site using Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. Completed videos are exported as uncompressed AVI’s, then we use the Flash Video Encoder to convert AVI’s to FLV’s.

dkaye315: thanks for the comment. In regards to the lightbox issue, are you experiencing the problem on all the photo galleries?

Floppydog: if you only need a handful of buttons in your own handwriting, creating images using a combination of Photoshop and Wacom would be a good way to go. If you needed more flexibility in where/how you embed your own handwriting (i.e. for post titles), you could create your own font and use sIFR to replace the standard browser text with that font.

fireundubh: I’m working on a downloadable iPhone interface theme and plugin. Soon, I’ll be launching a WordPress-driven redesign of my professional site (justinbarkhuff.com), and it should be available then (along with several other free goodies).

UPDATED URL: To view the iPhone interface using Safari on your desktop, use this URL:

https://www.barkhuff.com/?wpiphone_test

whooami, thank you for the kind words. While building the site, the WordPress documentation proved to be extremely helpful, and I spent a fair amount of time reviewing the code in the default WordPress theme.

It also helped that I’ve had extensive experience developing sites from scratch utilizing XHML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, PHP, and MySQL.

Dgold, the location/weather/date graphic at the top right is actually a flash file. The flash file is fed information dynamically via ‘flashvars’. Here is a sample of the ‘flashvars’ and values I’m feeding it:

month=JUN
day=24
dnam=Barcelona, Spain
lat=41.3962
lon=2.175
conditions=1:23 AM, 68° F (Partly Cloudy)

‘month’, ‘day’, and the time portion of ‘conditions’ are calculated via PHP’s built in date/time functions. ‘dnam’, ‘lat’, ‘lon’, and the weather portion of ‘conditions’ come from weather.com’s XML service (I use PHP to parse the XML).

In the flash file, the ‘month’, ‘day’, ‘dnam’, and ‘conditions’ variables are displayed as-is. The ‘lat’ and ‘lon’ variables are converted to X and Y coordinates, which are used as the coordinates for the red-dot.

Whenever we move to a new place, I have to update two things:

1. our blog’s timezone in the WP-admin area
2. a php variable in my theme’s header.php file that stores the weather.com location ID that corresponds to our current location

Thank you everyone for the feedback.

Doodlebee, thanks for the tips. Changing the #wrapper to ‘position:absolute;’ and tweaking a few other things fixed the extra space issue.

As for the validation, I’m afraid that won’t be fixed anytime soon. The ‘&’ signs are part of the string that specifies the ‘flashvars’ when unobtrusively embedding a flash file, and changing ‘&’ to ‘&’ breaks the passing of those ‘flashvars’.

I think lightbox makes for a much better user experience. Especially for navigating photo galleries.

Navigate through your photo galleries with lightbox installed, then remove the lightbox functionality and navigate through your photos again. For me, when I remove lightbox, it feels like my photo gallery is broken.

I would especially recommend it in your case because your photo galleries have so many images. Without lightbox, I would feed lost everytime I viewed a photo then had to click ‘Back’ and find the next photo.

On my personal site (https://www.barkhuff.com) I use my own customized version of lightbox that includes a slideshow function.

For ranges, use PHP’s built in range() function:

$page_ids = range(123,128);

For a mix of individual ID’s and ranges of ID’s, you just need to figure out the best way to build the $page_ids array (see these PHP functions: array_merge, array_push). For example:

$page_ids = array_merge(range(123,128),array(115,119,309));

Or:

$page_ids = range(123,128);
array_push($page_ids,115,119,309);