Tag Archives: wordpress

My del.icio.us bookmarks for March 27th through April 1st

  • Spam blights e-mail 15 years on – The thing that I'll never understand is that some people must read spam otherwise it wouldn't be a profitable business. Why?! My domain received over 40000 spam messages last month, none of which I've read so please stop sending them!
  • WordPress 2.5 – I just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. I don't think I've managed to break anything but please do let me know if you know differently.
  • Adobe Photoshop Express Now Live – A neat, on-line mini-Photoshop is now available in beta at least. Clearly some way short even of Elements but it's probably sophisticated enough for a lot of people.

Welcome to 2008

And welcome to the new look ZX81.org.uk! This time I decided to go “back to basics” with a relatively simple, low-graphics theme. Having said that, it’s not quite as basic as things were back in late 1999 when the site first went live ((The Wayback machine only has an entry from August 2000, but the domain was first registered in November 1999 and a minimal placeholder was put up almost immediately.)). It’s less fussy than the old version and should load more quickly for those people not yet on broadband.

The boring details are: I’m using a slightly modified version of Dagon Design’s NightSky theme for WordPress. Other than a fairly extensive set of plugins, changes were to bring the theme in line for tags and to allow a daringfireball-style “linked list” rather than the rather more static del.ic.io.us list I had previously.

In theory I’m not missing anything that was present before but, as with any significant change, there is a chance that I missed something. Please let me know if you spot anything odd.

Photopress/Lightbox Patch

Ever since I moved over to using the WordPress content management system to host this website I have been using a relatively small number of plugins. One of my most used is Photopress which you can see in use almost everywhere you see a picture.

However, late last year I realised how much one, small part of the functionality irritated me. You could either view a full size picture in a page on its own, but I’d never managed to create a template that worked well for both portrait and landscape images. Or you could have each image pop up in another window. I wasn’t keen on that either.

I eventually decided to “scratch an itch” and implement option number three. I’d found and liked the “zoom” effect provided by the Lightbox JavaScript library, and so decided to use that.

I did offer the patch to the author of Photopress, but I have heard nothing from him so find my changes here.

You’ll need to follow the following few steps to do the same with your own site:

  1. Disable the Photopress plugin if you already have it installed
  2. Download the Lightbox Javascript library and install it on your webserver. I put it in wp-content/lightbox ((You’ll need to keep the same directory structure as in the LightBox ZIP file. For example, you should see three directories “css”, “images”
    and “js” Inside the “lightbox” directory on the webserver.)). Remember where you put it as you’ll need it again in a couple of steps
  3. Download and install the plugin. If you don’t have Photopress, try this full version. If you already have Photopress 0.9.5, you can download either the only file that’s changed or this patch file
  4. Activate the plugin
  5. Go to the Photopress Options screen. Look at the bottom of the screen. Here you can enable/disable the Lightbox effect and point Photopress to the Lightbox Javascript routines
  6. Also make sure that you have switched off the “Link to Album” feature ((Thanks to Roman Seibel for figuring this out.))
  7. You’re done

Please let me know how you get on. Hope you like it!