My Side Door

The theme for this blog is called Dust.  It was written by miloIIIVII.  Version 3.17.4 was released in late August, and today I applied it.  This blog’s intent was always to feature photos I have taken that I find interesting, and thus why I chose a very dark black background theme.  Dust really shows off a photo well, I believe.

The new version improves the typography a bit over the older version, and adds a few bits to the sidebar.  I tweaked the header a tad from the default, and added elements to the sidebar I like, but otherwise it’s pretty close to vanilla.  Hope you enjoy it.

For my newest blog, Scottsdale Real Estate Blog, I went crazy and created a brand new custom theme. I know…crazy, huh? With so many free themes out there, why would I bother to create a new theme. Well, I wanted what I wanted, and I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted, so I set about creating it.

It started with the vision of a photograph in my head. I hadn’t taken the photo, but I knew what the photo was going to be. I would shoot the McDowell Mountains from the top of my office building, and that would be the banner photo. This beautiful blue sky and mountains would be the basis for my inspiration for the theme.

I installed Dreamweaver, a tool I had never used before, and pieced together a complete theme, with all of the rough elements: Header, sidebar, content, and footer. At this point, I actually took the photo that was in my head. I would need it to complete the header, and really stylize what I had in mind. Photoshopping skills, I apparently have a little, but I’m continually amazed at how difficult it is for me to do what I feel should be easier. Eh…I suppose when I stop taking photos will be the day I declare myself a Photoshop master.

At this point, with so many php elements in the theme, and not much content to play with, Dreamweaver ceased being very useful, and I just installed it all on the live blog, and made my final edits from the Wordpress admin panel. Honestly, it’s painfully slow, but since it’s my theme, I wasn’t hunting around wondering where to change what. Actually, the toughest part was getting the cForms plug-in and it’s style to agree with my style. I wanted that plug-in to go narrower than it is built to go by default, and adjusting cForms style to do that was very time consuming. And of course, it’s style and my theme’s style clashed, but that was fine…it caused me to clean up my style.

As themes go, it’s relatively basic. There aren’t as many style elements as the bigger themes, but at least I know it’s unique (or unique enough…I mean, how unique is a header, sidebar, content, and footer?). This exact format won’t be found elsewhere, and that itself is reason enough to have bitten off the task.

I’m naming the theme onScottsdale, for lack of a better name, and I’m sure I’ll add to the theme over time, but doing this project has given me a much better sense for what I see when I look at a theme, and what’s style/theme versus content. I don’t think I had fully distinguished the two well enough in the past.

Saturday afternoon I upgraded every blog to 2.5.1. That includes the Phoenix Area Real Estate Blog, Scottsdale and Phoenix Homes for Sale, and my newest single property website: 3121 W Mescal. Of course, I also upgraded My Side Door from 2.5.0 to 2.5.1.

Another thing I did at the same time, was switch all blogs to use Subversion to get the latest version of Wordpress directly from Automattic, rather than using the normal upgrade path. Upgrading via Subversion saves an FTP step, which wasn’t really a big deal, but if you can save a step, why not?

I had used Subversion to get the trunk (latest and greatest) before 2.5.1 was released, while I was testing out and setting up my first attempt at a single property website and found it was faster and easier than the standard FTP approach. So when I decided to jump to 2.5.1, it was a no-brainer to begin using Subversion for all future blog upgrades.

If you are considering using Subversion to track Wordpress development, or upgrade your blog, here’s the link Upgrading Wordpress using Subversion. Naturally, in order to do this, you will need Subversion installed on your server, and you’ll need access to run Subversion from that server.

Today, I decided to try to create a template for single property web sites. I wanted to have a nice template, that featured a photo gallery, and all of the other property information that made sense. Working with some old listings, I set out on the first task, which was having a photo gallery. Wordpress 2.5 seemed like the ideal version for this, as photo galleries are now supposed to be a standard feature. As well, the Options theme, by Justin Tadlock also seemed like a good choice, as it too has a pretty slick featured photos “option”, as one of it’s many theme options.

So, I set up a new domain, installed WP 2.5, installed Options, and quickly did some crude test posts. I was able to get the Featured photos option working correctly, but the gallery was giving me trouble. I kept struggling with it, and struggling with it, sure that I was doing something wrong. I searched via Google for any reference that the gallery doesn’t display for some people, and could find nothing. Searching the Wordpress forums revealed no help. Finally I decided to read the code. Sometimes being a developer has its advantages, though I resist going that route when at all possible. I finally found the offending bit of code. The query that returns the images for the gallery was failing. Looking at the query, I couldn’t figure out how it would work for anyone, let alone most people, but I digress.

Digging in yet deeper, I found that there was indeed a bug logged against this problem in Trac. It’s fixed as of now, and slated for Version 2.5.1. That’s sweet. Accordingly, I’ve decided to install the version of Wordpress at the bleeding edge of development, so that I can download this fix and ensure it does indeed fix my problem, the way it would appear to.

The bleeding edge version of Wordpress does indeed fix the gallery problem, although there are still issues with galleries and IE 7 and even galleries and Firefox, dealing with adding photos to the gallery. I’ve developed a workaround, which requires me to use both browsers to do my first gallery. The gallery display problem seems to be a problem that PHP5 and/or MySQL 5.0 reveal, that earlier versions either mask, or simply don’t expose.

Not quite liking the gallery display functionality, I also decided to write my first Wordpress plugin. The plugin is very simple. It adds the text “Next Image” & “Previous Image” below the navigation photos. I can understand why it’s not in the code normally, as it creates a language problem, but needing to write a plugin to address it, and being unable to use either a theme or css solution was rather annoying. Clearly there’s some more work needed in the future of galleries for Wordpress.

The gallery also required the Options Theme to be modified to some extent. Most notably, Options doesn’t include any theme support for the attachment viewing of a Gallery, but copying the default PHP for that from Wordpress got me pretty close. I’m going to continue to keep this blog around as my #1 test blog for evaluating new releases of Wordpress, tracking bugs, and evaluating fixes. Now that I have it set up, there’s no cost and it’s easy to do.

If you are curious, its testblog.teambelt.com.

What better blog to be the guinea pig for WordPress 2.5, then my personal blog that I know almost no one reads. Out of the box, I love the new interaction with plug-ins. In 2.3, we got notification that plug-ins were out-of-date. Now with 2.5, we get a way to download and install plug-ins that are out-of-date, directly from the admin panel. This was awesome!

I’m using Windows Live Writer to compose this message, and then I’ll see if I can save as draft and edit online, just as I was before.

===save draft and finish editing online===

Yep, that works well. There is a problem in the online editor…it seems the editing window is too wide, and it’s covering up the publish button that should be the right of this editor window. I suspect that has to do with my variable width CSS, and possibly one of my editing plug-ins that hasn’t updated to 2.5 yet. Switching to the HTML view fixes it, but it’s annoying none-the-less.

Now I’ll add a picture online, even though I suspect I’ll always do that from Live Writer in the future, just to see if it’s different. Well, that’s not going to work. I can upload a picture, but I can’t seem to get the picture to want to go into the post. This was supposed to be one of the premier features of 2.5, so that’s not a good result, and it’s unacceptable that picture insertion doesn’t work…completely unacceptable.

Another thing that’s always annoyed me, and is no different now, the Preview button doesn’t save before it previews. What’s up with that?

Hmm, my verdict: I love the plug-in change, but the pictures not working is a deal breaker.

UPDATE: In Firefox images load and are managed perfectly…so it’s something with IE. I should have guessed. In Trac for WordPress, defect 6502 is noted with the same symptoms I’m having, so I added a note to the defect that I’m experiencing it too.

Last night, on my home PC, Windows Messenger needed to be updated to a newer version.  I relented, and did the install.  Along the way, an option to install Windows Live Writer was pushed in front of me, so I decided what the heck and installed it.

After getting it installed, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to compose a new blog post.  I did a test post, and saved it in draft mode.  The post was easily seen online, just the way I had written it, saved as a draft.  That post included a picture, like this one, and the picture was uploaded exactly where it should have been.

Above, you can click on the screen shot to see how Live Writer is a true WYSIWYG editor.  The style of my blog is coming through perfectly to the editor, which the normal editor for my blog doesn’t do nearly as well.

As a further test, I just wrote and published this post about selling a Phoenix home, using Live Writer.

So far, this tool is darned near ideal.  Another huge bonus, is that I now get real time feedback about misspelled words.  I’ll freely admit, I need spelling support.  I can’t find any downsides so far, so I’m going to keep using it until I do.

There is a bit of a drawback, however.  Tagging and SEO tools aren’t able to be managed from Live Writer, as they are admin plug-ins.  So, I’ll always need to save each post as a draft, and then publish from the blog, after doing those final activities.  I much prefer the WYSIWYG editor for composition, and when ready to publish, there’s an option to save the draft and edit online.  That works perfectly for doing any additional plug-in required tasks before publishing.

Saturday, I announced the re-launch of the new TeamBelt.com website.  The old website was a static web 1.0 style site, that was really underperforming for me.  I made very few, if any, clients from it, and with the success of RealPhoenixLiving.com, I knew it had to go.

So, I found a website template that I liked, and then I had that template customized for my needs.  And what you see at Scottsdale and Phoenix Homes For Sale is the result. 

I hope you check it out.  If you do, let me know what you think.

Just a quick update on my broken camera.  Canon confirmed receipt of the camera at their repair facility today.  Also, Jefferson Graham from USA Today contacted me yesterday to discuss my broken camera.  He said he personally had 3 Canon cameras fail, and wanted to know more about mine and my experience.  I let him know that it was about 45 days old, and I had returned it to Canon’s repair center. 

He then let me know that he had spoken with Canon directly about it, and that Canon does not advise people to put these cameras in their pocket, but instead to store them in a case.  Ugh.  I bought the camera to put in my pocket and to have it handy everywhere I go.  I want a camera I can put in a jersey pocket on my bike, in a backpack, or in a pocket while I’m roaming around the city/on vacation, so that I always have a camera handy.  If I can’t count on this new Canon camera to be that camera for me, I’m going to be quite disappointed. 

My old Canon G3 has been through a number of bumps and bruises and has always worked.  It’s just too bulky to stick in a pocket.  I wanted the SD870is to do everything the G3 could do, but in a smaller package.  Hopefully I’ve been unlucky and it’ll work like I want, and not like Jefferson Graham from USA Today expects.

Ok, this is a bit of a rant, so my apologies up front.  But a month or so back I bought a new Canon SD870is Digital Elph to use as my general all-around blogging camera.  I wanted something that was small enough to put in my pocket almost every where I went, but with the best quality of photo I could get for the size.  The 870 is a bit bigger than my Razr, but not much, so the size was right, and with the image stabilization, it really takes some great photos.

So yesterday, when I whipped it out to find it wasn’t working, dang I was bummed.  The camera won’t focus at all in the wider angles, about 3/4 of the way through the zoom you can make out a camera phone quality fuzzy image, but any further zooming and again, there’s non focus.  Some thing is jammed in the focusing motor, and all the messing with it and banging of it I’ve done hasn’t helped.  So I’m going to have to send it back, and endure the hassle of dealing with an online retailer’s customer service.  Ugh.

Anyway, until it broke (inexplicably I might add…I don’t recall dropping it since I last used it on Halloween), I did like the camera, and I expect it’s replacement to do well for its intended purpose.

Today was an amazing day.  My real estate blog received some tremendous reactions over an article I wrote about Trulia Voices.  The CEO of Trulia stopped by and commented later that day.  Today, I wrote another article about Trulia Voices, and got another visit from the CEO of Trulia.  And all of the hits on the blog caused it to really skyrocket in the stats category, which I couldn’t be happier about.

While that fun was taking place, I had coffee at Starbucks with an agent that’s agreed to office at my satellite.  That’s really good news, as we need more agents, especially since I let one go, while at the same time a client that was renting half of my office space moved out when he found a commercial lease that worked for him.  So the office has been a bit quiet the last couple of weeks.

And then back at the office, In my inbox, a client prospect sent me an email requesting to look at homes to buy on November 5th and 5th.

So when Shelly from the Wall Street Journal called today, as the big “capper” you can’t imagine my elation.  She led out by saying that she’d seen what I had written on my blog, and the reaction from Pete Flint, the CEO of Trulia, and wanted to ask some more follow-up questions.  I’m not sure our discussion added much to her story, but I did stress an important point: 

When the content at Trulia becomes consistently high quality, I’ll want to be a part of it.

The low quality of the content is my beef with it today, and it looks like the folks at Trulia listened and are planning to do something about it next week.  Kudos to them.

But back to the cool factor…I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.  Sheesh, how cool was that?  Jan remarked that I haven’t attended any media training.  She’s wondering if I made ”the company” look bad.   If so, oh well.  Most likely is I botched it up enough that the Journal never references me in whatever article they are planning to run (Shelly said it was something about Web 2.0).

Anyway, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, here at My Side Door, I’ll probably always post in flurries.  That’s another reason to subscribe.  If you don’t have a feed reader, Google has a good one.  Then you don’t need to ping the site to find out if I’ve posted, your feed reader will alert you automagically.

Happy Belated Halloween.