The sites wont be down at all, but I’ll be without broadband internet for about a month. This means that I’ll have to record as many video demos as I possibly can before I move out of the apartment that I’m currently in and hopefully I wont run out of them until I get access to broadband again. The reason for me losing fast internet is because I’m transferring to new school, DeVry to be exact, that is if they accept me. So for the month or so between now and when DeVry starts classes again I’ll be living at home with the parents, until I get a chance to move up to Kansas City.

With me starting a new school this will probably mean that the other site that I spoke of (the poetry site) will probably go back on hold. This will actually be nice because I’d really like to wait until the CMS that I want to use comes out of beta. Other than this the only thing new with the Virtual Console site is that I updated all of the video demos to a resolution of 640×480 so they should look a bit better.

Today I removed the “Link Exchange” page on Virtual Console Mondays and replaced it with a contact page. I think this will work out better all around, because users will be able to send me mail even if it doesn’t have to deal with a link exchange. I decided on using the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP WordPress plugin to create the contact form. Although this plugin was a bit awkward to edit for my needs, it only took a little bit of time to understand how the plugin works. I was also amazed that one of the themes that came with the plugin worked quite well with the site and only needed a small amount of CSS editing.

After about a year of coming up with the original idea and with the idea taking on many different forms, but never actually becoming anything, I have finally decided to start working on the idea of a poetry site again.  I’m not really going to give many details about it here, but if you have ever read my blog on MySpace there is a good chance you’ll know what I’m speaking of.  All that I’ll really say about the site is that its focus will be on a dynamic community for poets with a bit of a twist. The reason for deciding to start this idea back up is that I finally think the content management system that I want to use for the site is finally at a point where I can use it for the type of site I have in mind.

Some may remember the original domain name that I was going to use, but I will no longer use that domain name for the idea.  I have picked out a new domain name, though can not register it because it is take, but it will expire in a few months and I hope that I’ll be able to pick it up.  If the domain gets extended I’ll just have to come up with a new name or try to purchase it from the owner.  So this means I’ll have a good several months to work on this idea, which is good because I figure I’ll have a good amount of work to get the site how I want it to look/work.

If this site actually comes to light and it ends launching, I’ll have a lot of work to do post launch because I still have to figure out how to market it just right for the projected audience.  I think the beginning will be hard, but if I can manage to get a community to grow out of it then I’ll be pretty well set.

There was a tiny bug that I had noticed at one point in time but completely forgotten about. What happened was that when you clicked on the “comments” link from a page with multiple posts on it you weren’t taken directly to the comments section of the post but instead just taken to the top of the post.  I don’t know if I had caused the bug to crop up or if it was there from the beginning, but after a quick look at the code and a bit of typing it is now fixed.

After realizing that Luigi rarely ever gets noticed I decided to make a header for my Virtual Console site with him in it. I didn’t want to change anything about the header, so I just removed Mario and put Luigi in instead. I then realized that I’d rather have both headers for the site, but just make it randomly select one so that there would be a 50/50 chance of seeing Luigi in the header.

It took me a little while to figure how to do this without adding another WordPress plugin so I started looking into some php, which by the way I know very little about; I eventually came up with this solution.

First I put this into the header file of the template:

<?php
$random = mt_rand(0,1);
?>


Then all I did was edit the CSS file so that I had two different entries for the two different headers, which look like this:

#masthead0 {
background: url(images/masthead0.png);
width: 600px;
height: 150px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 0;
}

#masthead1 {
background: url(images/masthead1.png);
width: 600px;
height: 150px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 0;
}

Lastly all I had to do was change the DIV code for the header a little bit, which it now looks like this:

<div id="masthead<?php echo($random); ?>"></div>

So basically all this little hack does is add either a 0 or a 1 to the end of the id name, thus it will either be id=”masthead0″ or id=”masthead1″ respectively. All and all an easy little way to make a random header without the need of any plugins. To increase the number of possible headers change the 1 in the first bit of code to a higher number.

See it in action over at my site about the Virtual Console, just reload multiple times to get the second header image to show up.