The long story boiled down is that the ThickBox can find a “group” of images if you pass it common name in the rel param in your a tag. For instance:

<a href=”http://mikebrum.com/full_image.jpg” class=”thickbox” rel=”anyString”><img src=”http://mikebrum.com/thumb_image.jpg” /></a>

That’s simple enough. Any link that has the rel param set to “anyString” will be shown with Thickbox having “next” and “prev” links so you don’t have to view, close, open the next by hand. Very handy feature, for sure!

However, if the rel param happens to have a space in it, this appears to break completely, resulting in the image not being displayed. I’m sure there’s some degree of bug on Thickbox’s side, but I decided to fix it on the NextGEN Gallery side since that’s code I’m far more familiar with.

The fix is rather simple. In <your_WP_root>/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/lib/image.php, find the line:

function get_thumbcode($galleryname = ”) {

Immediately under that, add the following two lines:

 // Fix thickbox failure when $galleryname has a space in it
$galleryname = preg_replace( ‘/\s+/’, ”, $galleryname );

And that’s it. That strips the whitespace from the $galleryname variable which is what’s passed on to the code that populates the rel param in image links for Thickbox.

Just keep in mind that if you make this change on your server, your changes will be overwritten when you perform your next update — so make a note and be sure to apply this fix again after you upgrade.

In the meantime, I’ve disabled the Thickbox display until I can figure out why.

…I’m really annoyed.

Later, if this goes smoothly, I’ll figure out how it works with images. Definitely neat!

I ported the old haiku that were submitted years ago from an old database backup to the new database and rewrote a front-end for it. You can get there by simply clicking on the Haiku link in the main pages list at the top of the page. The biggest pain in the ass is dealing with html encoding and special characters that go along with it that aren’t alpha.

Right now, you can add new haiku and view random haiku. I still need to write a paginated view so you can look through all of them — but that’ll be for another day.

Feel free to submit some of your own and look at those that other people have submitted — that’s why it’s there!!

I had to make a few changes to various plugins to get them working properly, but I think everything’s working without issue now.

I’m sure there’ll be some minor tweaks, but this should be it for a while.

I really like the cleaner look and how everything exists in a discrete “box”. Visually, I find this very appealing and easy to identify elements and identify what you’re looking for.

If anyone notices any problems, feel free to let me know.

Everything’s back up now, but I don’t know if any email was lost. External mail servers should try again a few hours later, so maybe some stuff will trickle in. It’s not that I get a ton of mail — I just don’t want to miss anything that might be important due to a stupid server outage.

All of this has me considering dropping the whole VPS setup and finding a place to host my own physical host. I’d need to find a DNS hosting service (DynDNS used to be super cheap per domain, but that price has sky rocketed), but I’m more than capable of actually administering the box myself.

We’ll see if I actually go through with this or if I’m just pissy due to the outage this morning. It’d be a lot of work up front, but not a bad deal in the long run. It’s not like the VPS is the cheapest thing ever.

It’s worth it to stage all of the upgrades so that I don’t totally FUBAR the production box, but it definitely makes the task run a bit longer.

Luckily, most of the plugins don’t tend to have crazy updates, so I just need to get a diff of my changes and basically apply it to the new version of code instead of having to re-engineer the functionality against a new code base.

If anyone finds anything odd about the site, feel free to holler at me via the contact form. Though everything’s looking good right now.

Oh, and I’m back from a very productive trip to LA that was 100% related to BME. As a totally unrelated, but exceptionally cool, aside, I’m still overjoyed that I got to hear the space shuttle’s sonic boom on its way to land on Saturday.

I wrote some code to leverage the existing gallery engine that I’m using and display a nice listing of the galleries that I have to show. I’m running the exec-php plugin to allow me to actually embed code in my posts and pages, which increases WordPress’s versatility exponentially in my opinion. I used it a while back while running my old D&D Blog, but haven’t really had need to dabble with it for quite some time. I wanted to find a “simple solution” for a gallery display and I think this is it.

I had to make a minor code change to a NextGEN Gallery module in the end, but it was amazingly trivial. While I’ve been working on this for about 4 hours, it was also while chatting, browsing and watching The Big Lebowski – so I definitely didn’t have my head buried in code the whole time. The biggest issue was tracking down the NextGEN Gallery issue, which turned out to be the addition of just two lines of code. I still want to add some error handling/sanity test code to the gallery wrapper, but it’s ready to go as-is.

Definitely feeling good about finally having a nice gallery browser. I’m sure I’ll extend it over time.

1. Added new Contact page
2. Added new About page
3. Minor change to code so that when a page has comments disabled, it will not output the “Comments are closed.” message – because it’s simply ugly and unnecessary
4. Minor change to code to properly respect user-defined page order in the header

That’s about it. Nothing too special, just bringing everything together.

I think the theme that I chose was written a few versions ago and doesn’t have support for a lot of the newer features. It’s not a huge problem for me (for instance, I don’t need threaded comments), but I just have to wonder at what point maintaining the theme will outweigh the value of finding one that’s written for the current version of WordPress.

I haven’t reached that point yet – but that’s probably because I’ve been able to fix all the problems I’ve encountered thus far. We’ll see if I get to a point where that’s not the case.

The only tip I have is that if you want to compete in that market, do something unique. Trying to out-Google Google isn’t going to work. Having a million-billion sites indexed doesn’t help you if your search results suck or take forever to be returned. Impress me with some meaningful content-aware app that knows what I’m looking for even before I do… and do it without being bigbrother creepy.

Anyway, I got a response from the “bandwidth thief” below… who turned out to at least have a good sense of humor about the whole thing. I still find the whole episode hilarious. I’m so lucky that I can amuse myself!

In the site news category (something that I’m sure most people don’t give a rat’s ass about), I’ve added a “top 10 pages viewed” feature to the sidebar. I had to do some minor hacking to get the output to play nice with my theme, but it wasn’t too difficult. I could turn on a per-page counter but would think that that’s a bit cheesy and obnoxious. At least it’s out of the way over there and you choose to ignore it. Naturally, it’s not retroactive and counting starts as of installation earlier this evening.

That’s the long and short. Not a ton going on. Just trying to get back into work mode.

I think I’m going to go buy some candy on Amazon.