Twidget

I am looking for a free PHP script to count the total visits to this blog and return it in a function. Do you know of one?

The Daily Recycler has an interesting post showing the results of the 2004 presidential election as influenced by the increased turnout. I actually think this is a better representation of the changing electorate because it emphasizes the votes of many citizens feeling compelled to vote for the first time. It did hold some surprises, however, such as Alaska, Colorado and Montana being shifted into the blue states.

Either way, if you’re interested in things political, like I am, its an intriguing take on things.

I send a great deal of my spare time chatting in the IRC channel #wordpress where no small degree of camaraderie has sprung up. We talk primarily about WordPress, but we also chat about nearly anything that comes to mind.

HauntedUnix has taken it upon himself to collect photographs of the more frequent visitors to #wordpress and publish them in a sort of online scrapbook. If you’re a WordPress aficionado, or if you just want to see what I look like, go pay him a visit.

I cobbled together code from various sources into one WordPress plug-in to display:

1. The date of the oldest (and presumably first) post in your blog.
2. The total number of posts.
3. The total number of comments, trackbacks and pingbacks. (WordPress lumps them all together for some reason.)
4. The total number of registered users.

I’ll be making it available for download later, once I’m finished.

My elderly mother compained several weekends ago that she felt like, “someone had beaten me up.” She didn’t get around any more than waking up, having meals and going back to bed.

Since then, she has seen the doctor who has identified water in the lungs as the culprit. (Or was it water underneath the lungs? Either way, it doesn’t sound pleasant.)

He also identified “several” tumors on her liver. She is scheduled to go back next week to see about those and whether or not they will need to be treated. Needless to say, we’re all more than a little anxious about it.

The good news is twofold: One, we know her doctor is conscientious enough to not delay unnecessarily any tests or treatment if he thought the tumors were likely to be cancerous. Two, the possibilities of benign tumors outnumber the malignant ones by a margin of 2:1.

The bad news is the treatment, should any one of them prove to be malignant: chemotherapy. Surgery is out of the question.

I know my Mom, and chemotherapy will kill her.

To say I’m worried is an understatement. I’d appreciate it if my readers would remember us in their prayers and thoughts.

I’m told that my ex-fiancé didn’t introduce herself to one of my co-workers for fear of all the “bad-mouthing” she’d likely heard from me. To complicate matters, a different co-worker’s wife is my ex-fiancé’s best friend, and I know from experience anything I say or do (whether it relates to her or not, probably) is repeated down the chain verbatim.

To be honest, my opinion of my ex-fiancé is not very good. She broke my heart, she broke a financial agreement we’d made, and she was complicit in running me into bankruptcy. We could very well have parted as friends, had she not been so financially irresponsible.

Either way, I don’t give a flip about her opinion of me, as I continue to try and put that entire chapter of my life to rest. I miss terribly her youngest daughter, Chloe, who I wanted so badly to adopt as my own, but other than that, that whole chapter is a waste to me now.

I can’t feel anything but grief and sympathy for the people of Sumaria, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and Somalia, and anywhere else affected by the huge Earthquake in the Bay of Bengal and the resulting tsunami. Already the reports of dead numbers over 77,000 and the spectre of disease, particularly Cholera, breaks our hearts and spur us to action.

The death toll could easily exceed 100,000 when everything is said and done. These people need instant food, water-purification pills, and much, much more. If you believe in a Supreme Being, please say a prayer tonight for the survivors and if you can spare as little as $5, please consider donating to the Red Cross and Red Crescent’s Internation Response Fund.

Part of my job requires that I carry a wireless phone with me at all times to communicate with my boss, customers, salespeople, etc. I also must carry a pager because, Heaven forbid I miss calls from the office! So, much of my day is spent with my phone at my ear.

The other day, I arrived at a job site where four “manly men” were physically exerting themselves, installing the equipment I was scheduled to later bring up and get to working. We made small talk, since these guys are considered friends of mine, then I started to whine about constantly having to talk on the phone.

It then occurred to me, this was an opportunity to have a little fun at their expense. I added that perhaps one way to alleviate this problem of constantly holding a phone to one ear or another would be to have one surgically implanted inside me, like the Borg.

Imagine all these beer-drinking, truck-driving, deer-hunting, red-staters looking at me with this dumbfounded look on their faces, since they’d probably never seen 10 minutes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I decided to take the inside joke a step further. I dropped my arms to my sides, stiffened my stand and in my best Borg accent said, “I must communicate with the Hive!”

All four just looked at each other with their best “Wa-a?” look. I could barely keep a straight face.

This site uses the most current available WordPress 1.3-alpha5, and I’ve begun to develop my own personal theme.

Many thanks to Owen Winkler for his RedAlt WordPress Index Builder, and Ryan Boren for both his Kubrick theme (based on Michael Heilemann’s original design) which provided much inspiration and code, but also for his excellent documentation on the subject of themes. As always, thanks to Mark Jaquith for his poking and prodding. Also, many thanks to the boys and girls of #wordpress and #css for their “critiques” and assistance.

twidget.zip

I’ve been struggling for the past hour trying to get the CSS2 text-shadow property to work, only to find that neither Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape or Opera support it!

Another option I have is to use the DropShadow filter, but that’s proprietary to Microsoft, only works in Internet Explorer and won’t validate as valid CSS.

So, for #headerimg h1 a and .description I’d like to keep it white while making it stand out from the image behind it. Any suggestions?

Update - 12/31/04: I’m being told from those in #css that in current browsers, it isn’t possible. I’m forced to include the title of the blog in an image.

This is the first post of my new blog, called Twidget.