I would very much like to find a way to post Apple iChat tran­script files so that they are both read­able within the Word­press post and down­load­able as the orig­i­nal name.ichat file.  So a but­ton when I am com­pos­ing or edit­ing a post that says “Post iChat Tran­script” would be ideal.  I won­der if some­one could write the Word­press plu­gin that would accom­plish this as I am sure it would be popular.

So this Word­press Plu­gin Project would Entail:

1. Cre­ate the plu­gin that would include a “Post to iChat” but­ton within the post edit­ing screen.
2. On Click, plu­gin would ask for the local loca­tion of the xxx.ichat file.  Worth not­ing here is that the xxx.ichat files are sim­ple ordered xml for­mat so this can be done.
3. Use the cod­ing that rajbot cre­ated here to dis­play the con­tents of the chat within the post (uses CSS to style the tran­script in order to look like an ichat inter­face (includ­ing rounded edges on the bubbles).
4. In addi­tion to dis­play­ing the tran­script within the post, the plu­gin should include a link to the orig­i­nal (now on server) for down­load by read­ers as an option.

The Chat Bub­ble css code ref­er­enced in point #3 above looks like this when posted to Word­press (orig­i­nal posted here):

This exam­ple shows how CSS can be used to style a Word­press post to look like the iChat interface.

So obvi­ously I own my domain (forsbergville.com). After read­ing about map­ping my MX records for email to Google Apps, I started think­ing of other ideas for my sub­do­mains (cur­rent and future).

Sub-Domain Ideas

• www.forsbergville.com should resolve to pri­mary domain on web­host (of course)
• eric.forsbergville.com should resolve to this blog
• angela.forsbergville.com should resolve to her blog
• hik­ing.forsbergville.com should resolve to my hik­ing blog
• files.forsbergville.com should resolve to my Drop­box (www.getdropbox.com)
• music.forsbergville.com should resolve to Apache run­ning at home on my media server
• chat.forsbergville.com should resolve to to jab­ber server run­ning on my web host
• mail.forsbergville.com should resolve to google apps per this post
• legacy.forsbergville.com should resolve to a Telnet/ssh java-based con­trol on a black back­ground web­page that is auto­mat­i­cally attempt­ing to login to the web­server using ssh (green let­ter­ing – yeah). Installed tools would include Gopher, Lynx, Pico, Pine, etc. Just for fun.

The ideas will keep com­ing I’m sure, but I think that this is a great start!

Busy installing and test­ing plug-in’s for the blog today. The list is quite large, but I am sat­is­fied that, despite the amount of plug-in’s, I have the bare essen­tials for my design and usabil­ity desires. I snatched a few ideas from this won­der­ful arti­cle as well:

From: The 13 Most Essen­tial Plu­g­ins for Word­Press – NETTUTS

Word­Press is a very pow­er­ful and flex­i­ble blog/content man­age­ment sys­tem, but the thou­sands of plu­g­ins really help to extend the basic func­tion­al­ity. Here are 13 essen­tial plu­g­ins that you should imme­di­ately install after fin­ish­ing the Word­Press installation.

From: Word­Press › Sup­port » Work­ing with cap­tion id=”attachment_###”

I am using MarsEdit (OSX stand-alone blog­ging soft­ware) to pub­lish to my WP blog and have every­thing work­ing with the excep­tion of one issue I am just con­fused about.

I use cap­tions for all embed­ded images in my posts and love the fea­ture. The first part of the cap­tion code reads:

caption id="attachment_###" where “###” is a seem­ingly ran­dom num­ber. How is that num­ber gen­er­ated (where does it come from)? Is it nec­es­sary for post­ing new pho­tos with cap­tions? While MarsEdit lets me tem­plate how each image is inserted, I don’t know what num­ber to put in this part of the code.

I found this doc­u­men­ta­tion: Word­Press › Sup­port » Work­ing with cap­tion id=”attachment_###”

Image Set­tings – Titles, Descrip­tions, Cap­tions, etc.

You can add cap­tions to your images by using the “Image Cap­tion” field in the “Add an Image” or the “Edit Image” window.

Word­Press Heart But­ton
When you add a cap­tion to an image, cap­tion short­code is inserted into the source code. The cap­tion is also used as the alter­nate text for the image by default. Here is the source code for the image above right after insert­ing it.

caption id="attachment_945" align="aligncenter" width="161" caption="WordPress Heart Button"[/caption]

Unfor­tu­nately, this doesn’t tell me why the num­ber “945″ is used in both places above. Any tak­ers please?

Coro­n­ado Ran­cho Mirage website

While I have been work­ing on this site for some time now, Google Ana­lyt­ics for it are now online and func­tional and so it is finally com­plete.  Coro­n­ado Ran­cho Mirage is a local prop­erty devel­op­ment con­sist­ing of:

From: Coro­n­ado Ran­cho Mirage

Eight one-of-a-kind archi­tec­tural mas­ter­pieces, nes­tled in the heart of Ran­cho Mirage. The loca­tion offers extreme pri­vacy, rest­ful quiet open spaces and expan­sive moun­tain views while afford­ing easy access to all of the ameni­ties that Ran­cho Mirage has to offer. On one+ acre estate lots, Coro­n­ado will be home to eight truly remark­able archi­tec­tural cre­ations, each indi­vid­ual and unique in con­cept and design. Each estate is sep­a­rated by six foot berms and accented with attrac­tive desert land­scap­ing. Two curv­ing streets of tex­tured pavers lead you to each res­i­dence which is accessed by indi­vid­ual cus­tom gates.

The site is a hybrid between some stan­dard html/php and iWeb library inte­gra­tion.  There is some lim­ited Flash work uti­lized, but the pri­mary focus for this client was to increase read­abil­ity and main­tain a higher SEO stan­dard (as opposed to the last itter­a­tion of their site which was all Flask, AS2 and vir­tu­ally unknown to search spi­ders).  I am pleased with the result and Ana­lyt­ics is show­ing some won­der­ful site traffic!