The Soulpass Project

If you’ve ever talked to me about webhosting, you already know that:

1. I host through Dreamhost, and that
2. I think that Dreamhost is better than any other hosting company I’ve come across.

This post was inspired by a recent addition to the plethora of features already available through every low-cost hosting package they offer. They’ve added tools that allow streaming of video and audio, as well as slideshows through Adobe Flash Player. I’m going to compile the few songs I’ve posted on here and the old site, add the option of flash-based streaming, and add a page just for music. At some point I’ll post the source of the old method for streaming. No, I don’t work for Dreamhost, but I’ll be making more posts about how much they rock.

I figured that, rather than thanking everyone for commenting on each technical post, I would just make a post about it. I do appreciate people letting me know when the posts are useful, it makes it worth posting them. It’s especially neat to get the simple “thank you” comments. Chances are, I guess, that most people don’t comment, even if the post is useful. That’s fine, but it’s nice to know that they are being used, once in a while. And, as always, if there is trouble with any of them, I’ll make an effort to help as time allows.

With the release of WordPress 2.0, I’ll be totally revamping this site from the ground up! It’s going to be a while, because there will be a lot of work to do. Eventually I would like for everything here to be moved to the new site. I’ll probably have to write a script that will forward all of the old links. I’m really glad to be doing this, because this site has gotten very sloppy behind-the-scenes. Stay tuned!

I finally got around to adding some EXIF functionality to the photo gallery. It turned out that I could not do my own custom solution because some functions were not available to me. However, I found a neat PHP application called The PHP JPEG Metadata Toolkit that helped do the trick. When you are looking through the gallery, if you go to a specific photo you will notice a new link that says “EXIF Data.” The link will open in a new window, and it shows you all of the EXIF data contained within the image. This way you can see what camera settings I used to take the pictures, as well as some other info.

Hey hey!! Check this out! I’m mentioned in the mod_rewrite section of the MicroWiki documentation! This is really neat. I’ve always loved the concept of open source and contributing to code, and this is my first time being able to do so and being credited! yay!!

UPDATE: It seems to be working now… My first instinct is that it has to do with the whole PHP-CGI vs. Apache Module mode issue… The more I think about that, the more it REALLY bothers me. Why can’t things that are written for PHP work in PHP regardless?!? *sigh*

I did make a change the WordPress code outlined here, so maybe that had something to do with it. Crap, I should have used the standard protocol to find the root of the problem as I was fixing it!! sheesh..

Trackbacks don’t seem to be working in my WordPress install at all, so this post is a test of it. There a testing area set up for people to make sure they can use the trackback feature of their CMS software. Pretty neat idea!

Hah, I just added an annoying popup that only affects users of Internet Explorer 6. It links to http://www.browsehappy.com/, which recommends other browsers as alternatives to IE. hah, this is funny, I imagine a lot of people won’t like it though… Here’s a screen shot:

Also, I have put PHP back into Apache Module mode in order to get Exhibit working again… The WordPress SpellingChecker plugin doesn’t work in Module mode, but I’m sacrificing it because I’ve found SpellBound, a Firefox spell check plugin (thanks to PhotoMatt). Cheers.

Well, here goes another photo gallery update… This time, it should be the late go at it. I’ve implemented Simple PHP Gallery into Soulpass. There are instructions on how to integrate it into WordPress, and I followed them, downloading their hack at it. I made some major improvements to the integration code, and I’ll be posting info on how to get it done soon. With the way that they explained it, and the code that they had, the gallery didn’t seem to be integrating very tightly into WordPress. Now, with the code that I’ve modified, it is entirely integrated. When I change a theme in WordPress, gallery will use the new theme. Pretty soon I plan to enable it to extract EXIF data from images, and display it all pretty-like under the full size photos. You can see my installation by clicking on “Photos” in the menubar. I will still use Exhibit, but not as a “gallery” per se. It is more suited for the blogging interface anyway. If you would like to rush me into posted the code, feel free to contact me.

I ran into another IE problem creating the Soulpass design. It seems to be a variation of “The IE Doubled Float-Margin Bug“. The problem lied in the footer DIV. For some reason the top margin of the footer was always exactly twice what it is supposed to be. Both the top and bottom margins of the footer are supposed to be 20 pixels, but in Internet Explorer the top margin was doubling to 40 pixels. Grrrr, frustration. I searched the net for answers, and came up with the above-mentioned article. It seemed to be very close to the problem that I was having, but not exactly. The margin effect in the Soulpass template footer is creating by adding 20 pixels of padding to the top and bottom of the P tag, forcing the #footer DIV to be taller. The solution in the article mentions adding {display: inline;} on the float, but my #footer DIV is not floated. The solution that worked for me was adding an absolute width to the #footer DIV. Since the page is set to be 760 pixels and I wanted the footer to match, I gave the #footer DIV a width of 760 pixels and *voila* … IE began to cooperate. Yay!! I hope this helps someone else as well!

Another example of IE making up its own rules has come to my immediate attention. I had gotten an IM the other day saying that the link to this site in my profile was causing a file download dialog. I couldn’t reproduce the problem at home, but here at work I did. It has to do with IE’s handling of a document’s “Content-type”. That was my first suspicion when I saw the problem, and I found a good article that goes into detail about it. As a temporary fix, I added some PHP code in the header of my WordPress theme that explicitly defines the content type as “text/html”. Note that the header function call will have to come before anything is output to the browser, even so much as a space or a line break (else you’ll get an error or warning or something). Here ya go, maybe it will help someone else:

<? header('Content-type: text/html'); ?>