Day: October 2, 2008

Dressing Like a Girl

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G is so close to dressing herself! This would complete the trifecta of autonomy from babyhood to toddlerism:   eating, pooping, and dressing!   She certainly can undress herself, as I regularly find a happy naked baby running around the house at the mere mention of a bubble bath, or a happy pantless baby running around the house after the sweet relief of a good trip to the potty. Taking off socks is old news, putting them almost-on is quite novel. They usually end up on her hands where she plays with them because it more fun than being frustrated at not being able to pull socks over all 5 toes. Yesterday at the park, she decided to wear them on her hands all the way back the car. It was kinda cute, and kinda icky, cause she wanted to hold my hand while we were walking in the dark. So I had to touch her nasty-feet socks and get her nasty-feet sweat all over my hands.   Then she got bored and stuffed the socks in my pocket. Nothing a bath couldn’t cure — see above for the rapidly undressing baby.

The other day I was lollygagging in bed, and at one point she had on jammies. Then at one point she was naked. Then at one point she had on a new fall dress. This all occurred while I was somewhat dreamy at finally getting some sleep without getting kicked, but I am fairly certain that it actually occurred. In fact, I’m sure, as I had to take the dress off her so she could get in the bath…she tried to strip, but got caught up in the long sleeves.

Like all things with G, dressing is evolving into a hobby of its own.   And like all her hobbies, its another distraction to delay things that I actually need to get done. Yesterday, trying to get her dressed for school, she managed to avoid me putting on her shirt by attempting to put it on her toy pony for at least 10 minutes. She knew I saw through her bullshit too, cause when i finally got tired of cajoling her she scampered to the far side of bed and hid under her stuffed animals.

Every step forward is met by many steps sideways.

More Blog Work

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When I was editing the post for our CO Trip, I saw the size of my backup file grow by over 50 MB! This was f’d up, since I posted about 30 pictures but they were all streamlined for the web. Some digging revealed that a plugin I was using to resize images for presentation to 480×640 was actually making a new copy of the image every time the post was saved. Moreover, the new imaging features in WordPress 2.5 made this plugin redundant. I found that they plugin directory was housing almost 200MB in jpgs – half the size of my entire website! Deactivating the plugin and not using it moving forward was easy, but before I could delete its directory I had to cycle back through my entire blog and remove all the code that called it. This meant removing\readding hundreds of images over about 400 posts. I’m currently upto December ’07, and cause I got bored, started working backwards to July ’08. The pluses out of all this are that I’m also moving all video off my site and upto Vimeo, fixing some creeping DB errors, shrinking the size of the whole site way way way down, making pageloads faster, and getting to re-read all my old shit.

Hollow comfort for the hours this is taking me. The task reminds me of a few years ago when I made the massive effort to accurately tag and rip our entire MP3 collection from the mishmash of files we had accumulated over the years.

In the course of updating all this, I found that the imagescalar plugin was also affecting some of my smilies, which meant I had to redo several dozen for one post or lose them when i slayed the plugin’s directory. The smiley panel I added to the WYSIWYG editor had this annoying habit of closing after each click, in addition to being too small and forcing me to scroll all over to see all my smilies.   Sooooo…I revisted that code as well. WordPress 2.5 bundled TinyMCE, where previously I was using a crappy hacky plugin to get the smilies into my editor. When I updated to 2.5, I skipped the plugin and installed the code directly from the TinyMCE website.   Of course I did not write down what I did, and TinyMCE has since evolved. It seems I used only 1 file to do the core of the work — emotions.htm, and added some javascript methods from some utility files directly into it to initialize and launch the plugin. Every version of TinyMCE does this a little differently, but the code works in a variety of configurations. I got the button to appear in my editor by tweaking tiny_mce_config.php. Yesterday I figured out how to dictate the size of the popup-window by adding my own resize method to tiny_mce_popup.js.   It probably should have been local to emtions.htm, but whatever it worked. Finally I commented out the automatic window closing which lets me add multiple images with many fewer clicks.

All this made possible by my servers at work locking up and our systems group taking a long time to get em working.

I’ve thought a lot about the benefits of a product like WordPress which is open-source, and all the fiddling I need to do to get things working, and constantly reworking it as the codebase evolves.   However, I don’t think it’d be much better to go with a “commercial” product that has periodic releases – its the Web, you will still be customizing whatever you have.   The issue really is the webmaster, not the codebase.