langgam.org

A new, clean theme. Thanks to WordPress Themes Base.

I’ve been busy for the past few weeks. It’s really hard catching up with tons of stuff at work. Lots to learn, so much to do. But I’m still hanging on. Hopefully this very awkward and stressful part of the adjustment phase would end soon. I still have two months to go before my evaluation so wish me luck.

The whole Kris Allen over Danny Gokey thing being the new American Idol also contributes to the heavy feeling I’m having.

On other news, I’ve started drinking again since my very traumatic experience a few months ago. I’m very surprised to find out that my face starts to get hot after just one bottle of beer. I had tasted the ice cold San Mig Light below zero last week with my room mates. That was the best beer I had since I don’t know when. I know there are several restaurants serving these beers around Metro Manila but I had mine in Grilla in Kalayaan.

I am guessing this week at work would be as hell as the past weeks. I’ll try watching Star Trek and Angels & Demons, that is, if they’re still showing so I can have something to look forward to.

Things are really not as bad as they seem. How’s that for positivity.

An easy-to-install contact form plugin by Takayuki Miyoshi. You can download the zip file here.

You can also see the form in action here.

I was used to associating moods with my posts. After a long, long search, I found a good mood plugin for WordPress.

After trying out three or four plugins of the same kind, I installed Cricket Moods.

1. Download the plugin here.
2. Place cricket-moods.php into /wp-content/plugins.
3. Activate the Cricket Moods plugin from the Plugin Management panel of WordPress.

Some friendly tips:

• The mood settings in the Cricket Moods page under Settings are for the default moods for new users. It is better to add your own moods in Manage Moods panel page in http://<domain.com>/wp-admin/tools.php?page=cm-manage-moods.
• In my case, I did some changes in my cricket-moods.php file for the mood panel display in Add New Post page. In the foreach loop in cm_list_select_moods(), I added style="overflow:scroll; height: 200px" for a scrollable mood panel display for the 132 moods I added. It’s better that way.

If you’re an old Livejournal user, you can use this for your WordPress blog.

These are the most recent plugins I installed in my WordPress blog:

• WP-PostViews – enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. I just found out that the view counter is not updating in Google Chrome browsers.
• Disqus – comment system that allows threaded comments. I’m currently using it.
• Plurk for WordPress – a widget that posts plurk updates in your WordPress blog. You can check the topmost widget in the sidebar.
• Better Blogroll – a widget that posts a certain number of links in your blogroll randomly. It’s also in my sidebar
• Add To Any Subscribe – for easy reader subscription.
• All In One SEO Plugin – for search engine optimization

Happy plugin installing!

I had a hard time exporting my Livejournal entries into this blog. I can’t find an export link anywhere in Livejournal which was supposed to be here.

Then I came across ljArchive. It cannot only export my entries, but my comments as well.

To export my LJ entries, all I had to do was:

1. Download ljArchive here and install.
2. Run ljArchive.
3. Click File -> New Archive and click Next.
4. Login using my LJ username and password, click Next and click Finish.
5. After the application has synced all my LJ entries and comments, click File -> Export -> XML writer.
6. Specify values for filename, Split Export (default is Single File), Export Settings (for protected entries) and click OK.
7. XML file is generated!

All LJ entries and comments are imported through WordPress’ import tool (under Tools). Yay for ljArchive!

The Feed Reading Blogroll by Jan Weinschenker improves your blogroll by displaying the freshness and the latest post-title of your bookmarks.

What you need:

• Get a Google API Key for free here.
• Download the latest version of the plugin here.

To install:

1. Upload the archive and the files to the plugin-directory of your blog. This should be /wp-content/plugins/feed-reading-blogroll/. After that, all files should be located at that directory.
2. Go to the plugins-section of your dashboard, look for the entry called Feed Reading Blogroll and press activate.
3. Set WordPress content-directory /wp-content/ to chmod 777, e.g. by using your ftp-client.
4. Go to the plugin’s option-page. This will let the plugin create the JavaScript-file.
5. Go back to your ftp-client and go to /wp-content/. You should find a file called feedreading_blogroll.js in it.
6. Set the directory /wp-content/ back to chmod 755, while letting the rights of feedreading_blogroll.js remain chmod 777.
7. Finally, save your own Google API Key at the plugin’s option-panel.