Joe and Jamie's Blog

I finally sat down and figured out how to make Joe and Jamie’s Blog look better for mobile readers. Well it turns out there are simple plugins out there that take all of two seconds to install and voila, mobile-fied.

So why did I put it towards the bottom of the list for a rainy day? Not sure, guess I thought it would take hours of work.

I decided to to add mobile capabilities because sadly I am on my BlackBerry as much as my computer, if not more. So now you all have even less of an excuse to read this blog, you can do so anywhere you get a signal.

Just go to the blog on your cell phone as you would normally, but this time it will detect you’re on a mobile browser and arrange the blog into a readable format that’s easy on the eyes and easy to navigate. Nothing fancy needs to be done. Try it out, maybe you’ll find it more convenient and stop by more often.

If you have a WordPress blog and are interested in this plugin, you can check it out here. I chose to use WordPress Mobile Edition. You can’t customize the theme too much and there isn’t many options, but it works really well with pictures and links. Another one is WordPress Mobile Pack, which you can customize the crap out of it (colors, sidebars, etc), but it didn’t display links correctly so I scrapped that one.

Well I just hit my 100th spam comment today. It’s rather sad that a very new blog such as mine would already have more spam comments than real ones. I’m glad the Akismet plugin works very well and is part of Wordpress otherwise we would all be pulling our hair out more than we do already.

I have nothing more to say, just noticed it said 100, minor milestone for the blog. Lets see how long it takes to get to 200.

Hats off to Nigeria, Russia, and all the rest of the spam nations, keep up the good work.

I came across the NextGEN Workpress Plugin tonight. I was looking for something to do a nice gallery or slide show for pictures on the blog. The plugin can be found here. So far I am having an issue getting the thumbnail pagination to work, but if I leave it showing all the images in the post you can click on it and the pagination works for the full image size. It’s pretty cool. To see what it can do/looks like, go to the link above and click on FAQ.

These are some of the features:

• Sortable Albums : Create your own sets of images
• Upload a Zip-File with pictures : Upload pictures in a zip-file (Not in Safe-mode)
• Watermark function : You can add a watermark image or text
• JavaScript Effect : Use any available popular image effect : Thickbox, Lightbox or Highslide
• Multiple CSS Stylesheet : Use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file
• Slideshow : Full integrated flash slideshow
• TinyMCE : Button integration for easy adding the gallery tags
• Sidebar Widget : Show a slideshow, random or recent picture at your sidebar
• Language support : Translated in more than 15 languages
• Upload tab integration : You have access to all pictures via the upload tab
• Tag support for images : Append related images to your post
• Meta data support : Import EXIF, IPTC or XMP meta data
• Sort images feature

Over the past two days I have been tweaking the look of the blog. I have modified the template to show 4 posts on the main page, rather than the default 1 post and small boxes to display the older posts. I also removed the older post boxes, to me they were just ugly. I also encapsulated the posts in borders, I think it looks better than just post after post with nothing but a title header to separate them. I found a cool plugin to place related posts in each posts, hopefully driving some more page views and reading.

These are the obvious things that anyone that has been checking the site regularly (the whole 2 of you) would notice. The little things were playing around with the placement of advertisements to make sure they all looked the same on each page and weren’t put into boxes. I also moved around the widgets on the sidebar to allow me to show more recent comments and recent posts, especially since I removed the older post boxes from the blog.

Hope everyone likes it!