The Irish Thug

A few weeks ago I talked about how I was reworking the code runs My Music Choices. Now I am ready to show what I’ve been working on to the world. The layout has been slightly altered so that the list can be reordered with just one click without using the sidebar I had before. However, that is the small change that wasn’t the main focus of what I added.

The big part of this upgrade is that it now uses the Audio Player to let users to listen to samples of each song I have mentioned. The samples can be listened to in each post directly, or using the music list to open a new small window that will play the selected sample. It will take some time to get through the backlog of the old posts, but you will see the samples popping up as time passes.

At some point I will make the Music Listing plug-in available for other WordPress users to download and use themselves. But for now, I will be keeping it to myself in case I find a few bugs or want to tweak some aspects of the code.

I’ve been really busy coding this week. Almost all of it is back-end things that you will not notice, but it will make me feel better. What I’m doing is re-writing the code that I’ve been using to list My Music Choices and my Lists so that they are written the way WordPress Plug-ins should be written.

This also became much easier when I learned how to use Xampp to run a local server for WordPress. This lets me test out all my code before I try and make it public for you to see. It’s better because it prevents me from bringing down my whole website because I had a bug in my code.

And since I’m never one to only have one project running at one time, I started kicking around some ideas of what I want to do with the website for my lacrosse team. I’m really excited about diving into this one because it will be my first website that has a real purpose and not just me adding things because I think the are neat. I also will get to design all these things that will make the webpage very dynamic and require very little input from which ever person on the team is in charge of updating the news items and such.

The bad news is I’ve been back from San Diego for two weeks.
The good news is that we ran house while we were there.
San Diego State – 14-6
UC San Diego – 14-6
U of San Diego – 10-9
Arizona – 10-4
Thanks to this trip we moved up from #15 to #9 in the Polls. Also, our goalie was named player of the week. (link)
To check us out as the rest of the season goes go here.

California was amazing. I have know idea why I used to always say, “I don’t know if I could live with never seeing snow again” for all these years. If you are ever in San Diego, go to Mission Beach and find a place called Taco Surf. You will thank me later.

Another thing you might have noticed is I am not hiding my blog anymore. It’s now right up front on the main domain. It’s the way it was meant to be. It also allowed me to spurs up some of the other pages I had before I started the blog. There is some small back-end things that need to be ironed out, but you guys don’t care about that.

The first stage of transferring my website to the new blog layout has been completed. I have moved the lists and set it up so that the list can be sorted like the music page. Go check it out. Re-read all the great lists that have since been forgotten and talked about as legends.

I have decided what I’ll be moving next. There are so many options and they are all equally important.

As stated earlier, I was working on a page that would display the songs I list on all my posts in one convenient place. Today I finished up all the bugs. The songs can be listed by artist name, song name, and what date they were posted on. The more interesting point, for me at least, was that I implemented a paging function that allows the user to move between sections of the list and not force the user to look at one very long list of songs. The list is also cached on the server. This lets the page will load much faster because the database does not need to be accessed every time some one refreshes the page or moves to another spot in the list.

To take a look at my musical tastes, head over to My Music Choices.

The addition of this page also lets you see a feature I added earlier, but did not have enough pages to implement it. The top menu bar ( Home About …) has a built in drop down menu. If you hover over About, you will see a link to my music page. As I add more to the new layout this will be utilized more.

Welcome one and all to the true and rightful home of The Saint.

For too long my blog was hosted on Live Journal. But I finally took the time and effort to do it right.

I learned a lot of things about programing and how a dynamic webpage should really be structured by working with and tweaking the WordPress framework. Things are only going to get better from here as I will be adding some more features and eventually converting my entire webpage over to the new format.

All of my old posts from Live Journal and all of your old comments have been backlogged here. Anyone who left a comment on previously already has an account to post comments on the new blog. Contact me by email or AIM to find out your login and password.

I hope you all enjoy the new look.

Congratulations, Will, on being the 1000th person to cause a tick on my sites counter. Your prize is 25 Biggest Fan Points and your name goes up on the wall. Additionaly congrats go out to you for being the 2nd person to actually claim the points you get for being a specific visitor on my website. With this one act you sky rocketed yourself passed two other people and placed yourself in 4th … ahh, I promised myself I wouldn’t cry. Well done.

Free time at work means new lists for the masses. And always, a new song that I think is good.

I know, I know, it’s been a while. I’m sorry, but finals will be finals. I was also spending a lot of time on the Tournament Poker Rating System. (TPRS will soon be covered in a section on my website.) But know that I’ve started work and have nothing to do after 7PM, I finally got around to updating. I plan on doing a lot more work here and updating more than i did in December.

What are 5 hour road trips good for? Making Lists that’s what. Two new Lists and a new Featured song on my website.

PS Lilly shut up, I’m not getting pulled in.