Schinckel.net

I can’t even remember where I found this link: Be Rachael Ray for a Day.

So here is the deal - your Dine & Dish #4 blog post should cover a whole day’s worth of meals eaten outside of your home - breakfast, lunch, dinner and any snacks (if you have enough money), including drinks, for the total sum of $40.

Now, I’ve done the calculations, and US$40 is around about AUD$51, which is really quite a lot! So, here is my first part of my Rachael Ray Day - I’ll combine everything together on August 22nd. $40 a day in Adelaide.

Breakfast.

Hindley Street still has a bad reputation amongst a significant proportion of the South Australian population. Most of it is undeserved, but a quick walk down there at 8:15am will clue you in to why, especially if you remember that it’s much better now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. The section between Bank and Morphett Streets is the pits, and if you take the Railway Station underpass, you’ll emerge in the thick of it. Turning right into Hindley Street, you’ll pass pubs that are open that early in the morning, and strip clubs that closed not too many hours before. If you are lucky, you’ll see a feral or two enter a pub, stinking of beer, and eyes glazed over as they prepare to waste the local taxpayers money on poker machines. But push through, your destination awaits, and it’s worth it. After crossing Morphett Street, you enter the Education precinct, where the University of South Australia built a new City West campus to replace the aging, and closed suburban campuses of Salisbury and Underdale. (The northern and western suburbs are still whinging about the lack of education opportunities. Catch the bus, I say.) Because of the influx of students, several cafés and other shops have opened, and our goal is one of these: Phat Coffee. Josh will be behind the counter, he makes a great coffee, and he’s there all day, from 8:00 until 5:00. During Uni holidays they close at 4pm, but getting there is worth it. Phat Coffee does more than just coffee - they also serve a magnificent Ham Cheese and Tomato Croissant. Eat in or take away, it’s worth the $7.95 for the comfort food of a tasty croissant and a perfect coffee. Breakdown: Croissant: AUD5.25 ($4.12) Flat White: AUD2.70 ($2.12) Total: AUD7.95 ($6.24)

Lunch.

Still to write…Sushi train?

Tea.

Adelaide has a vibrant Touch Football community. It’s a relatively small town, so everyone who plays touch knows just about everyone else. Anyway, after playing a game with the Arab Steed Pornstars, at City Touch Club, we headed into their sponsor, the Arab Steed Hotel. Owned and managed by Shayne White, the Arab Steed Hotel has been trading since [YEAR]. Shayne bought the pub in [YEAR], and has turned it into a successful little business, with a great location near the south parklands, on the Corner of Hutt and Gilbert Streets. Parking out the front can be difficult, especially in the peak mealtimes, between 7 and 8:30. Don’t even think about parking on Gilbert Street, unless you go further west, as parking inspectors like to frequent the area, and unless you have a resident permit, expect the day to quickly become more expensive. There are plenty of parks further up Hutt Street, near and past the Adelaide City Council library, and beyond, as well as futher west. The ‘Steed used to make a great mushroom gravy, and it wasn’t unknown for the whole team to order Chicken Schnitzel with Mushroom Sauce (and Just Chips, in some cases!). Nowadays, the mushroom gravy ain’t that good, but there are several other great meals to try. The Veal Shanks (or Calves’ calves - thanks Alyse!) go well, but my choice is generally the Cajun Chicken Burger. Today, however, on the Specials’ board was Pork Puff Pastry Parcel, so I had “A Pork Puff Pastry Parcel, Please”, and a jug of beer. Since I bought the first round, others paid for the following rounds, and that was all I ended up paying for. Breakdown: Pork Puff Pastry Parcel: AUD10.90 ($8.55) Jug of Coopers Pale Ale: AUD12.00 ($9.41) Total: AUD22.90 ($17.96)

To create an image tag for a Gravatar in JavaScript, for use on Blogsome. Download the md5.jpg file (it’s really a .js file, but we are tricking Blogsome into allowing it to be uploaded), and upload it to your site. Put the following code into your Main Page template (probably in the head section): <script type="text/javascript" src="/images/md5.jpg" /> Put The following code where you want the Gravatar to appear: <script type="text/javascript">document.write('<img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id='); document.write(hex_md5("{comment_author_email}")); document.write('&size=20" />'); </script> You can change the size of your Gravatar image with the size=20 part, set it to whatever value you want. Enjoy! **Edit: **Don’t use this code, as it displays the email address to the browser, and then asks it to generate the MD5 fingerprint. This means that a Spam-collector would actually have access to the raw email address. I’ve diasabled the code until I figure out how to get around this…

I’ll do this later, but to change the favicon (the one that newer browsers show next to the URI), you need to include the following in your Main Page template. <link rel="shortcut icon" href="insert path of file here" /> Probably you should put it near the top. I’d suggest uploading a file called favicon.gif, and then making the code: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/images/favicon.gif" /> That way you can change it by uploading another one with the same name later. Favicons should be 16x16 pixels, or possibly up to 32x32 for display in a _Favourites _menu.

I like the idea of Gravatars, and they are easy to implement in PHP, but I cannot execute straight PHP code, only Smarty Templates (under Blogsome). I’d like to be able to write a Gravatar plugin in Smarty Code, but I don’t know how to MD5 encrypt just in Smarty. I thought the following would work, but it doesn’t seem to: {php}echo md5("email@address.net");{/php} In fact, I can’t seem to get any code to execute using the {php} {/php} tags. {php}echo "Hello, World";{/php}

I get quite a few people emailing or leaving comments asking for help with Templates and so on for WordPress, or issues with Blogsome that I’ve dealt with, but don’t appear in the forums.

Matt, Can you give a newbie some advice about installing the Connections theme? In the top nav menu there are five buttons: Home, About, Archives, Links, and Contacts. I can’t figure out how to make these links work. The Home button works ok, but not the others. My feeling is that I need to edit the links in header.php, but what do I put? Do I need to create pages first? If so, how do I do this? Also, can you tell me how to add a calendar like you have on your site? Thanks for all your help, Caitlin

It won’t matter if you have Pages created or not - and you can do this with Posts, or any URI. If you do have a Page or Pages created, you can then use the URI the Dashboard gives you in one of the later steps. To create a Page, use the ‘Write - Write Page’ menu in the Dashboard. Pages can not currently be created from ecto, or other off-line editing tools. Note that Pages use a different template file from posts, so if you are using Blogsome, you will have to hand code any markup in your Pages, they don’t just add the Page content into the {content} section. You will need to edit your Template to change the links at the top of the Connections Theme. If you are using Blogsome, or any WordPress Multi-User system, the changes will need to be made in the Main Page (index.html) template. Otherwise, under standard WordPress, the changes will indeed need to be in the header.php file. Either way, open the relevant file, and find the section that begins with <ul id="topnav"> There will be a series of list items (probably on seperate lines, although the Stylesheet will place them all on the same line). Each list item contains a URI, and the Link Text. Connections also has a seperator, of the Unix Pipe character: |. Each item you want in your navbar must appear, in the order you want them in your list of list items. Mine looks like the following: <li><a href="{ bloginfo show='url'}" id="navHome" title="Posted Recently" accesskey="h">Home </a>|</li> <li><a href="/about-me/" id="navAbout" title="About the Author" accesskey="a">About </a>|</li> <li>{wp_loginout} |</li> <li> {wp_register} |</li> <li><a class="rss" href="{bloginfo show='rss2_url'}"> RSS</a> |</li> <li><a href="mailto:{bloginfo show='admin_email'}" id="navContact" title="Contact the Author" accesskey="c">Contact </a></li> Notice that mine has a whole heap of curly brackets - that’s because I use Blogsome, and they have Smarty Tags instead of raw PHP code. It’s taken me a while to get used to them, but they are kind of cool. If you are using standard WordPress, you’ll need to replace them with the proper PHP code - go to the WordPress Codex for examples of how they work. Basically, the curly braces need to be replaced by <?php and ?>; and the arguments are not named, are in parenthesis, and commands are followed by a semi-colon. For example, the first entry, Home should be: <li><a href="><?php bloginfo('url'); ?>" id="navHome" title="Posted Recently" accesskey="h">Home </a>|</li> Finally, the calendar is really easy to implement. PHP Code: <?php get_calendar(); ?> Smarty Code: {get_calendar} You can also alter your Stylesheet to modify the display styles of the calendar - look at the Source Code for your page to see what the classes are called. I also received the following question via email from Peter Valentino:

I just dunno who or where to turn to.. The blogsome forum doesnt help at all. I usually have long blog entry and want to cut it to the first small paragraphs view in the index page, and use that excerpt/more feature to read the rest. The trouble is i dunno how to do it. I have filled the excerpt box for every post and checked the view the excerpt option on the dashboard cpanel, but it still doesnt work. I’m thinking that prolly I delete the html tag for the feature in index.php, and if it’s true, I dunno where to find the original tag. This is also my problem: where can I go to easily get the original coding for each default templates provided by blogsome? Thanks for your help, Peter

This one’s easy - when posting using the Dashboard, locate the cursor where you want the break to be, and press the little more button from the Quicktags. Or, type in `

`. If you are using ecto, typing into the first box will create text before the more seperator, the second box will be after. The trick here is that it’s not an excerpt or summary, but more of a teaser. I recall that it’s also possible to change the text that is displayed, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader (hint: this may not work in Blogsome, IIRC). I’m more than happy to help with other issues, but be aware that I’ll post responses to my site, in preference to email, as this might help someone else out in the future.

I’ve noticed a couple of blogs that hilight the comments made by particular users, mainly the blog owner, but in one case there were two writers, male and female that had blue and pink comment boxes respectively, and everyone else had another colour. I might implement this for another blog I’m working on, to do with a Touch team I’m Assistant Coach of. (South Australia Mens Open). I’ll also probably implement it here, at least for testing purposes.

After my whinge about the 0.9a2 (or whatever the ‘stable’ version was numbered), I downloaded the nightly development build, and it seems more stable. It also has a Pause/Resume butoon in the Downloads window. Doesn’t seem to like Resuming much though…

I’m surprised I’ve never come across this before. There is a town in Germany, about 200km from Hanover, called Schinkel. (Note the missing ‘c’) It’s just out of Osnabrück (less than 4km), and quite near the Hotel Westerkamp, and there seems to be a significant cemetary right nearby. Oh, hang on a bit, there’s also a Schinkel in Schleswig-Holstein, about 50km North-West of Hamburg. And another one, just a short hop across the river, in Land Niedersachsen. Finally, there’s also Schinkel-über-Kiel, right up on the northern edge of Germany. Just over Kiel, incidentally. As an aside, I found the following:

What does the Schinkel name mean? German (mainly North German) and Dutch: variant of Schenkel What does the Schenkel name mean? Last Name: Schenkel German, Dutch, and Jewish (Ashkenazic): nickname for someone with long or otherwise notable legs, from Middle High German schenkel, Middle Dutch schenkel, schinkel ’thigh’, ’lower leg’, German Schenkel ’thigh’.

The irony is I have short legs…

I found an old entry on Peter B’s site about making text entry areas resizable, and thought I might implement it on my site. It’s not working yet, but this is more of a reminder for me to do it…

It’s nearly time for me to reconsider my DNS Registration - I went with a $9.95 Dreamhost annual price, under the belief it was $9.95/year for life, but this was only for one year. I don’t use any of the hosting features, just DNS registration, address forwarding and mail forwarding. I’m looking for a cheap registrar who offers these things. Anyone know of any DNS Registrars that are cheap and good?