Begin, and Then Continue
My friend’s wall sports this placard; a Zen saying which keeps her centered and focused. Perhaps I need one too.
Checking out themes at alexking.org. 
I am once again overwhelmed by how much people know about this stuff and how much I don’t know. My 880-page PHP and MySQL Web Development book by Luke Welling and Laura Thompson is largely unread, but I continue to hack away at it. Studying about how to use WordPress as a website CMS, so hopefully I can build John’s website with the built-in tools in this thing.
Alex King has a myriad of tools, hacks, etc. There’s been a Themes competition going on, and I’m bowled over by how many people have a handle on all this stuff. All I do in this blog is say how stupid I am and how even teenagers know how to put excellent websites together and so on. Nobody wants to come to a blog where the author keeps deriding himself.
Anyway, wp_grins was not too difficult to install, following the readme.txt, but I couldn’t find the wp-comments.php file he refers to, only wp-commentsrss2.php and wp-comments-post.php. Neither of these had a
textarea tag in them. Okay I just figured out a few things where Alex King wrote incorrect instructions. 
One, he says in his readme.txt to look for the textarea with “id” = [content, or comment, - each case] what he meant was “name” = [content, or comment, - each case]. Two, he says to open up “wp-comments.php” and “wp-comments-popup.php”, but these are actually files in the wp-content/themes/default directory, and they don’t start with “wp-” . So I found everything and installed it and these clickable smilies are now added to my blog. Please make a comment and use them. I’d like to know if you have any trouble.
You know… I mean YOU. 
The person who doesn’t MIND reading about how much of a loser this blogger is.
March 23rd, 2005 at 1:46 pm
And there they are. The little clickable smilies.
Now, all they need is a little pop-up description that tells you what they signify as you mouse over them.
. Maybe I didn’t do it right. Could be that feature is lurking in here somewhere. 
March 23rd, 2005 at 4:58 pm
So, when I got to the public library and pulled up this site, first of all, the public library computer required the “www” prefix to get there. Second, I clicked comment, and it told me I had to register or log in. I registered. I went and retrieved my hotmail e-mail with the password, and when i used it and got in, it brought me to the dashboard.
So I clicked on the heading of the post I wanted to comment on, but it told me i was not allowed to edit this post. So I ‘view site’, and click on comment at the bottom there. here I am now. I can click the smilies…
and they work just fine.
It’s just such a shame about the whole process one must go through to comment. But then I guess it keeps out Spam.
So now I want to go see about the view of loosearrow3d from a typical public computer sort of arrangement. I’ll save this and come back to see if editing it again is possible.
March 23rd, 2005 at 6:37 pm