[crickets chirping in the distance...]

It's been a little quiet around here, so I thought I'd at least tell you what I've been up to. I only have so many hours in the day to devote to internet pursuits, and this blog has been neglected on account of a few other things I've been working on. So, in no particular order, here's what's been keeping me busy:

bbpress

This blog is powered by Wordpress, and I LOVE IT. With the never ending list of plugins that are available, I can make it do just about anything I need it to, and nothing that I don't. Wordpress has a sister program called bbPress, which is to forums as Wordpress is to blogs.

I found it when I was looking for an alternative to phpbb for my class reunion website. We had been using phpbb, but we were getting more than a dozen SPAM registrations a day. That's when I found bbpress. It is still in "beta" mode (ver. 0.8.1), but it is functional enough to use, and anyone with a little bit of PHP know-how can get under the hood to modify it so it works pretty stinkin' well.

I installed bbpress on the reunion site, imported the users and posts from the phpbb forum, and I've spent quite a few hours getting it *exactly* how I want (still not really there yet, but that's always going to be the case!). There were some things that I wanted it to do that it didn't, and because it is still relatively new there aren't a whole lot of plugins out there for it. So, I wrote a few for myself.

The first one I wrote is bb-Ads. It lets you put ads and/or messages in specific places on your site and randomly rotates them each time a person visits the page. All I did was take an old PHP script that I had that would pull random image files and modded it out so it would pull PHP files with the ad text/code built into the them. You can see the plugin page for bb-Ads here: http://blog.wittmania.com/bb-ads

My second attempt at a plugin was another mod-and-hack job. I took a Wordpress plugin that automatically turns scripture references into links to Biblegateway.com and ported it into bbpress. It wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. I had to change some variable names around, and delete a bunch of code that wasn't necessary in bbpress, and that was about it. You can see its plugin page here: http://blog.wittmania.com/bb-scripture-links

The third plugin I made was my first attempt at a from-the-ground-up build. By default, bbpress doesn't keep track of how many times a topic has been viewed. This was something that a number of people on the bbpress forums had requested, so I set out to see if I could cobble something together. This was a fun project for me because I was sort of aware of how to make PHP and MySQL work together, but I hadn't ever really had to use it to do anything. After this project, I have a pretty good (albeit basic) understanding now of how to add records to a database, edit existing records, and pull information from the database and use it as necessary.

I have launched an initial version of this plugin, but I'm working on a follow up version that is much more streamlined in the way it works and also adds some additional functionality. You can see the plugin page here: http://blog.wittmania.com/bb-topic-views

ImpeachReidandPelosi.com

If you've been reading this blog for any period of time, you know that I have a bit of a passion for all things political, and I have a bit of a leaning toward the conservative side. When Harry Reid declared that we had lost the war in Iraq, I went out to godaddy.com to see if "impeachharryreid.com" was available. It was, but I decided against registering it because I didn't think I'd ever do anything with it.

Then, last Wednesday I got an e-mail from one of the elders at our church (JD). Apparently, he was so disgusted with what Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have been up to, he had already registered ImpeachReidandPelosi.com and wanted to know if I'd be willing to help him set up a website to "take the fight to them." I immediately agreed and set about my task. Since then, we've launched the site and had quite a few posts already. It is supported by the Wordpress blogging engine, and also incorporates an integrated bbpress forum. We have five different authors now (including me and JD), and we're starting to see some pretty decent traffic.

Speaking of traffic, this morning I found out that Nancy Pelosi has a blog. She had published a post basically blaming W. for the tornado in Kansas that had killed at least 10 people over the weekend. I couldn't resist, so I authored a post in response to her post, complete with a picture of Nancy Pelosi as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. So what? Well, I'm getting to that…

I checked our traffic stats this afternoon and saw a visit worth noting. When I saw Pelosi's blog, I was almost certain that it was powered by Wordpress (though she doesn't state that anywhere… shame on her!), and one of the things the Wordpress Admin Dashboard does is keep track of incoming links. At 2:21pm today, somebody on Nancy's blog logged into the admin area and saw that we had linked to their blog. They came over and visited our site, including my post and its related topic in the forum. While I highly doubt it was Pelosi herself, it still is kind of fun to know that *someone* from her staff is now aware of our site.

I don't know where this site is going to go, but it has been a lot of fun to put it together and to get it working how I want it to. I've also realized just how much I've learned about Wordpress and bbPress as I've tried to teach the other authors how to compose a post, including blockquotes, pull quotes, and "floating" images.

I'm not really sure how soon I'll get bored with that (and developing bbpress plugins), but as soon as I do I'm sure I'll come back to blogging more frequently.

If you're really angry at me for not posting more often, I suggest that you start your own blog to keep you busy. Send me a link and I'll probably stop by.