Fungible Convictions

While the overall look will stay the same, it’s been about two years since I examined WordPress’ plugin repository and, now, its widgets. The main big goal at this point—consisting of some high-level fc_loop work—is to get two to four recent posts to follow in two columns below the photos (themselves below the main post).

I’ll list the improvements later but wanted to give a quick hat tip to Alax.info for helping me tweak the Google Talk widget. For anyone interested, you can now IM me any time I’m online using the “Chat with Andrew Whitacre” link in the sidebar.

A solid percentage of Fungible Convictions readers are bloggers too, and a solid percentage of you designed your own site. If so, USE THIS EXTENSION.

Roger Johansson’s indespensible blog 456 Berea Street has drawn attention to a stunningly well-thought-out Firefox extension called Firebug. For advanced and beginning developers alike, Firebug is the Web Developer extension on steroids, crack, and Cezanne.

Just look at these features!

• Just the way you like it: Firebug is always just a keystroke away, but it never gets in your way. You can open Firebug in a separate window, or as a bar at the bottom of your browser. Firebug also gives you fine-grained control over which websites you want to enable it for.
• Inspect and edit HTML: Firebug makes it simple to find HTML elements buried deep in the page. Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, Firebug gives you a wealth of information, and lets you edit the HTML live.
• Tweak CSS to perfection: Firebug’s CSS tabs tell you everything you need to know about the styles in your web pages, and if you don’t like what it’s telling you, you can make changes and see them take effect instantly.
• Visualize CSS metrics: When your CSS boxes aren’t lining up correctly it can be difficult to understand why. Let Firebug be your eyes and it will measure and illustrate all the offsets, margins, borders, padding, and sizes for you.
• Monitor network activity: Your pages are taking a long time to load, but why? Did you go crazy and write too much JavaScript? Did you forget to compress your images? Are your ad partner’s servers taking a siesta? Firebug breaks it all down for you file-by-file.
• Debug and profile JavaScript: Firebug includes a powerful JavaScript debugger that lets you pause execution at any time and have look at the state of the world. If your code is a little sluggish, use the JavaScript profiler to measure performance and find bottlenecks fast.
• Quickly find errors: When things go wrong, Firebug lets you know immediately and gives you detailed and useful information about errors in JavaScript, CSS, and XML.
• Explore the DOM: The Document Object Model is a great big hierarchy of objects and functions just waiting to be tickled by JavaScript. Firebug helps you find DOM objects quickly and then edit them on the fly.
• Execute JavaScript on the fly: The command line is one of the oldest tools in the programming toolbox. Firebug gives you a good ol’ fashioned command line for JavaScript complete with very modern amenities.
• Logging for JavaScript: Having a fancy JavaScript debugger is great, but sometimes the fastest way to find bugs is just to dump as much information to the console as you can. Firebug gives you a set of powerful logging functions that help you get answers fast.

My favorite feature so far was one I’ve been pining for for years: you can use Firebug to select an element on your page and it will a) tell you all the CSS that affects that element and b) of that, cross out the CSS that is overridden by other styles.

It’s brilliant.

Thanks first to all you Fungible Convictions readers. The stats show you’re very loyal, with about a quarter of all visitors returning regularly.

The last couple months saw some significant improvements to the technological guts of Fungible Convictions, none of which I can take credit for. If you are a lit blogger and/or WordPress user, I’m pleased to recommend the following goodies that are each recent additions.

WordPress plugins:

• Jerome’s Keywords: Generates a list of keywords for each post, for the page heads, and, thus, for search engines. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing, unlike WordPress’s category functions, which take a lot of management.
• Jerome’s Keywords: Related Posts: Any time two or more posts share a keyword, those posts are linked on one another’s single-post page. So that when I write about an overweight mobster, it’s linked to a post on Dunkin Donuts (because they’re both tagged with Boston).
• AJAX Comments: A stylish way to add comments without reloading the page

Income and networking:

• Metaxu Cafe Litblog Network: Fungible Convictions is now a member. Many thanks for their profiling Fungible Convictions when FC became their 400th member blog—and for pointing me and others towards so many excellent writers.
• Amazon.com Associates Program: Foolproof, money-making linking to books that interest Fungible Convictions readers. They also provide a spiffy linking feature that generates an information window alongside a link upon a user’s mousing over it. For example: WordPress 2 (Visual QuickStart Guide)
• Brainiads: A recently launched Metaxu Cafe ad service featuring better ad targeting.

This site is the best thing that’s happened to my reading and writing life. I’ve received countless recommendations for great books, learned a lot of PHP coding, gotten the chance to interview editors and writers I admire, and discovered hours and hours of great blog-reading via links in your comments and e-mails. For all of that, my sincere thanks.