You may have noticed that the shaman has not been all that prolific since the end of Turkey Season. It’s true. I have not been posting all that much. However, I’ve been doing a lot with the weblog.  Some of it has to do with adding functionality.  A good deal of it has been cleaning up the goo that has been accumulating for the past 17 years.

Added Functionality:

WordPress has gone through several rather large updates in the past year. In some cases, these were beneficial to this weblog.  Some of them really threw a monkey wrench into things.  A lot of the features that I had been using for years stopped working. I had to find new ways to make things happen.

The big new feature has been the Featured Image feature.  It is actually a function that WordPress has had for a few years now, but it took quite some time for all the plugins and themes to catch up.  It allows you to associate a single image with a given blog post.  I started adding featured images to my posts last year about this time.  I have been spending the summer going back and adding featured images to 16 years of back posts.  As of this writing, I’ve managed to tackle July, August, September, and October.  I will continue to work on it. 

Once I got past 1,000 posts last summer, I realized that folks really did not have a good way to go back and search the archives.  Yes, there is a Search Bar up at the top. Yes, there have always been ways to select a given Category or a given month of any year.  However, I hunted around for a facility that would highlight what I’d written on a given date.  You’ll see that feature on the top of the lefthand sidebar.  In the latest release, I found that I could add featured images to it.    

I have had YARP running for some time. YARP stands for “Yet Another Related Post.”  Yarp uses AI to pick the stories most related to the current one.  The latest version also gives you a related featured image.

Lastly, f you scroll down past the current blog entries, you’ll come to a feature called “Random Hits from the Archive.”  It’s just what it says it is; it’s a fairly intelligent post-picker. 

Cleaning up the Goo

This weblog has had three incarnations. The current is in WordPress.  The predecessors actually go back to about the year 2000 and a webpage I built in FrontPage.  I really did not start counting it as a weblog until 2004.  The accumulation of detritus became immense– broken links, missing pics, etc.   Somewhere in all the updates forced on me this past year, a bunch of photos went missing from the earliest posts– no particular reason and past the point of going back.

You’ll notice over the coming months that I am gradually restoring the pics that went missing.  It is a laborious task.

WP Photo Albums Plus

About 5 years ago, Google dropped its support for its previous photo album facility.  All of a sudden all the slide shows I’d built for the better part of a decade went POOF! and I had to go look for something better.  I finally settled on  WP Photo Albums.  Starting in 2016, I started hosting all my pics locally and using WP Photo Albums Plus(WPPA+) to deliver them to you.  I also had to go back and download all the pics from Google Photos and get them loaded.  

I want to make a special shout-out to J.N. Breetvelt a.k.a. OpaJaap, the brains behind WP Photo Albums Plus. I’ve been working with Herr Breetvelt for several years, and I have nothing but the highest praise for this Dutch software designer.  OpaJaap has a standing invitation to come deer hunting and turkey hunting at the farm, should he ever make it across the pond.

Right now, I’ve got just south of 4,000 photos in 250+ albums in OpaJaap’s plug-in.  Most of the pics you see going down the left and right sidebars are coming from WPPA+ as well as all the in-post slideshows.

He is just releasing Version 8 of WPPA+ this week.  I tested a pre-release version and got to help out getting it ready for the final release.  As usual, Version 8 is a work of art.

Weaver Extreme

Lastly, I would like to mention the Weaver Extreme, the theme I use on this weblog.  WordPress allows folks to change themes; a theme is the look and feel of the weblog.  Years ago, I picked a theme that allowed two sidebars, and that was what I went with for several years.  Eventually, that theme got left in the dust, and I had to pick another.  Weaver was one of the few themes that allowed two sidebars.  I held onto Weaver and then Weaver II for as long as I could.  One of the WordPress updates a year or so ago forced me to upgrade to the new Weaver Extreme.  I won’t say the move was effortless. In fact, it was pretty ugly on my end, but I have a 17-year-old WordPress site that is huge by comparison to most.  I knew it was going to be tough going in. 

Weaver Extreme has been my choice for over a year now, and it is running better now than at any time in the past.  Many thanks to Bruce Wampler, the genius behind Weaver Extreme, for making it all happen.

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