dougv.com | The Web home of Doug Vanderweide

You’ve probably noticed I’ve been putting in some work on this blog lately.

Amid all the tweaking, one fact became obvious: I was going to need to make significant changes to the TypoXP theme to get it fully compatible with post-WordPress 2.3 releases.

I thought long and hard about that. I really like TypoXP and I wanted to stick with it as long as I could. But the more I thought about it, the more I decided it made sense to move on to a more recent theme.

Once again, it came down to two choices: Barthelme and Fluid Blue. In the end, Bartheme won.

Continue reading ‘Goodbye, TypoXP; Hello, Barthelme; Welcome Back, WP-Syntax; Tag, You’re It’ »

I’ve done some more hacking of the Sociable social bookmarking plug-in for WordPress and I’d thought I’d share them with others.

I’ve added buttons for MySpace and Yahoo! Buzz. I’ve also changed the layout to put all the icons inside a fieldset tag and eliminate the rollover effects.

I’ve also cleaned up some more code, most notably making a change to the way the script creates excerpts when the user has not done so.

Let’s look at the changes.

Continue reading ‘More Sociable Hacks: Adding MySpace And Yahoo! Buzz, Changing The Look’ »

I decided recently that I wanted to use a social bookmarking plug-in* on this blog. The choice came down to one of two: Add To Any or Sociable.

After a day of fiddling with both, I finally opted for Sociable. Both plug-ins are very good, and each has things it does better than the other. The reasons I decided on Sociable vs. Add To Any:

• Add To Any uses a pop-up layer to display some top bookmarking sites, then an additional click to select all. Sociable allows you to select which bookmarking sites you want to display as 16×16-pixel icons. I figure it’s enough to show just the most popular, rather than virtually every bookmarking site.
• Sociable requires less space to accomplish the same basic tasks.
• Add To Any requires JavaScript to work; Sociable doesn’t require it for most functions.
• Sociable looks prettier on my pages. The Add To Any icon didn’t fit well on my page; it does allow you to make your own icon, but I didn’t want to bother with that, especially when, again, Sociable’s icons all work on their own, right on the page.
• Add To Any doesn’t easily allow you to rearrange icons or add / remove certain links / services; Sociable makes selecting the order of icons (and which to use) quite easy.

That said, Add To Any does have some strengths over Sociable:

• Add To Any’s code is a bit cleaner; but again, we’ll soon discuss how to fix Sociable’s faults.
• Sociable requires a knowledge of CSS to customize; Add To Any allows n00bs to easily change colors and certain display settings.
• That Add To Any allows users to select virtually any bookmarking site, rather than a list the blogger determines, may be considered a strength by others.

So even though I opted for Sociable, I had to clean up some problems, such as display problems due to my theme; the alignment of the icons; and incomplete information for certain icons.

Continue reading ‘Fixing Various Issues With The Sociable Plug-In For WordPress’ »

No Tony Kornheiser on Monday Night Football, thanks to hernia surgery. Just Ron Jaworski and Mike Tirico, talking about the game itself, focusing on pertinent matters, providing actual insight and calling what, so far, has been a pretty good football game.

If only there was such a thing as season-ending hernia surgery for TV commentators.

Probably the best we can hope for is a nationwide outpouring of people, shouting with joy from the rooftops, that Tony Kornheiser = good football broadcast.

But if ESPN won’t respond to overwhelming criticism of Kornheiser, will it respond to overwhelming support of his booth partners when they are freed of his inanities?

I doubt it. But we can always hope.

Recently asked on Yahoo! Answers:

How do I read and write binary image data from SQL server?
I’m making a website where visitors can upload their images, I’ve done the uploading code and it (probably) works fine because I can see the data is recorded on the database.

The problem is when I want to test it (display the image on the website) theoretically I have to read the data from the SQL server and write it to the web. I’ve done several ways and tests but all of them failed to display the image.

Anybody knows how to do this? I’m using visual web developer 2008 and VB.NET as programming language

Note: no “wizards” please, I want it to be implemented using fully coded like I did with the uploading code

There are other examples on the Web on how to do this, but most are either written in C#, or are very specific to a given set of circumstances, so I thought I would explore this subject for Visual Basic .NET, and in the process try to address a few different ways to display an image.

The executive summary: Displaying an image that’s stored in a database requires you to make a “helper page.” And that’s what we’re about to make.

Continue reading ‘Displaying An Image Stored In A SQL Server Database On An ASP.NET Page Using VB.NET’ »