My blog has been quiet recently, as I’ve been focused on creating and launching the site for my new business, Kai’s Candy Company. Our goal with the company is to seek out the most unusual, fun, and tasty candies from around the world, and sell them! We’re starting with Obama and McCain candies that we’ve made especially for the 2008 Presidential campaign. The candies are hand made by artisans in Japan, using traditional kumi ame (rolled candy) techniques.

We also have a Halloween candy poll that’s waiting for your vote! Your votes will help us decide which candy designs to pick for our Halloween candies.

I used several interesting techniques in the site’s CSS to achieve the desired layout. I’ll write about that next…

Displayed below is an array of data from a project I’ve been working on. I’ll explain the color coding in a minute. The first element is a sub array of laboratory sample IDs, and the subsequent elements are subarrays indicating which laboratory tests should be run on which samples. (I’ll spare you an explanation of the database structure behind all this, but suffice it to say that pulling out the data with this organization was the most efficient solution).

Array[4] (
    0 => Array[6] (
        0 => ‘Sample ID’,
        1 => 193,
        2 => 194,
        3 => 195,
        4 => 196,
        5 => 197,
    ),
    1 => Array[4] (
        0 => ‘Phospholipids’,
        1 => ‘Y’,
        3 => ‘Y’,
        5 => ‘Y’,
    ),
    2 => Array[6] (
        0 => ‘Apolipoprotein A-I’,
        1 => ‘Y’,
        2 => ‘Y’,
        3 => ‘Y’,
        4 => ‘Y’,
        5 => ‘Y’,
    ),
    3 => Array[4] (
        0 => ‘Gastrin’,
        2 => ‘Y’,
        3 => ‘Y’,
        4 => ‘Y’,
    ),
)

How I ultimately what to display the data is like this:

To get from here to there, you need to visualize how you want to arrange the data elements. If you use the color coding I assigned to the array indexes above, you can picture the data in rows, like this:

0,0    1,0    2,0    3,0

0,1    1,1    2,1    3,1

etc.

To generate a display of the data in this manner, you need to loop through the arrays in an inside-out manner. You loop through the subarrays to set the rows, and then have a nested loop through the parent array to set the cells. Here’s the PHP code for it:

$content = "<table>\n";

// This loop controls the table rows
// $cols is the name of the parent array
for ($inner=0; $inner < count($cols[0]); $inner++) {
    $content .= "<tr>";

    // This loop generates the table cells
    for ($outer=0; $outer < count($cols); $outer++) {
        // this assumes you want the first row to be a header row
        $tag = ($inner == 0) ? "th" : "td";
        $content .= "<$tag>{$cols[$outer][$inner]}</$tag>";
    }

    $content .= "</tr>\n";
}

$content .= "</table>\n";

// then display or return $content…

The first subarray contains the Sample IDs, so I used it to set the maximum count for the outer loop that controls the HTML table rows (because I can be confident there will never be data beyond the last sample). If you don’t have an analogous subarray, you’ll need to check to see which subarray is longest, and use that to control the count.

1. It uses reCAPTCHA for blocking spam. reCAPTCHA is a great project that uses data from its captcha form submissions to help digitize books.
2. The Deko Boko contact form can be extended any way you want, but without the need for complicated admin menus. If you’re comfortable editing HTML, then you can add any number and any type of input fields to the contact form. You can control which fields are optional or required. When the form is submitted, any fields that you added will have their data included in the body of the email.

The form layout is controlled by a CSS styled definition list, which provides a great deal of flexibility. With just a few CSS edits you can change the position of the field labels to top-aligned, left-justified, or right-justified.

Spam protection in addition to reCAPTCHA is also included. Deko Boko protects against email header injections and will verify that the return address provided by the user has a valid format.

This is a beta release (v0.8). I’ve been using it on my own site for some time and it’s working well. I’d like to hear feedback before making it an “official” release.

Go to the Deko Boko page for more information and to download it. Note that comments are turned off on the page - please submit any comments on this post.

To follow along, you’ll need to be comfortable with editing a couple of your theme’s files, and be comfortable with the basics of PHP.

Limiting the categories on your home page can be done by adding a few lines of code to the top of your theme’s index.php file.

<?php if (is_home()) {
    $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
    query_posts("cat=12,23,6&paged=$paged");
} ?>

For “cat=” on the 3rd line, list the numbers for the categories you want to appear on your home page (or you can put a minus sign in front of the category numbers to exclude specific categories). The WordPress documentation for query_posts says you can do this with simpler syntax, but you can’t. The documentation is wrong. If you follow the suggestion there, your “Newer Entries” and “Older Entries” links on your home page won’t work. They will just continually re-load the most recent posts. The code I’ve given here is explained nicely in this WordPress support forum post.

So with this code, my home page includes only the categories related to my professional work. For my personal blog, I needed a way to get posts from all the right categories to appear together on a page. The answer is simple: I created a single parent category that encompasses all the categories I use for my personal posts. So the page for that parent category serves as the “home page” for my personal blog.

I also wanted my sidebar to change depending on whether you are viewing the “professional” pages or the “personal” pages. Achieving this involves two steps. First, add the following code to the top of your sidebar.php file. The category and page numbers you see listed are the ones where I want the “professional” sidebar to appear, which I call $home_sidebar (so you should substitute category and page numbers appropriate for your site). Note the ability to pass an array to is_category is new with WordPress 2.5.

<?php
$home_sidebar = false;
if (is_category(array(12,23,6))
  || in_category('12') || in_category('23') || in_category('6')
  || is_page(array(345,440,496,501)) || is_home()) {
      $home_sidebar = true;
}
?>

The second step is to check the value of $home_sidebar whenever you want to vary what appears in the sidebar. For example, to vary the category links in your sidebar, use code similar to this (again, substituting your category numbers). You’ll want to explore the options for the wp_list_categories function to get the exact appearance you want:

<ul>
<?php if ($home_sidebar) {
    wp_list_categories('include=12,23,6&feed=RSS&order=desc&title_li=');
}

else {
    wp_list_categories('child_of=26&feed=RSS&title_li=');
} ?>
</ul>

Note my use of child_of. This is the number for the parent category I created for all of my personal posts. This is a very convenient way to get all of the child categories without having to list them individually.

I’ve used this approach to make my blog look like two blogs. But you could easily extend this approach to subdivide your blog into as many mini-blogs as you like.

There were 3 problems with how I implemented this feature in the previous (2.0) version of Shashin, but they only became clear to me after hearing feedback from people using Shashin 2.0 in a wide variety of WordPress themes. One problem was that the steps involved were just too complicated for most people’s needs (but the more complex options are still there, if you need greater control of the configuration than the new “easy” way).

The second problem was my attempt to manipulate the title of the page containing the [salbumphotos] tag. Shashin 2.0 tries to dynamically append the title of the selected photo album to the page title. In a rational world this would be easy, but WordPress makes it extraordinarily difficult to isolate and manipulate the title of a page, as reported here. I thought I had come up with a work around. But, as it turns out, my solution was not reliable across all the different WordPress themes that are out there. So, with Shashin 2.1, I have removed all the code that tries to manipulate the page title. It now simply displays the album title as a caption on the table that contains the photo thumbnails. This is much cleaner and shouldn’t cause conflicts with any themes.

The third problem was the [salbumphotos] tag, which is used to display thumbnails for all the photos in an album. In Shashin 2.0, a page with the [salbumphotos] tag won’t play nicely with sidebars that use the wp_list_pages function (for listing links to all the pages on a site). The [salbumphotos] tag only worked correctly if you used it in conjunction with Shashin album thumbnails. You couldn’t just go to the page directly from a sidebar link. This is fixed in Shashin 2.1.

Shashin 2.1 also has a few minor bug fixes, the most important of which is that you can now once again see the photo thumbnails in the Shashin admin panel.

I should point out that, if all you want to do with your Picasa photos in WordPress is display your album thumbnails on a page, and then link them to a page that displays the photos in each album, then I recommend kPicasa Gallery. It has similar features to Shashin in this area, but without Shashin’s management overhead. But if you want to do more than just that, then I recommend Shashin .

Other than the new look, the big change is that I’ve split my blog in two. Posts that show up on the home page concern web technology and my projects. Everything else is still on the site, but is in my personal blog. There’s also a link for it at the bottom of the sidebar.

For my RSS fanbase (yes, I’m trying to be funny…), you can get all my posts from this feed, or just the personal blog posts from this one.

Under the hood it’s still one blog. Figuring out how to get WordPress to display everything as if it were two blogs was an interesting challenge (one that has frustrated a number of people, judging by the threads in the WordPress support forums). It’s not just a question of limiting the topic categories that show up on the home page. It’s also a question of how to group the other categories together, and how to get the sidebar to show the appropriate navigation controls for the current context (i.e. listing the correct subset of categories on the home page, as well as on each different category archive page). I’ll write up a how-to post soon.

My former officemates at the U Penn School of Medicine Information Services Department have put together a Web Symposium, scheduled for July 15-16. They have an impressive list of speakers lined up.

I recognized many of the names of the list, as it includes some of the most well known people in the world of web user interface design. But I was surprised to see the names of a couple people I personally knew. I worked with Dana Chisnell for a short time in 2000, when she was brought in to consult at a small start-up where I was working (Finexa - a company that did not last long). And I met Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg at a coffee shop when Glenn Greenwald came through Philadelphia to promote his first book a couple years ago. I contributed a post to his Blue Force site, but it wasn’t long after that when I started to come up short on time for regular political blogging.

The price for attending the symposium is a bargain. Several of the speakers typically make the rounds at conferences that cost 2 or 3 times as much. So if this is a topic of interest for you, definitely check it out!

The only other change I made was to add mp4 as a video type that Shashin will recognize (it’s not documented as a supported video type for Picasa, but it does in fact accept them).

Download Shashin 2.0.4.

Update: I’ve received a few reports from first-time Shashin users who are having trouble activating Shashin properly, despite this fix. This seems to be happening to only a small number of people, and I haven’t been able to track down the cause yet. If you are having trouble with Shashin under WordPress 2.5, please leave a comment on this post and let me know exactly what’s going wrong.

This is the one real problem with building an application that relies on Google’s RSS feeds - I have no control over when they might change the feeds, or what kind of changes they make.

There are also some other minor fixes. Here’s a list of the changes in 2.0.2:

• Adjusted for new location of the content_url in the Picasa feed
• If you select the option to display your photos at Picasa in a new browser window, it actually works now (the formatting of the anchor tag was incorrect).
• Shashin now performs a preg_escape when detecting the URL for the page containing your salbumphotos tag. This fixes a warning that was being displayed for some URLs in PHP 5.
• Shashin now correctly detects your WordPress installation directory if you’ve installed it in a subdirectory (except for paths in shashin/display/highslide.css which are hardcoded - you’ll need to edit those by hand).