Connie's Ramblings

I received a nasty gram from google last week because my blog was not ‘mobile’ friendly… so I spent the day reworking my design into a responsive one… I haven’t not reworked the menus which are using a hover effect to display so the menus are not working properly on touch devices.

I originally created my wordpress theme back in 2007.. before widgets and nifty menus etc… hence it was frustrating having to code in widgets I was interested in by hand so nothing got added or updated.

This week I’ve spent time updating some of my own sites. Back in April I got a SmugMug account which I wanted to style a bit. I finished that on Monday and then decided it was time to tackle my WordPress site. I knew I wanted to keep the basic look I’ve had but wanted to bring it into the WP3.0 relm with support for Menus and Widgets.

I just put it live this afternoon… there is still more I want to do with it. Specifically I want to code a slide out sidebar for on the single posts pages and check out some of the SmugMug/Wordpress plugins. But this will do for now – I think it is much better than I had before..

I’ve been using the Now Reading Plugin by Rob Miller as a means of keeping track of the books I read. I encountered a problem a couple months ago in that it was no longer able to retrieve books from Amazon and so I had to enter them manually.

Yesterday I came across A Modest Construct which has a post on Now Reading for WordPress 2.7+ this version actually works! I like how Helio has made adding a book manually always available. Something of note however is that when you add a book manually, you don’t have the option to include or later edit an ASIN.

I started looking around the code and found where to make a few simple additions to allow the editing of the ASIN of a book.

In the file admin-manage.php, after line 126 add:

<tr class="form-field">
<th valign="top" scope="row">
<label for="asin-0">' . __("ASIN", NRTD) . '</label>
</th>
<td>
<input type="text" class="main" id="asin-0" name="asin[]" value="' . $existing->asin . '" />
</td>
</tr>

Then in the edit.php file, after line 49 add:

$asin = $wpdb->escape($_POST['asin'][$i]);

and after line 104 add:

b_asin = '$asin',

And now the ASIN number is editable when you edit the book… having an ASIN number for a book allows the plugin to create the links to amazon. It annoyed me that half my books had links and the other half did not.

Now that I have managed to get the plugin actually working, I might look at actually styling the individual book pages…