I’m up super-late on a Saturday night playing Shadow of the Colussus, and updating this website. Shadow has received critical acclaim, and as it turns out, deserves every word of it. It is truly awe-inspiring.

As for this site, well, I cleaned a few things up in the various sidebars (capitalization, link presentation, etc.), removed pagination from the photos sections, and redid my Links section by replacing the built-in Wordpress Links functionality with Del.icio.us bookmarks. Using Del.icio.us Integrator by Eric Anderson, I was able to pull in all my links directly, saving me the tiresome step of regular bookmarking, del.icio.us bookmarking, and Wordpress linking for every damned cool link I found. I have also started trying out Flock, which uses delicious instead of regular bookmarks as well, so maybe, I’ll be moving entirely online for links, making my life more interesting, and my links section more comprehensive and useful for you all. We’ll see how it goes. I had to make a few changes to Eric’s plugin, and hopefully, he’ll continue to make improvements. If not, I may have to take over the project and add some of the missing features myself.

A couple notes for anyone thinking of doing the same…

The Del.icio.us Integrator plugin does not work properly with Dreamhost hosted sites. As usual, “fopen” commands are not supported due to security concerns. Instead, a few lines of code need to be changed in the plugin itself. This comment on Eric’s website explains it and provides the replacement code.

I hated the presentation of Tags as “Categories”, so I changed it, along with the not-so-efficient bulleted list of tags. I made a coma-separated list instead. Ideally this will become a “tag cloud” but the plugin currently does not have a function to query the number of links in a given tag. If it did, we could write some simple code to resize the words based on how many items were in them.

I also removed the display of the 5 or 10 latest links as a default on the main page. Instead I placed them in the sidebar at all times. It seemed more consistent with the homepage and looked a lot nicer.

All of those changes required changes to the plugin code itself. I anxiously await Eric’s next rev of the plugin, even though I’ll have to go in and redo all of this crap. Great job Eric - excellent plugin.