Author: isaac

I like cats and compost.

Categories
General

Cherry blossoms

Delicate blossom More cherry blossoms Cherry blossoms Blossoms with bokehblossoms Backyard blossoms Blossoms and festering pond Bright pink blossoms More white blossoms

It’s springtime in DC, which means cherry blossoms and tourists. After the inauguration, the cherry blossom crowds seem pretty tame – no need for the national guard to do crowd control at least. However, trying to take photos around the tidal basin you’re either standing in someone’s way or further trampling the already dead grass. So, I like to head over to East Potomac Park, towards Hains Point, instead. Also, the blossoms around the tidal basin and Hains Point are all the same delicate pinkish-white, so if you like some variety in your blossoms, you’ve gotta go elsewhere. I found the bright pink blossoms at Brookside Gardens in Wheaton.

Update: Added a couple more from Brookside Gardens. This Flickr set contains a few more photos.

Categories
General

Titlematic plugin 0.1

If you run a group blog, your group members are going to forget to title their posts now and then. It’s mostly just an annoyance – posts without titles look funny – but some plugins get broken because they expect posts to have titles. So, I was using Luke’s Default Post Title plugin, which works well but just sets a default, such as “Untitled Post.” The code I borrowed from the Prologue theme for the quick post feature in OrgPress has a nice auto-title feature that takes the first 25 characters of post text and uses that for the title. It results in some silly titles, but at least they’re more informative than “Untitled Post.” I smooshed the two together into Titlematic, a plugin that sets the title for an untitled post to the first 25 characters of the post’s content and reverts to the “Untitled Post” thing if there isn’t any post content, such as when a post is just an image. Right now you’ve gotta edit the code to change the number of characters to use, so for the next version I’ll probably add some settings.

Download Titlematic 0.1: titlematic.0.1.zip

Categories
General

flickpress 0.6

No, that’s not a typo…I’ve decided to rename my Flickr plugin. There’s an old WP plugin out there in the aether that’s got the old name, so a new name seemed like a good idea, especially if I’m going to post it at wordpress.org sometime.

The more exciting change in this version is that it uses ThickBox for the popup tool now, rather than the old ugly popup method. I think there were some advantages to the old way, but there’s a lot of peer pressure to use ThickBox or something like it. There’s also a new icon, but I’m not crazy about how it turned out, so I probably shouldn’t mention it.

Since this version involves a renaming you’ll want to deactivate the old version, delete the old folder in your plugins folder, then install the new version as usual. You’ll also need to re-enter your Flickr API key, and reactivate and reconfigure the widget if you’re using it.

If you’re reading this and still aren’t sure what the flickpress plugin does, it’s a simple plugin that makes it easy to insert photos from Flickr into your WordPress posts. It can access several different Flickr accounts, so it’s great for group blogs.

Download flickpress 0.6: flickpress_0.6.zip

Categories
Kitchen

Apple custard pie

Apple Custard Pie

Ingredients:

  • a pie crust
  • about 4 apples
  • butter or coconut oil
  • 2 or 3 eggs
  • about 1/2 cup of crème fraîche or coconut milk
  • a couple of tablespoons of honey
  • spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, etc.
  • vanilla

First make a pie crust. My usual crust is pressed moist almond meal, baked at 350F for around 20 minutes. You can probably get that done while sauteing the apples, and you’ll be preheating the oven while you’re at it. Peel and chop the apples. Saute them in some butter, sprinkling in the spices you like – I use cinnamon and nutmeg. While they’re getting soft, mix up the eggs, crème fraîche, vanilla, and honey. Slowly mix in the hot apples once they’re soft, then dump the whole mess into the pie crust. Bake at 350 F until it looks golden brown and set, around 30 minutes or so. I sometimes bake it around 15 minutes at 350, then 325, then 300 – I think the texture turns out nicer that way. You will be sorely tempted to eat it hot, but it is better chilled with whipped topping.

Categories
General

OrgPress Theme 0.2

This version adds the quick posting thing I mentioned in an earlier post, with some tweaks based on how it’s been working at my group blog. It’s fun and popular, but we decided to keep the quick posts separate from the regular posts, putting them in a sidebar block instead. Not much else has changed – just a couple of fixes to the archives.

Download OrgPress 0.2: orgpress_0.2.zip