However, the event painfully pointed out that I should invest some time to investigate how I can rewrite the plugin to use the API instead of the RSS feed. Maybe in the near future…

Thus the reason why this site behaves oddly – for now. (I hope)

The normal Text widget allows you to insert arbitrary Text and/or HTML code. This allows that too, but also parses any inserted PHP code and executes it. This makes it easier to migrate to a widget-based theme but the fun part is, together with the Mobypicture plugin it enables you to include multiple Mobypicture streams in your sidebars. Just like I included the public stream.

Install both widgets and then include the same Mobypicture php code you would use to include the a Moby stream in a post or page.

PHP Code Widget
Mobypicture Plugin

So I installed the WordPress plugin ‘Fix RSS Feed’ and let it do it’s thing. It returned a huge list of files containing blanks at the top or bottom of the file and fixed them all. This was kind of scary but apparently it did not break anything. It does backup all the files it is going to change as a .bak file, I have to clean this mess once I am convinced the backups are no longer required.

Damn, still errors, but now referring to a XML error. This time I noticed the output of ismyblogworking.com suggested to have my RSS feed validated by FEED Validator. Yes! Validation pinpointed the error; the little bugger appeared to be a blank in the theme functions.php. The blank was not found by the Fix RSS Feed plugin because it was in the middle of the file, right above the code I inserted to show a menu-link. Mystery solved!

Regarding my to-do list,  a few items are resolved now that I have changed the WordPress theme:

• Shorten the height of the header. Don’t know why a lot of themes (and website) use such a large header. I agree you need some space to show off your logo and flashy site/brand name but it doesn’t mean you have to spoil valuable pixels. E.g looking at a site on the smallest Macbook or any netbook with a browser which has the adress toolbar and tab-browsing enabled, only has so many pixels available for showing content…
• Add second sidebar and maybe even make the width dynamic instead of fixed.
• Replace the ‘Previous’  and ‘Next’  page indicators with real page number (already experimented with 2 plugins but they require some tweaks to fit my theme.
• LifeStream plugin works nicely with auto-grouping of events but somehow it does not display the  events in a group in chronological order. Weird but true. Have to look into that and try to fix it. Maybe even going to try to have the event timestamp displayed when showing details.
• Add search. The build in WP search widget looks ugly in my theme.
• Add About page and/or show ‘About-info’  on homepage. I tried the WP build in free-text widget but didn’t like the outcome.
• And looking at a preview of this list; ad color to the bullets or something else to juice up a list.
• …

To be continued.

• Shorten the height of the header. Don’t know why a lot of themes (and website) use such a large header. I agree you need some space to show off your logo and flashy site/brand name but it doesn’t mean you have to spoil valuable pixels. E.g looking at a site on the smallest Macbook or any netbook with a browser which has the adress toolbar and tab-browsing enabled, only has so many pixels available for showing content…
• Add second sidebar and maybe even make the width dynamic instead of fixed.
• Replace the ‘Previous’  and ‘Next’  page indicators with real page number (already experimented with 2 plugins but they require some tweaks to fit my theme.
• LifeStream plugin works nicely with auto-grouping of events but somehow it does not display the  events in a group in chronological order. Weird but true. Have to look into that and try to fix it. Maybe even going to try to have the event timestamp displayed when showing details.
• Add search. The build in WP search widget looks ugly in my theme.
• Add About page and/or show ‘About-info’  on homepage. I tried the WP build in free-text widget but didn’t like the outcome.
• And looking at a preview of this list; ad color to the bullets or something else to juice up a list.
• …

Of course a site also needs some interesting content but this is of lesser importance to me. I am just playing around with WordPress and trying to build a site with some nice features.

Something you would like to see changed or added to this site? Just leave a comment with your tips or ideas, your feedback is appreciated!