SELECT pg_database.datname,  
  pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size(pg_database.datname)) AS size  
FROM pg_database;  
  
   datname    |  size  
--------------+---------  
 template1    | 6369 kB  
 template0    | 6361 kB  
 postgres     | 6589 kB  
 foo          | 55 MB  
 bar          | 5129 MB  
 foobar       | 85 GB  
(6 rows)  

I started my website in 2003. At the time it was hosted by the University of Michigan, where I was a graduate student. They gave all students some space for a personal website. It was really great, though it did come with some limitations, like no php or cgi allowed. I managed to kludge some server side includes and javascript together to get a fairly decent food website. I also had some other stuff on my site like some academic info. In 2006 I started a blog, and started learning wordpress. Since then, most of the new content on my site has been in my blog, and the rest of the site has kind of just been sitting there. I finally decided to try to integrate it all, for several reasons:

1. Consistent style for all pages
2. Get everything in a database (for better searching among other things)
3. Learn some new technology

For that last reason, I had started to look at learning more about drupal, since I have seen a number of jobs looking for drupal developers recently. I spent a week or so looking at that in June, and got a little bit excited about a recipe module I found. However, I decided that I wasn’t crazy about drupal. I think WordPress is miles ahead of drupal in many ways. I was very surprised to find out that uploading pictures is not part of the core of drupal, but rather in a module (and not a very good one at that). Of course, up until WordPress 3.0, WP was mostly just a blogging platform. No longer! With version 3.0, WordPress can easily be used as a full-fledged content management system. So I decided to integrate the disparate portions of my website all into WordPress. During the conversion process I got to learn more about the new features in WordPress 3.0, especially custom post types.

The biggest challenge of the conversion was converting my recipes. Most of the old pages on my site simply became a WordPress page, but the recipes clearly needed special treatment. I thought I might use a custom post type for recipes, but after a little searching around, I quickly stumbled upon RecipePress, which basically does everything I was looking for (and does in fact use custom post types). RecipePress will work out of the box with any theme, but, upon my request, it also will let you use your own custom theme, which is the route I chose. One small dilemma I faced was that I had multiple pictures in some of my recipes, but I could not insert them into the post content, since RecipePress uses that for the recipe directions. Instead, what I ended up doing was using one image as a featured image, and then I wrote some custom code to display any additional images below the ingredients and contents, like so:


ID );
if (count($pics)>1): ?>

As I started to figure out how I wanted the navigation for the site to work, I also realized that I wanted to update some of the WordPress navigation plugins I have written – Collapsing Categories, Collapsing Archives, and Collapsing Pages. I added support for custom post types for the first two, and added an option for the pages plugin to only list subpages of the current page (this is how the navigation works for the academic, web design, and wordpress plugins portions of the new site). These features are all in the development versions of the respective plugins right now, but I should put out a new stable release soon.

While I was working on importing content from the old site, I also decided to make a new theme as well. I decided to try out the new child theme functionality in WordPress 3.0. It turned out to be quite easy. The only slightly confusing thing for me was how to disable some of the functionality of the parent theme. There are hints on how to to this in the TwentyTen functions.php file, but it took me awhile to actually figure it out. For example, I did not like how TwentyTen handles excerpts, so I wanted to remove the filters for the the except which TwentyTen adds. The way that WordPress handles child themes is that it first looks for the functions.php file in the child theme, and processes it all. Then it looks at the parent theme’s functions.php file and processes that. This means that if you try to simply remove a filter from the parent theme in your child theme, it won’t work, since the child theme is processed first. Instead, you have to do all of this in a function which is called in the after_setup_theme hook. Here is what I used in child theme functions.php file:


function robfelty_child_theme_setup() {
// We are providing our own filter for excerpt_length (or using the unfiltered value)
remove_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'twentyten_excerpt_length' );
remove_filter( 'excerpt_more', 'twentyten_auto_excerpt_more' );
remove_filter( 'get_the_excerpt', 'twentyten_custom_excerpt_more' );
}
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'robfelty_child_theme_setup' );


I also added in some CSS3 features, including rounded corners with border-radius, and gradients as well. As always, it is still a work in progress. Feedback is welcome.

Today I released my 8th wordpress plugin. This one is quite a bit different from all the other plugins I have written. A friend of mine was looking for a way to create a gallery on his family blog. “No problem!”, I told him, “there are lots of plugins for that”. But I then quickly realized that no plugins were available for what he was looking for. All of the other image gallery plugins for wordpress function by creating galleries manually, say a gallery of wedding photos, or a gallery of a trip to the zoo. My friend was looking for an easy way to browse all pictures he has ever posted on his blog. That is what the Image Browser plugin does. It allows you to browse through all of your pictures on your blog, and also allows you to restrict by year, month, category, and by caption text. It is easy to install and use. Simply install it, then create a new page, and insert the [[imagebrowser]] shortcode. That’s it. Options can be set either in the settings page, or by using shortcode parameters. If you would like a demo, please take a spin at my family blog gallery, or the image browser page on this site.

For awhile now I have been wanting to show the total number of topics started and replies in a bbpress forum on the profile page. Today I finally figured out how. I like bbpress quite a bit, as it integrates very nicely into wordpress. The main downside of bbpress right now is that the documentation is still basically nonexistent. Maybe someday I will help out with it.

Anyways, to get the total number of replies, simply use the following little mysql query:

get_var("SELECT COUNT(post_id) FROM " .
$bbdb->prefix . "posts WHERE poster_id=$user->ID");
?>

To get the total number of topics started, use:

get_var("SELECT COUNT(topic_id) FROM " .
$bbdb->prefix . "topics WHERE topic_poster=$user->ID");
?>


This is particularly important if I am uploading many pictures. So I wrote a little sql which will set the “caption” and “alt text” fields to be the same as the description. I already had this working for the “caption” field for quite some time, but getting it to work for the different alt text handling in 2.9 was a bit tricky, since I discovered that the alt text is not stored in wp_posts like the other fields. Instead it is stored in the wp_postmeta table, which is new in 2.9. Although it took me awhile to figure this out, the new table is a welcome addition. Now for each image you upload, wordpress stores meta information in this table, including the width and height, different sized versions of the file, the IPTC caption, some EXIF info and a few other goodies. This means that if you like to include EXIF info about your pictures, that doing so requires only a simple database lookup, instead of having to read the headers from the image, which should be considerably faster I would imagine.

Now for my little SQL which sets the “caption” and “alt text” to be the same as the description. I run this on my server after uploading pictures. It would be even better if I could figure out how to do this as a wordpress plugin.

-- First we set the image caption (post_excerpt) to be the same as the
-- description (post_content)
update wp_posts set post_excerpt=post_content WHERE post_type='attachment' AND
date(post_date)=curdate();

• Changed name from Fancy Archives to Collapsing Archives
• Changed author from Andrew Rader to Robert Felty
• Added option to link to archives.php
• Added option to list in chronological or reverse chronological order
• Added triangles which mark the collapsing and expanding features
  That is, clicking on the triangle collapses or expands, while clicking
  on a month or year links to the archives for the said month or year
• Changed behavior from starting all expanded and then collapsing on page
  load to the opposite
• Removed the rel=’hide’ and rel=’show’ tags, because they are not xhtml
  1.0 compliant. Now uses the CSS classes instead

You can download it from the WordPress plugin repository.

• Changed name from Fancy Archives to Collapsing Archives
• Changed author from Andrew Rader to Robert Felty
• Added triangles which mark the collapsing and expanding features That is, clicking on the triangle collapses or expands, while clicking on a month or year links to the archives for the said category. This uses html entities (dings) instead of images, for a variety of reasons
• Lists the titles of posts, instead of just listing subcategories
• Removed the rel=’hide’ and rel=’show’ tags, because they are not xhtml 1.0 compliant. Now uses the CSS classes instead
• MOST IMPORTANTLY — it is compatible with both the pre 2.3 database which uses categories, and the 2.3+ database structure which uses the tag taxonomy

You can download it from the WordPress plugin repository.

This did exactly as one would expect. However, this also caused some problems. For those avid blog readers, now they would have to scroll way down (or go the archives) to see new posts, which doesn’t really make sense. In addition, the RSS feed was also chronologically ordered, so that RSS users would find it very difficult to see if the blog had been updated recently. While searching I also found another post on janegalt.net, in which the blogger asked the same question, and a reply by Jeff Licquia suggested a very simple solution:

To set up archives to use a different template, go into the management page, then go to Options, then Permalinks.

If you can’t, or don’t understand, the RewriteRules stuff, look at the note about not being able to use mod_rewrite. Where it says:

/index.php/archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Change “index.php” to something else, like “archives.php”, and put that in for the virtual site structure. Copy index.php to archives.php in your document root, then add the special flag to archives.php. You should be all set at that point.

(I’m a newbie to WordPress, but not to Web servers or Web stuff in general, so the above makes sense to me but isn’t tested. I’ll try to help if you have problems.)

This idea worked very well. I made the change in the WordPress options page, then copied index.php to archives.php, using the $order=ASC flag, and removed that from index.php. Then I had to change the .htaccess file to direct queries to archives.php. I did not want to do this for feeds though, so I had to put in two rules, like so:

#.htaccess file for fedibblety/house blog

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /house/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !.*feed\/?$ [NC]
RewriteRule . /house/archives.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} .*feed\/?$ [NC]
RewriteRule . /house/index.php



Then there was one last thing. In that blog (and in this one), I am using the fancy-archives plugin (as I write this post that site seems to be down, so I am not providing a link), which I have tweaked a bit. To get the archives in the sidebar listed in chronological order, I just had to change the SQL queries in the fancy-archives-list.php file to ORDER BY post_date ASC.

That was it!