Author: chris

Referencing directories in WordPress themes

Posted on by chris

I needed to enqueue a handful of scripts and stylesheets in a WordPress theme and ran into much confusion between which functions to use to return what paths from the parent theme vs. the child theme. To save myself later here is the breakdown of when to use what. Basic gist is that “stylesheet” will get the child theme. “template” will get the parent.

If you don’t have a child theme any of these will get the current theme.

Absolute Path

These functions get the absolute path on the server’s file system. Mostly useful for referencing other PHP files within your theme’s PHP files:

get_stylesheet_directory() – absolute path to the current theme. If you’re using a child theme it’ll get it. Documentation.

get_template_directory() – absolute path to the parent theme. Even if you’re using a child theme it’ll get the parent. Documentation.

Directory

These functions get the public URI for the theme directory. Useful when you’re trying to publicly display something on the site through your theme files:

get_stylesheet_directory_uri() – returns a properly formatted URI for the current theme. Use if you have a child theme that you want to return. Documentation.

get_template_directory_uri() – returns a properly formatted URI for the parent theme. Even if you’re using a child theme it’ll get the parent theme. Documentation.

Playing The Quiet Year in One (1) Hour

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You should play The Quiet Year! If, at all possible though, you should not play The Quiet Year in only 1 hour.

I was running this as part of an event and only had one hour so the constraints forced my hand somewhat.

Here’s how I approached it:

  • Each turn encompassed 3 weeks instead of 1. This is where the game suffers the most because projects start less frequently and end more quickly.
  • Cut down each season drastically. 3 cards for Spring, 4 for Summer (make sure to remove the King of Diamonds), 4 for Autumn, and 4 plus the King of Spades for Winter. Put the King of Spades at the bottom of the deck. Draw all but the King of Spades randomly.
  • Keep an eye on the time. If it’s looking like you’ll go long you should remove one of the cards from winter.
  • Your goal is actually to hit around 55 minutes for the game so you have 5 minutes to decompress and make up an epilogue. This is extremely important because everyone will have questions.

A few other items of note. I started the setup for the game by telling folks that the following:

I do not know if this game is fun. It is fascinating though. Keep in mind that we are collectively role playing a community and as such you will sometimes be frustrated with the direction things are taking. There is no win or lose state either, we see what happens and then the Frost Shepherds come.

Saying that the game might not be fun has a weird effect of making the game quite a bit more fun since everyone can just relax and see what happens.

Thanks to Sam and Brendan for helping out with a playtest of this compressed version of the game!

From Hugo to WordPress

Posted on by chris

There are a million and one blog posts for “move from WordPress to Hugo!” out there. This is the opposite of that.

Hugo is good

I like Hugo a lot. If you need a static site generator I’d recommend it without reservation! Once I had it going it worked very well. I loved how fast Hugo could build the entire site and it required almost no server resources. Turns out, you don’t need that much raw computing power to serving static files to a handful of folks every day.

Posting though

But…posting was far more complex than I wanted it to be. In the end I was syncing a folder via dropbox, committing my code to a repo, pushing it to a repo on the server. From there a git hook would run to build the site and then move the files to a folder. Extremely cool and extremely obtuse. If I had just one computer it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal to continue on; however, because I’m a glutton for complication, I bounce between 5 different devices (3 macs, 2 iOS devices) within the course of a week.

Having a web interface to log into matches my mental model of “I am writing and publishing” much better. I also dearly appreciate having drag and drop image support as well as WYSIWYG formatting options. Hugo’s support for non-text media is lacking. That’s totally okay! But, I was finding that I was avoiding publishing certain kinds of posts because I was lacking easy tools to do so.

WordPress and Gutenberg

What finally pushed me to make this change was a recent experience building a new website for Workantile. During that redesign we relied on the Gutenberg editor for formatting our pages. I was impressed! You can create fairly complex pages quickly with blocks in a way that just wasn’t easily doable a few years ago without diving deep into theme files. We’re in a bit of a rough transition point going from the classic editor to Gutenberg (and more importantly the concept of Blocks). It’s getting better all the time though!

Problems

The move went pretty well for the most part. Some technical issues I ran into:

RSS Importer

The RSS importer that is built into wordpress needs some serious attention. The biggest issue is that it fails because it’s calling a deprecated PHP function. The fix for this for me was to comment out the offending line. This StackOverflow post was helpful:

php – Call to undefined function set_magic_quotes_runtime() – Stack Overflow

I just found line 72 in the importer and commented it out. I wouldn’t rely on this edit for an import where you didn’t control all of the content, or as an importer you run more than once. It’s a brittle fix to say the least. Here’s the error and stack trace:

An error of type E_ERROR was caused in line 72 of the file /var/www/beta.chrissalzman.com/wp-content/plugins/rss-importer/rss-importer.php. Error message: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function set_magic_quotes_runtime() in /var/www/beta.chrissalzman.com/wp-content/plugins/rss-importer/rss-importer.php:72
Stack trace:
#0 /var/www/beta.chrissalzman.com/wp-content/plugins/rss-importer/rss-importer.php(178): RSS_Import->get_posts()
#1 /var/www/beta.chrissalzman.com/wp-content/plugins/rss-importer/rss-importer.php(204): RSS_Import->import()
#2 /var/www/beta.chrissalzman.com/wp-admin/admin.php(344): RSS_Import->dispatch()
#3 {main}
  thrown

Hugo’s RSS Implementation

And on the Hugo end of things: Hugo’s built-in RSS generator doesn’t include the full text of the posts. It also doesn’t include categories. I happen to be the sort of person who likes adding categories, so this was a problem! Here’s a gist of my RSS theme file that has the full text and categories:

Hugo RSS Implementation with Categories · GitHub

This looks for the categories set in the frontmatter of your markdown files. If there are none it skips it and nothing is added to the feed for that post.

RSS Redirect

I wanted to make sure anyone who subscribed to my old RSS feed continues to get the new one. To do so I set up a 301 redirect using this plugin:

Simple 301 Redirect

Keeping it around since it’s always nice to have this in a readily accessible place.

Images

Moving images over to the new site involved making sure they were uploaded appropriately to WordPress’ Media library. I toyed with the idea of doing one big import and going through and fixing individual images. Then I found this plugin that just did it for me. Installed it and then Edited all of my posts and resaved them. It ran through and copied everything over and updated the src tags for me:

Auto Upload Images – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org

Inserting images in Hugo was one of the reasons I wanted to get away from it so this was nice to have it just work. After I ran this I turned it off.

Conclusion

So far, so good. I’m happy with this and this post was fully written and edited in the WordPress editor. It’s nice to have “my website” compartmentalized to something I go to on the internet to edit, although I will miss how much posting a blog post made me look like I was attempting to hack the planet.

Kitchen Shelves

Posted on by chris

Our kitchen peninsula was in dire need of some organization. We also had a blank wall directly above it so…shelves!

All of the wood for this project came from Workantile’s storage room: pine slats from someone’s old ikea bed and shelves made from the Baltic birch plywood from an old phone booth project. The screws and edge banding from Home Depot.

I made the shelf supports out of pine based on a google image search for DIY shelf supports. The hardest part was figuring out the order in which to attach everything together to have room to screw things in. For the supports I had to attach the bottom of the angled support to the “L” and rotate it out of the way. Then mount the “L”, then rotate the angled support into place and screw it in that way. There are better ways to do this, but it went pretty quickly.

Finished with shellac and wax. I really like this finishing technique because it looks good and requires minimal drying time.

Installed with much mumbling and annoyance.

Remote Caddy

Posted on by chris

Made a little caddy for our remotes. The hope is this cuts down on the number of times we have to ask where the Roku remote went.

Mitered the edges and reinforced with splines for rigidity and class.

Pine reclaimed from the Workantile storage room and walnut from Urbanwood. Finished with shellac.

Try Square

Posted on by chris

Made a try square based on plans from Rex Kruger. Shockingly, it’s pretty and pretty square!

Walnut and cherry from Urbanwood. Aluminum rod for the pins from Home Depot, who looked at me like I was off my rocker for wanting brass rod. Epoxy to hold in the pins. Finished with shellac.

AADL RPG Fest – Sept. 14th 2019 1-5pm

Posted on by chris

The Ann Arbor District Library is hosting an Role-Playing Game Fest on September 14th at 1-5pm at the downtown branch! I’ll be running a table there as will Andy Rau, my cohost on Roll for Topic, and John Corey, one of recent guests who actually came on to talk about running games at cons.

Please come and play!

AADL RPG Fest

It makes me sad that will not have time to personally play in any other games because the lineup looks fantastic:

  • Numenera (Andy is running this)
  • Mothership
  • Pathfinder 2e
  • 7th Sea
  • Kids on Bikes
  • Savage Worlds
  • Star Wars: Force Awakens
  • D&D 5e: a few tables for this (including me!). Some will be playing D&D, others will be creating characters
  • The Quiet Year (I’ll be running this and am very excited about it so please come!)
  • Dungeon World – Mad Libs: John Corey is doing this and I am jealous of those that’ll get to play in it

Dark Forest Proliferation

Posted on by chris

I keep on referencing Dark Forests and realizing that people don’t know what I mean, which is fair because the only place I talk about them is in dark forests.

The first place I heard about this was from George who brought it up in one of several dark forests that we interact on. Whenever I go looking for a post to link to as an explanation I usually grab Kottke’s post: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet because the original piece by Yancey Strickler that kicked this off is published on Medium, which is the worst.

For posterity, here’s a link to Strickler’s piece: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet – OneZero

Below is the main quote from it that I think defines our term the best:

“Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course, it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent….

This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.”

And here’s why I’m increasingly finding myself in these forests:

“These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.”

To put this in my own words:

Global public social media is a trainwreck for most forms of communication. Humans just cannot handle the ability to respond to anyone anywhere about anything they’ve tweeted. And in pursuit of Engagement Metrics the algorithms are working overtime to make us angry, bewildered, and extremely in tune to celebrity gossip. I don’t really care who was cast in what movie, but twitter sure thinks I should! Because of that focus it also does an increasingly poor job of community building. If I want to talk about, say, local Ann Arbor and Ypsi whatnot it’s much better to do that within a space designed to do that so we’re not constantly defining our terms.

In response to the general toxicity and business practices of the major players many people (like me!) have opted out and moved their online interactions to smaller, more controlled, venues. Private or semi-private online spaces like slack teams, discord channels, mastodon communities, forums, instant messenger, DMs, email newsletters, and (my favorite one!) personal blogs. Twitter and facebook at one point consumed all of the above. It did an okay job and I like that it was centralized; however, good enough is no longer good enough. Rather than subjecting myself to various algorithms I’m instead finding life in dark forests.

Miter Saws and Circular Saws

Posted on by chris

A friend asked me whether he needed both a miter saw and a circular saw for a project he’s working on. As we were chatting he told me “this should be a blog post” so here we are.

Important Note: when we think of tools I think we should focus on access rather than ownership. Borrowing and lending tools is vitally important to a healthy society. Tools are meant to be used not acquired to sit on shelves.

Everyone should have access to a circular saw. It will empower you to do lots of projects you might otherwise think are beyond you.

Not as many people need access to a miter saw, but goodness, is it the right tool when you need it.

Regardless of which tool you’re using it’s worth using the right blade for the material you’re cutting. Not all blades are good at all things!

Miter Saw

The motorized version of this is a very useful tool for making quick repeatable crosscuts on widths less than about 8 inches (more if it’s a sliding miter saw) and miter (angled) cuts. You can get non-motorized versions which use your arm as the device to move the saw across the work piece instead. This is tiring for more than a few cuts, but is cheaper.

Where miter saws really shine is with angled cuts. Most of them these days are compound miter saws, which let’s you set the angle of the fence as well as the angle of the blade. This is very useful for trim work.

Primary Advantages vs. a Circular Saw

  • Repeatable cuts: put a stop block on the fence and you can quickly make a bunch of the same length cut by aligning the piece to the stop block.
  • Taller cuts: due to a larger diameter blade they can cut through thicker stock in one clean pass.
  • Accurate: since you have a fixed metal fence and a fixed fulcrum for the saw they’re unlikely to wander
  • Angles: the “miter” part of the name means that the saw can handle complex angles easily.

Primary Disadvantages vs. a Circular Saw

  • Footprint: the size of the tool is a lot larger. You will also likely need a stand of some sort of the tool and to support your work piece.
  • Weight: you’re not going to love moving your miter saw around.
  • Long cuts: even with a sliding miter saw you’re going to max out around 16”
  • Price: they’re more expensive. Sometimes a lot more expensive.

Circular Saw

A circular saw is a portable saw that is designed to be operated with one hand and excels at making cuts that are perpendicular to the surface of the work piece. You can freehand your cut (usually while following a penciled line), or run the edge of the saw plate alongside a straight edge.

Advantages vs. a Miter Saw

  • Portable: if you get a cordless one you can take it with you pretty much wherever. Even a corded one can travel easily.
  • Virtually limitless capacity: since you’re moving the saw across the piece you’re not limited by the size of your fence or blade size.
  • Price: you can get the last circular saw you’ll ever need for less than $100. Less than $50 if you don’t care about it being cordless or it being new.

Disadvantages vs. a Miter saw

  • Accuracy: unless you have a very steady hand or are using a rock solid fence the accuracy of your cut will be lower. Plenty fine for framing. I wouldn’t want to use it for detailed work.
  • Depth of cut: since the blade is physically smaller in diameter it won’t be able to handle as thick of stock as a miter saw
  • Angles: angled cuts are going to be difficult and/or impossible. Straight 90 degree cuts are all you should expect to get out of a circular saw.