Carrie

I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I use MS Outlook as my e-mail software. If I used it for just e-mail, I would have switched to Thunderbird ages ago. After all, I switched from IE to Firefox a few years ago, and haven’t looked back. No, I use Outlook for everything; the contacts section is my address book. It maintains birthdays, anniversaries, email addresses, home addresses, website addresses, almost anything I could want. I have a task list to remind me when certain bills are due, with a checkbox so I know if I’ve paid them this month. I keep my work schedule in there, since my schedule changes from week to week. And it syncs to my Dell Axim, so I can take my contacts and lists with me anywhere.

I’ve installed Thunderbird in the past, to try it out, and see if I could switch. It’s nice for email, but the contacts section was sorely lacking, and it had no calendar function. I decided that I would switch to Thunderbird only when it could replace Outlook for me; decent contacts, decent calendar, and syncing with my Axim. Well, come to find out you can now synchronize Thunderbird with a Pocket PC. About a month ago, Lifehacker had an article detailing just how you can sync your Pocket PC to Thunderbird. I think maybe it’s time for me to re-evaluate Thunderbird, and see how the advances in the calendar plug-ins have come.

ETA:

Ok, until Thunderbird improves the address book, I’m sticking with Outlook. I’ve been spoiled by the birthday and anniversary fields, and the auto-creation of birthday and anniversary events.

Today was opening day for TMNT, so of course Matt & I had to go. I enjoyed it terribly! I would have enjoyed it a bit more, and maybe been a touch less self-conscious, had we not been practically the only adults in the theater NOT accompanied by a slew of small children. I only wish I was joking. I was expecting SOME children – it was the first night show (6:45pm) on a Friday night after all. I was not prepared for the large groups of children, going all the way down to toddlers. And the large group of children that sat RIGHT next to us, not even giving us the unspoken one seat buffer. It’s not like space was tight – it was a good showing, but nowhere near a full house.

But I digress. The movie was very good – not terribly campy like the old cartoon was, but there was a bit of silliness thrown in at spots to lighten the mood. It was a bit dark at times – much darker than I was expecting a PG movie to go. The inevitable clash between Leonardo and Raphael was really the one dark point, and was handled very well; it was similar to the original comic books in that respect. Establishing the characterizations and personalities of the turtles was done remarkably well; far better than any of the live action films, I think. The image of Donatello wearing a headset and doing phone tech support was hilarious, and fitting.

There were a few plot holes, but in a movie about giant ninja turtles, that’s a given, isn’t it? Honestly, the most glaring plot hole to me was either continuity, or the script writer’s inability to count. I’ll try to be a bit vague and not give anything away, but if you’re paranoid, you might want to just skip down to the next paragraph. At any rate, at one point in the film, they establish that 12 of the 13 monsters have been caught, and that they won’t catch the real 13th monster. A scene or two later, Raphael is shown fighting a monster, so it must be the as yet not captured 13th monster. They catch a dummy 13th monster, and then show all the monsters in their cages, including the monster Raphael was fighting after they established that they’d caught 12. So what gives? Can they not count? Did I miss something?

After the movie we were hungry, so we walked over to Uno Chicago Grill, as I’d never been there. Very tasty – reminded me of Applebee’s, but with less crap on the walls, and more of a pizza twist. I had the Rattlesnake Pasta, which was quite good; basically Chicken Alfredo, but with penne and a spicy Alfredo sauce. I was preparing myself for something a bit more spicy, but still good. I’ll definitely go there again.

I finished building my archive, and honestly, it was a lot easier than I expected. The default WordPress theme comes with an archive.php, so I just copied that, and modified it to match the rest of my theme. Essentially, I just copied the index.php and displayed the excerpt instead of the entire content. After browsing online to check out other archives in an effort to determine what I want, I decided that having an “archive” page is the way to go, if for no other reason than it’s convenient for browsing. Basically, archive.php controls how the archives are formatted, but archives.php is the page for navigating. After getting my archive up and running, though, I realized that while I know what plug-ins I’m using to format things, people without admin access have no idea what I’m using. So I figured I’d include a list of plug-ins I’m using, a colophon of sorts, in case anyone out there is curious.

• Glossy Blue Theme – Not a plug-in, but still worth listing. The theme I currently use, and love. It does everything I want, style-wise. Anything it didn’t do (like archives) I built myself. This is his first theme, if you can believe it.
• Widgets – For themes with a sidebar, this is fabulous. It lets you easily customize the sidebar without hacking the code. You can also easily downoad other widgets to add to your sidebar, and place them however you like. It’s like Lego bricks.
• Drop-down Archives Widget – I don’t have this problem yet, as I’ve only had my site running for 3 months, but the longer your site runs, the longer your list of monthly archives becomes. This widget turns that long list into a drop-down menu, to conserve space. Apparently some themes come with a drop-down menu for the archives, but enabling widgets will overwrite that option in the sidebar.
• Brian’s Threaded Comments – I LOVE this plug-in. I want to be able to reply to a specific comment, and not just have my reply be tossed at the end of a list of comments, so you have to guess what you’re replying to. I’m a huge fan of threaded comments, and this plug-in accomplishes it well.
• Custom Posts Per Page – This lets you change the number of posts displayed on various types of pages, without editing the reading options on the WordPress dashboard. If you want 4 posts displayed on the front page, but 20 displayed on the archives, this will do it.
• Clean Archives – This plug-in displays beautifully formatted archives. It breaks everything down by month, and further by day. This is exactly what I wanted for an archive.
• Polls and more – I’ve not actually used the poll plug-in or widget yet, but I’ve downloaded and installed them just in case. There are actually quite a few good widgets here. Definitely worth exploring.

And there you have it! A complete listing of all the plug-ins and widgets I use.

So, I’ve determined that the one thing I really want for my blog is archives. But I don’t want a static archive page, like the “About Me” page. Ideally, when you click on the monthly archive in the dropdown box, or one of the categories, it will take you to a page, with a list of all the posts that meet that criteria. But I don’t want all the posts there – just the subject lines, the date posted, maybe a line or two excerpt, maybe the number of comments on each post. It sounds like I’m going to need to code this myself, unless I can find and modify something else that already exists. This should be fun, considering I have NO experience with PHP. Oh well, I’m a relatively quick learner. Wish me luck.