Living with Mint
As some may know the other week I installed Mint, a little web stats application from Shaun Inman.
Well a week on, how does Mint taste? Did it leave a breath of freshness or loose it’s taste just way too quickly?
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asides
the whole concept of asides to me is an interesting one.
I like the idea of having a seperate section for those off beat comments or posts but I’m still undecided as to the location and style of them. with K2 you have two options; inline or on the side bar. so far I’ve opted for inline but I just don’t think that either place lends itself well to the idea of asides. the sidebar to me is the place for all those funky little ‘php powered’, ‘wordpress’, ‘linux operated’ icons that everone loves to stick in. but the inline option still does not feel right, there is no real seperation between the posts and the ramblings. of course you can change the styles and make them stand out or blend in (which ever your poison) but it still does not just feel right. until I think the man man Michael has shown the way. over the last few weeks the new BB theme; Invader has taken on various guises but his latest work has shown a true difference between the two types of post. I love the concept of the two journals running side by side, so to speak, and the contrast is now easy to understand, you know your reading either an interesting Monday morning quirk or one of those epic insights that leaves you with hmmmm…
for me this is the way forward in terms of this feature, except I neither have the time, knowledge or patience to code it. plus you would need to spin your own version now, hats off to another cutting edge design.
FAlbum plugin
I have been using the flickr album plugin by Ramon Darrow for my photo album but after some rooting around this afternoon I decided to switch over to FAlbum.
With a bit of help from Andreas Linde’s great walkthrough it was up and running in no time. This version looks to have nice admin plugin page which made linking to flickr easy as pie, plus it displays all recent photo’s even if they are not collated in sets.
After a few hourse tweaking and setting it all out I went back to modify some other pages and suddenly was faced with a 500 Server Error! What had just fallen apart?
I then spent a few hours getting to the root of the problem and found removing the .htaccess file for the root and removing permalinks solved it. Right turn permalinks back on; works. Turn friendly url’s on photo plugin on; works. Modify a page and save; 500 Server Error!
It turns out that the FAlbum plugin writes to the .htaccess file but in doing so erases the last #End WordPress marker so when you change a page and WordPress updates the .htaccess file it chokes on the FAlbum section. I manually added the WordPress end marker above the FAlbum being marker and so far it looks to be working ok.
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flickr it is then
we all sat in the pub last night to celebrate Sarah's birthday (hope you had a good one in the end!) and the subject of 'whatcha doing tomorrow came up'. Lucy was simple; working so that left me with two options. 1. dust off my bike and head out on ...
got minted
I decided to give mint a try as a new way to monitor web traffic (if any).
there has been a lot of hype about mint before it’s release but you know me I’m never one to jump too soon so I held back and to be honest it has had some mixed reviews, on the whole I think it has gone down a storm with the newer blogging crowd. I think the old schoolers out there have criticised the price tag of the application and claiming that there are other alternatives out there without the outlay. true. but mint is all about ‘a fresh look at your site’ and to be honest I have to agree on that one, the user interface is very crisp, clean and minty fresh really.
whether it works or not, only time will tell.