Photo by Lisa Max

Good news (unless you’re sick of me posting about CandyCult, in which case you might want to leave now)! The artist merchandise, including my crafts, that was sold at the Candy Cult opening was such a hit that we were asked to sell them again at the Northbridge Festival this weekend.

I’m not completely sure of all the details, but all the stalls will be on James Street from Lake Street to William Street, and should include a really fun and eclectic range of sellers. There’s also performers around and an inflatable igloo apparently! Should be lots of fun. The stalls will be running from 1-11pm on Saturday 1st November, and I’ll be manning the CandyCult stall between 3-6pm so come say hi if you can! More details on the Northbridge Festival website.

I think something like half of my crafts and buttons are still available and there’s quite a few bits from other artists too, so please come along!

Also a quick reminder: the CandyCult exhibition is closing this Sunday, so if you haven’t already please go check it out. Details here.

I’ve been putting off upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress as I’ve made some slightly hacky changes to a few of the files which I haven’t kept a proper record of, and inevitably forget to back up before upgrading. But not this time! I have now backed up everything and will put a list of my hacks here, for my future reference and for anyone who feels a bit limited by Wordpress’s templates.

Giving the category listing ‘before’ and ‘after’

I’m honestly not sure why the ability to put in what you want to appear before and after categories isn’t Wordpress by default. All I wanted to do is put those little dots in between the category items to make it the same as the archives listing - which actually does have the ability to choose what goes before and after each item.

After a lot of Googling I eventually came across this tutorial which hacks a few Wordpress files to enables wp_list_categories() to do exactly what I wanted it to. Now I (and you) can add dots, random tags and whatever you like between categories!

Removing the year from archives listing

Listing the year after every month in the archives listing wp_get_archives() seemed a bit pointless to me, especially when it’s listed horizontally the way I have it above. There doesn’t seem to be a way to remove it or change the date format, so again I had to turn to a hacky solution.

Open wp-includes/general-template.php

Around line 431 you should find the following:

See the %2$d part? That’s putting in the year, so replace with:

No more year!

Now I’m not saying that these are the best methods for creating a Wordpress template - they’re hacks, prone to problems whenever you upgrade, but the best solutions that I could find to achieve the look that I wanted. If anyone knows a better method of achieving this I’d be grateful if you could tell me so I don’t have to remember what to change every time I upgrade!

Just a quick sketch of my avatar on a popular forum site I used to frequent. A lot has changed and I don’t have the time to waste there anymore, but the outfits are always good fun to draw.

It’s strange sometimes, to look back and see how we’ve evolved - just a few years ago this forum and MMORPG’s like Ragnarok Online were my main online presence, besides my blog. Now the majority of my online presence and time online is spent on things related to design, arts and crafts - blogging, posting work, conversing with others, reading through my hundreds of RSS feed items over breakfast as if it were a newspaper. I’m not sure if I should be worried about the role the internet has had in forming who I am, but there isn’t anything to do but embrace it, I think.