hung on like so many things that shouldn’t

Such as current affairs hosts, heads of state and even reality television.

It pays to read the Readme…

I’ve been trying for some time to get the category drop-downs to work in the main menu.

Oh, you didn’t realise? Yes — there’s a page menu right next to a category menu.

Not that it matters to the naked eye — or the clothed one for that matter — they look the same for all intents and purposes.

The reason there’s two menus side-by-side is so I can easily arrange the various stories (the blog posts) into a coherent order for my burgeoning readership (ie. You.).

It’s fundamentally hard to create a wordpress page that has blog posts on it. And blog posts are the easiest way to add content to the site without having to go into manually creating each page, the links, and all the rest of it. Far easier to create individual posts and link them to the various categories.

For example, you’ll find the first story “Fire with Fire” is linked to “Book 1″, “Daisy”, “Prime”, “Miss Rook” and “Colonel Panix”.

This would be extremely hard to achieve on individual pages.

Now to my other problem – clearly stating the order of the posts for the drop-down menu.

This initially worked because I was numbering each post (eg: 1-2:Confinement), etc. However, when I reached 10, things went pear-shaped.

The traditional numbering system in WordPress is one of two things — orderby — which can be postname or id, or orer which is asc or des (ascending or descending).

Useless in all cases for the posts.

I’ve had “My Category Order” installed for some time, but was unable to get it to work for the drop-down fields. An hours research finally paid-off though.

Because in the Readme file is a single PHP statement which does the work for me.

*sigh*.

Onto the next challenge!

ps. It’s funny how much of the work that’s going into the site is actually invisible UNLESS IT DOESN’T WORK. It’s all about a seamless user-experience. That and me trying to avoid screaming and banging my head against the wall beside me.

Finally a Series plugin that works!

I’ve been mucking around for most of the evening on “series” plugins for WordPress and the Daisy Donnie site.

My requirement was as follows:

I need a way to regroup related posts (other than with just categories). The logic is that the Daisy Donnie stories work in two ways — the first is the literal run through the book, and the other is inter-related stories which make up a specific storyline (or series). I need a sidebar widget for preference to display these and the order of stores, and to allow the reader to select the stories one-at-a-time (rather than with the whole lot on a single page which is — to be honest — unworkable reading-wise).

So, I started with in-series, which after an hour of playing around, found out that it’s no-longer supported and is broken in this version of WordPress. Would have been nice to have had this information on the WordPress plugin page. Oh well.

Next was Organize Series, which worked to a point. I was able to get the posts into the “series” relatively easily, and determine a manual order (rather than ordering by date or by title, which is the only apparent shortcoming of the plugin I eventually got working. But more on that later). However, with this plugin was a major issue. While it had a widget for the sidebar (Yaay!), and it listed the Series titles (W00t!), when you clicked the series title, the page that displayed didn’t actually list the stories specifically set for the series. It actually excluded them. Subsequent testing determined that it wasn’t doing that either. It was just determining its own order based upon nothing in partucluar. I left a message on the site, and am awaiting a response.

Strike Two.

The third option, Series,  was a similar failure, simply because it was really hard to work-out how to make the posts display as belonging to the series. Maybe I was missing something, or had become bored.

This soon changed with Hackadelic Series, which required an additional plugin: Hackadelic Sliding Notes. This worked really well. And I’ve left it on in the blog to act as a Table of Contents of sorts for the posts that belong to series. However, it didn’t come with a sidebar widget so people could find the specific series titles and the stories (posts) that belonged to it.

After some further mucking around in Google, and ignoring an apparently unrelated post, I was ready to give it up. Then I took a look at the aforementioned post and found another one.

EG-Series – here was a plugin that I was willing to try as a last resort… and it worked. Oh did it work!

I’ve got two sidebar widgets – one for listing the series titles (in a naff field, but it’s better than nothing), and another for the stories/posts IN that series.

And the angels cried a long word starting with “H” and all seemed peachy.

There is only one small issue, but I’ve left an enhancement request with the lovely French gent – a way to manually determine the order of the posts/stories in the Series.

But this is a minor issue for a single reason: The plugin just works. It’s not got tons of wordpress code to deal with. There’s plenty of UI, and it even works with the TinyMCE plugin (which I’m about to install)…

Now I can sleep well — another achievement… achieved with the help of plugin developers.

Bad karaoke

Not that there’s good karaoke of course

Mind twisting issues

The facts were simple: the body she jumped into shared her physical characteristics and name, but the shock of the jump scrambled her memory for as little as five minutes to as much as five hours. There were many potential reasons for the phenomena, and Daisy had thought at length about a fair few of them before finally giving up in resignation during her sixteenth jump, immediately after surviving a close-encounter with The Assassin, a pissed off and highly intelligent octopus and a suicidal sushi chef whose stellar career was cut short because of a single simple mistake. The mistake, of course, was that if you insist on hacking the tentacle off of a live carnivorous mollusc, you should make sure the remaining knives in your collection are well out of reach of those that remain.

MC

Master of Ceremonies. There is no word in the English language, regardless of which continent you live on that is spelled E-m-c-e-e that actually has a meaning other than ‘I’m too dim to work out or remember a contraction of two simple words.’ Seriously, it’s not that hard, people!

Read DaisyDonnie on your mobile

You can read DaisyDonnie easily on your Mobile Phone, now I’ve installed the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin! It makes the site less colourful, but a lot easier to read on your phone.

1-9:The Middle Child of the Secret of the Lost Gavel

A tinny funeral dirge began to play.

‘Doesn’t look good Donnie,’ said Freddy.

Donnie’s hand hovered over his groin, then he heard a high pitched whirring. It sounded like a drill.

‘Guards,’ yelled Freddy. ‘Security breach! Shoot that bastard!’

The doors toppled inwards, the result of a good kick, and there stood Donnie’s rescuer.

‘Achtung!!’ screamed Fritz the German, dressed unexpectedly in a wrestling leotard, a blue-black mask and cape. He hurled a stick-grenade down the corridor.

Donnie was bathed in the glow of the explosion, shading his eyes.

‘Get out of here,’ screamed the German, hefting a big machine-gun up. He fired quick bursts from the machine gun, the sound accompanied by a faintly pleasant metallic tinkling of spent cartridges raining down on the concrete.

Donnie had knelt down and had his head covered by his hands; he looked like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand.

‘La la la…’ Donnie murmured in desperate terror. ‘I’m not listening…’

‘Get out,’ screamed the German and back-kicked, catching Donnie’s backside. ‘SCHNELL!!!’

Donnie jumped up like a hundred meter sprinter and ran for the nearest safe thing: a perfectly maintained 1963 Volkswagen Beetle.

Meanwhile, the German tipped one of the barrels on its side and rolled it down the corridor.

He hurled another hand-grenade after it for good measure and ran for the car.

The explosion and resulting fire successfully cremated the guards.

Within moments Donnie and the German were roaring out of the car-park (As far as you could roar in a VW Beetle) and into the side-streets around the studio, slowing only for Donnie to stand out of the sunroof with a stick grenade which was lobbed into the guard’s booth at the main gate. Beside the gate was a poster for the fight of the century, Rambozo’s Roarers versus McWarickson’s Trio of Terrifying Terrorists.

* * *

Donnie started breathing again — another near-death experience under his belt. Maybe when he had the full set he’d be allowed to stop all this running around?

‘Thanks for that,’ said Donnie to his rescuer.

‘Don’t mention it,’ said Fritz.

‘Um,’ Donnie pondered how to ask about the man’s get-up. ‘What’s with–’

The German turned to face Donnie.

Donnie’s eyes widened in realisation.

‘Raznou the Magnificent?’ exclaimed Donnie, a boyhood dream coming true: his wrestling hero had rescued him from certain death.

‘Yes,’ said Raznou. ‘It is I.’

‘You rescued me,’ said Donnie. ‘Why?’

Raznou turned pensively to watch the road ahead. ‘It was what you said… the Lost Gavel.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Donnie, disappointed.

‘Freddy has been searching for it,’ said Raznou, gearing down as they had reached an intersection. ‘And when you asked about it, I knew what I had to do.’

‘Where’s Maria,’ asked Donnie.

‘Maria,’ murmured Raznou, heartbroken. ‘Maria left me, left the team, for a job in the entertainment industry. One that didn’t involve tight lycra and Thrush once a month.’

‘Penfolde!’

Donnie looked up through the windscreen as a huge helicopter zoomed overhead, turned in the air and hovered over the intersection before them.

Raznou hit the brakes and they stopped in a cloud of burning rubber.

1-8:The secret of the lost gavel

He woke with a killer headache and groaned slowly while checking his genitalia for evidence of alteration.

Ah, there they were, right where he’d left them.

A sharp and loud beeping assaulted his ears leaving him feeling as if he’d been aurally mugged.

An eye slowly opened and focussed on a mobile telephone not far from his face.

A message on its face flashed on and off.

Donnie attempted to move but found he couldn’t. His face appeared stuck to whatever he was resting against.

He moved a little, experimentally pulling at the surface and slowly his face came away with a rip of paper. He peeled his eyes open and cracked his jaw.

There was a newspaper on the desk, coated in red stickiness; some had ripped off and was still stuck to his face. The headline, on the newsprint that remained, screamed:

Advertising Triumph!

A picture of a pyramid accompanied the statement, though the rest of the report was obscured by haemoglobin.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, dabbing at the top of his head where the scab of a wound was clear evidence of being belted by something fairly unpleasant. The caked blood acted as a macabre hair-gel.

Below the report was another, equally unbelievable, this one had an image of triangular mirrors against a starry backdrop.

‘Solar Mirrors launched,’ read Donnie. ‘Global Warming to be finally controllable.’

He snorted derision.

‘Wankers.’

Donnie glanced around the depressingly dull office. Dark wood-panelling insinuated itself upwards from the grotty wooden floor, stopping partway up the walls in much the same way as rising damp. Beyond this was nasty-looking peeling wallpaper terminating in a cracked and probably asbestos-infested ceiling.

In the middle of the ceiling a fan slowly rotated, like a bored fast-food service assistant. It seemed to be saying, ‘Do you want air with that?’.

Donnie decided to help the asbestosis along a little, and reached into the top drawer where he found a packet of Gauloises and a silver zippo lighter with an amusing aeronautical motif. A practiced flip and click resulted in a lit cigarette landing between his lips.

He flipped the newspaper open onto page 39 to his horoscope while slowly flexing his face, trying to get back some feeling and to crack the sticky red varnish over it.

1-13:The Secret of the Lost Gavel: A New Pope

Elvis snorted derision, which got him a pointed look from Freddy.

‘We’re clear,’ called-out the Floor Manager.

‘Right, you fuckin’ bastard,’ said Freddy furiously, stepping closer to The King. ‘Why now? Why’d you bring her here?’

Elvis met Freddy’s gaze and the air fairly crackled between them.

‘I smell a bloody rat you over-popular prick,’ said Freddy. ‘You want me to have you locked up too?’

‘You don’t have the nerve,’ said Elvis calmly. ‘There’d be riots and you know it.’

Freddy’s expression grew more intense again, knowing full-well that Elvis was right.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the assistant carefully, walking to one side of the men. ‘This solves nothing.’

‘He’s on my bloody show,’ Freddy hollered. ‘So he’ll bloody do what he’s told!’

‘Bite me,’ said Elvis, turning contemptuously away.

Freddy fumed at Elvis, then stormed back to his throne, impotent rage boiling within him.

* * *

Another day, another dark corridor, mused Daisy as she was led by the arm towards a metal door.

‘How are your bonds,’ asked Marcus, beneath the guard’s costume.

‘Tight,’ said Daisy, slightly irritated. Her wrists were beginning to itch.

‘You go first,’ said Marcus ‘I’ll loosen them as we go.’

‘Okay.’

‘Just remember,’ said Marcus. ‘Go bananas on my signal.’

‘Which is?’

Marcus considered.

‘I dunno,’ he said, glancing upwards with thought. ‘Bananas?’

‘How the hell are you going to work that into the conversation?’

They stopped by an armour-plated door. Above this was a small camera and a speaker.

‘What,’ barked a voice. The speaker fed back for a moment then stopped.

‘Got a prisoner,’ said Marcus.

‘Good for you,’ said the guard within the facility over the speaker.

The door buzzed and Marcus pushed it open.

* * *