Actually, “first ever etching” might be more appropriate. I’m working on a collaborative etching with Shawn Demarest. Shawn provided me with a copper plate covered in what is known as hard ground (which is basically a waxy material that is resistant to acid) and a metal-scratchy-thing. I was instructed to remove the waxy stuff with the scratchy thing and produce a design. Here’s what happened (click image for larger):

On the left, you will see the etched plate. On the right (thanks to the miracles of digital imaging) you will see what a clean print of the plate would look like. By clean, I mean “without the aquatint” which is an etching process allowing for the creation of tones, shadows, and solid areas of color. Aquatint will be be handled by Shawn in her studio.

This print will be on display sometime in June, 2008 at Bite Studio in SE Portland. Check back soon for more details.

Thanks Shawn!!!

You can read more about the modern techniques involved in the etching process if interested.

Please see this plugin before you read this article

Another WordPress tutorial!!!
Andy from Tokyo, Japan writes in asking:

Could you please tell me how you added the text navigation links to your gallery? I would be grateful… …Thank you.

Sure Andy, No problem, but first a little bit of background for everyone else:

Gallery Shortcode

WordPress version 2.5 added an exciting and very awesome feature: The Gallery Shortcode. This feature allows blog authors to add a gallery of thumbnails to their blog posts. Each one of these thumbnails is linked to an individual page which displays a larger version of the image and any other information that has been associated with that image (title, description, comments, etc…). A new template file was added to the WordPress Default theme to display single images. This template file is called image.php.

Image.php?

If your current theme does not have an image.php file, I would suggest that you visit your theme’s homepage and see if a new version has been released for 2.5+. If no new version is available, you can save a copy of the WordPress default theme’s image.php file to your current theme’s directory and modify it match your current theme.

Changing to Text Based Navigation

Now that everyone has a working image.php file in their current theme’s directory, it’s time get rid of those clunky thumbnail links! Unfortunately, I was not able to find any template tags which offered text-based links, so I had to create my own:

function mf_previous_image_link( $link_text ) {
    print mf_adjacent_image_link( $link_text, true );
}
 
function mf_next_image_link( $link_text ) {
    print mf_adjacent_image_link( $link_text, false );
}
 
function mf_adjacent_image_link( $link_text, $prev = true ) {
    global $post;
    $post = get_post($post);
    $attachments = array_values(get_children("post_parent=$post->post_parent&post_type=attachment&post_mime_type=image&orderby=\"menu_order ASC, ID ASC\""));
 
    foreach ( $attachments as $k => $attachment )
        if ( $attachment->ID == $post->ID )
            break;
 
    $k = $prev ? $k - 1 : $k + 1;
 
    if ( isset($attachments[$k]) )
        return '<a href="' . get_attachment_link( $attachments[$k]->ID ) . '">' . $link_text . '</a>';
	else
		return false;
}

You’ll want to paste the above code into your theme’s functions.php file. If your theme does not have a functions.php file, you can make one from scratch. Basically, I have copied a few functions from a core wordpress file, gave each one a unique name and modified them to suite my needs.

The next step is to locate the following code in your image.php file:

<div class="navigation">
	<div class="alignleft"><?php previous_image_link() ?></div>
	<div class="alignright"><?php next_image_link() ?></div>
</div>

Change the above code to:

<div class="navigation">
	<div class="alignleft"><?php mf_previous_image_link( 'Previous Image' ) ?></div>
	<div class="alignright"><?php mf_next_image_link( 'Next Image' ) ?></div>
</div>

Save both image.php and functions.php and upload them to your server. You should now have text-based navigation links for all of your WordPress Galleries.

Image Page Template Hierarchy

The list below illustrates the logic WordPress uses to determine which template file will display the the larger images in your theme. Basically, WordPress first looks for image.php if it is found, it is used, if not, attachment.php is used. Wordpress will try to locate each file in the list before it defaults to index.php.

1. image.php
2. attachment.php
3. single.php
4. index.php

In Conclusion

I hope this helps you out Andy (and whoever else might be reading). Feel free to leave questions in the comments section. Thanks for visiting!

Last Sunday, I went to see Power Circus and Sallo play at Plan B in SE Portland. I brought along ye old trusty digital camera with the mission of taking at least ONE decent shot. I think I got a few, check ‘em out below.

I started out just wanting to take some decent pictures, but then discovered that while most of the shots didn’t really hold up well on their own (Dark, Blurry, etc…), they looked pretty rad when you advanced through them really quickly — like a really jerky stop animation. I have about 400 total shots for Power Circus and plan on piecing them together (with music) into a really jerky animation. Should be fun.

Photos

I think this theory is absolutely beautiful. To watch more visit the site of Neil Adams.

Youtube. It’s one of my favorite places to visit on the internet. Above, I have posted one of the favorite things that I have found on there to date. I have no idea who made it or why, but it is pretty creepy.

Basically, three kids are hanging out with Albert Einstein in an intergalactic elevator. Albert opens the door and the children are introduced to a headless angel named satan who does some pretty impressive magic tricks for them.

Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments section. And definitely leave a comment if you have more information on this clip.

Answers!!!

Thanks to Mike of flammableanimals.com, we have a few answers about this short (see comment below). So, it looks like Albert Einstein does not appear in this clip at all. The gray-haired blob of clay on the intergalactic elevator is actually a different fellow named Mark Twain. I wonder how I ever got these guys confused???

I recently found this animation posted on huellaspyp.com and thought that you might it enjoy it too. The animation was made by The Flowfield Unity and is titled “The Corporate Machine”

Note: The original comic for this animation can be found here.

If you liked this, see: Corporate Puppet.

I always wondered why wordpress allowed excerpts for posts and not for pages. A bit odd considering that both posts and pages are stored in the same database table and can have the same values stored for them. I have found a rather nice work around for this in 2.3.3 and then came…….. Wordpress 2.5!

I recently had a chance to upgrade one of the sites that I manage to the brand new Wordpress 2.5. I noticed right away that drastic changes had been made to the admin section - some for the better and some for the worse. The Requests and Feedback section of the Wordpress forums can better fill you in on all of this.

One thing I noticed immediately was that the Post and Page screens had been completely overhauled. This made me wonder whether or not my custom mf_add_excerpt_to_page() function still worked.

No dice.

Broken.

Luckily it took under 10 minutes to upgrade the function to work with two-point-five. For your viewing pleasure (drum roll please? ) here are both versions:

Wordpress 2.3

<?php
 
add_action( 'dbx_page_advanced', 'mf_add_excerpt_to_page' );
 
function mf_add_excerpt_to_page(){
	global $post;
?>
	<div class="dbx-b-ox-wrapper">
	<fieldset id="postexcerpt" class="dbx-box">
	<div class="dbx-h-andle-wrapper">
	<h3 class="dbx-handle"><?php _e('Optional Excerpt') ?></h3>
	</div>
	<div class="dbx-c-ontent-wrapper">
	<div class="dbx-content"><textarea rows="20" cols="40" name="excerpt" tabindex="6" id="excerpt"><?php echo $post->post_excerpt ?></textarea></div>
	</div>
	</fieldset>
	</div>
<?php
}
?>

Wordpress 2.5

<?php
 
add_action('edit_page_form', 'mf_add_excerpt_to_page' );
 
function mf_add_excerpt_to_page(){
	global $post;
?>
	<div id="postexcerpt" class="postbox <?php echo postbox_classes('postexcerpt', 'post'); ?>">
	<h3><?php _e('Excerpt') ?></h3>
	<div class="inside"><textarea rows="1" cols="40" name="excerpt" tabindex="6" id="excerpt"><?php echo $post->post_excerpt ?></textarea>
	<p><?php _e('Excerpts are optional hand-crafted summaries of your content. You can <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_excerpt" target="_blank">use them in your template</a>'); ?></p>
	</div>
	</div>
<?php
}
?>

You can enter each function/hook combination into your theme’s functions.php file.

Hope someone finds this useful.

• About

  Michael Fields is a mixed-media painter who also builds websites and designs things.

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