New look, new theme, same old stuff.  I wanted to try out a  new theme to see how I, and others, like it.  So let me know what you think about the change.  Hopefully this theme will make things a little more streamlined and easier to read/see.  Plus, this theme has some built in widgets for things like Twitter, which may encourage me to ‘tweet’ more about the boring stuff I’m doing with my life.  Most of you know that I’m not a big fan of Twitter, but I do sort of like the idea of keeping my internet presence connected together into more of a cohesive unit instead of having multiple little footprints strewn about the web.  We’ll see how that works out.

So that’s it for now.  Let me know what you think.

This is a guide to manually modify the source code for the Starred Review plugin in order to resolve the recent “permissions” error that has shown up since upgrading to WordPress 2.8.1 and later.

You can modify the source code using the WordPress plugin editor on the left hand side of the dashboard or you can view/download the entire modified source code here and simply copy and paste into the editor if you wish.  The file you’ll want to modify is starred-review.php. As far as editing code goes, it’s a relatively simple change, but before you edit anything, I recommend copying the original source code and having a backup, just in case something goes awry. Read the rest of this entry »

After hours and hours of searching, reading, shouting, tweaking, and breaking code, I’ve taken matters into my own hands and managed to fix the Starred Review plugin that appears on the right hand side of the site.  Usually this is something that the developer of the plugin would do.  After much complaining to him to update his plugin to address new security issues with WordPress, he went ahead and released an upgrade from version 1.3 to 1.4.

Unfortunately, the upgrade didn’t resolve the problem.  So I gave myself the frustrating assignment to follow in the long line of people who take open source code from others, and modify it to make it better (or work at all), and then share it with the others who were just as frustrated with their broken plugin as I was.

So for now, enjoy the condensed and updated starred reviews on the side of this site, along with links to my full length reviews.  Now I suppose my next task is to add a feature to the plugin that allows for randomization of the starred reviews, rather than just the 5 most recent reviews.