Some housekeeping updates

Point of interest in case anybody wanders by here, since I don’t update this site very often (most of my activity is over on angelahighland.com):

I’ve done a bit of under-the-hood site maintenance, due to a couple of plugins I have been using on this site being deprecated and/or outright vanishing off of the WordPress.org plugins repository.

This has impacted three things here on the site:

One, my Contact page no longer has a form on it. But I do mention my email on that page, so if you really want to get in touch with me, you can do that.

Two, I have swapped over to using a different Flickr plugin to show stuff from Flickr. This impacts a small number of old posts here, but also my Great Big Sea Pictures. Visually, things should only look slightly different, but work the same general way: click on a thumbnail, it’ll take you over to the actual picture on Flickr.

And three, I’ve done some rejiggering of the custom code on my Roleplay Logs archive. Way back in ye olden times before this site was hosted on WordPress, I whipped up custom PHP to organize those logs and show you all the various sets of them. When I pulled the site into a WordPress install, this necessitated me taking that PHP code and making a custom plugin out of it.

The problem with this: WordPress doesn’t natively let you run PHP on posts or pages, so I’d been using another plugin to allow for the execution of that PHP on the pages in question.

However, since that plugin vanished off of WordPress.org, I felt it was appropriate to rejigger the code so that the actual site pages would no longer need PHP in them directly.

This has meant I got to teach myself how to do shortcodes today! Which basically means I still have the pages calling the logs PHP, but there’s an intervening layer now between “page” and “PHP code”. I.e., a shortcode, a short string that basically tells WordPress “okay now go find the code in the plugin that handles this shortcode, and do the right thing as a result”.

So that’s fun. :)

Anybody notice anything looking wacky, do please let me know!