I’ve been cleaning up The Sh17 today and last night. The sidebar is less cluttered, and the little grey-red bullet things are cleaned up so they don’t look so out of place. I added the striped background h2 titles to separate more of the sidebar.

I removed the adsense bar at the top, and put one at the bottom of the sidebar instead. I installed Popularity Contest to show which posts are the most popular. You can see it on the sidebar between the Archives and Meta sections. It’s at the bottom of every post too(until I take it out)

There’s also one less post showing on the front page. I’m about to create a new page showing the best articles/posts and clean up the categories and whatnot. If anybody has any suggestions, now’s the time to tell me!

I just updated WordPress to 2.1.3, and it looks like it went smoothly. Dreamhost has a neat one-click-install system that works pretty well; I haven’t had any trouble with it yet. I clicked upgrade and it sent me an email in a few minutes letting me know it was complete.

Also, if you click the Dreamhost link above and enter the referral code THESH17 then you’ll get $90 off your bill and we’ll get $7 for referring you.

It’s been slightly annoying me that videos weren’t showing up in The Sh17’s RSS feed, so I decided to modify the plugin I’ve been using.

From the author’s page: jovelblog » Embedded Video with Link

V3.0 - 30.01.2007

* plugin ready for WordPress 2.1!
* removed video object in feed, just a link instead
* added video portal: brightcove, aniBOOM
* added support for local media files like mov, avi, mpg, flv, swf

I guess videos showed up in feeds up until version 3.0. I started editing the embedded-video.php file and around line 132 is where my modifications start.
Lines 132 to 159. All I did was comment out the if/else statement.
//if ( !is_feed() ) {
switch ($match[1]) {
case “youtube”: $output .= YOUTUBE_TARGET; break;
case “google”: $output .= GOOGLE_TARGET; break;
case “myvideo”: $output .= MYVIDEO_TARGET; break;
case “clipfish”: $output .= CLIPFISH_TARGET; break;
case “sevenload”: $output .= SEVENLOAD_TARGET; break;
case “revver”: $output .= REVVER_TARGET; break;
case “metacafe”: $output .= METACAFE_TARGET; break;
case “yahoo”: $output .= YAHOO_TARGET; break;
case “ifilm”: $output .= IFILM_TARGET; break;
case “myspace”: $output .= MYSPACE_TARGET; break;
case “brightcove”: $output .= BRIGHTCOVE_TARGET; break;
case “aniboom”: $output .= ANIBOOM_TARGET; break;
case “vimeo”: $output .= VIMEO_TARGET; break;
case “guba”: $output .= GUBA_TARGET; break;
case “dailymotion”: $output .= DAILYMOTION_TARGET; $match[3] = “nolink”; break;
case “garagetv”: $output .= GARAGE_TARGET; $match[3] = “nolink”; break;
case “local”:
if (preg_match(”%([[:print:]]+).(mov|qt)$%”, $match[2])) { $output .= QUICKTIME_TARGET; break; }
elseif (preg_match(”%([[:print:]]+).(wmv|mpg|mpeg|mpe|asf|asx|wax|wmv|wmx|avi)$%”, $match[2])) { $output .= VIDEO_TARGET; break; }
elseif (preg_match(”%([[:print:]]+).(swf|flv)$%”, $match[2])) { $output .= FLASHPLAYER_TARGET; break; }
default: break;
}
//} else {
// if a feed, overwrite nolink option
//$match[3] = “Link”;
//}

And I added this:

//add generic <noembed> so that feed readers that dont support it won't get confused
$output .= "<noembed>--There's a video here that you can't see. You should check out the blog post and watch it.--</noembed>";

Now. With any luck, video’s will start showing up in feeds. If the plugin doesn’t get updated anytime soon, I’ll extend it and just have it post a thumbnail of the video or something with a link to the post.

For a test:

I followed the advice from gHacks and started optimizing thesh17 a little bit better.

I installed the css-compress wordpress plugin that automatically gzips .css files, and it reduced the (~)download time from 28.85 seconds on a 56k modem to 23 seconds. That alone is pretty good, but I decided to re-enable the normal gzip support in wordpress too, so that all pages are gzipped before being sent to your browser. This didn’t have much effect on thesh17, so it was still at 23 seconds.

I’ll still keep messing around with things I find, but for right now the main page is less than 100k with all images, scripts, and stylesheets loaded. On a T1 or a good cable connection that’s around 4 or 5 seconds. With any luck, I can get it lower. Check it out for yourself.

So I just figured out how to schedule future posts in wordpress. It’s crazy easy. I added a video of the day for the next 3 days, and it’ll come in handy once me and Andy start working on the comic.

I also fixed the links to Home, Sh17Cast, and the Forums.

I upgraded wordpress to 2.1.1 so leave a comment if anything’s messing up. More importantly. Here’s my new spray for counterstrike: