Internet

Event Calendar 3.1.4

Over on the Masters Miata Club Website I have been using a calendar plugin Event Calendar by Alex Tingle to keep track of the Club’s events since the very beginning of the site’s WordPress era, circa 2008. Coincidentally 2008 is the year of the last stable release of the plugin, Version 3.1.4, and I have been using it ever since. It was tested to work with WordPress Version 2.6.3 and it was still working with its current version 5.1.1 ( a whopping 220 updates.)

It would probably still be working except for one thing, PHP. PHP is the server scripting language that WordPress runs on and like WordPress it has been going through its updates and version numbers too. The Club’s website is hosted on GoDaddy and when it first started there it was running on PHP Version 5.2.6. PHP is up to Version 7.1.26 which is somewhere around 200 updates as well, but WordPress is barely ready for that new a version yet and quite a few of the plugins aren’t either. But WordPress has been nagging me to update to a minimum newer version of 5.6 (105 updates from 5.2.6) that at least has included some more modern secure scripting to keep it stable.

Last Monday I broke down and updated the hosting server to run PHP5.6 and sure enough, doing so broke down the whole Club website. I finally managed to get logged in to the WordPress dashboard and deactivate the 30 some odd plugins used to make it pretty and functional and the website came back online. It looked ugly and was barely usable, but it was back up. I then started activating plugins one by one until it crashed. The one that did it was the Event Calendar. This was bad, there were quite a few stylization plugins we could have lived without, but an event calendar is kind of integral.

I headed over to the WordPress Add a Plugin page to find another event calendar plugin. Searching for the phrase event calendar results in 605 items. Now, not all of these are actual event calendar plugins, quite a few just have one of the words event or calendar in their description. In the block showing each result there was a line listing how many active installs of the plugin there were, ranging from over 700,000 for one all the way down to numbering in the tens.

I had four requirements: 1) event posts integrate seamlessly into the site’s temple, 2) be able to display a monthly view calendar on a separate page, 3) have a sidebar widget that could display a list of upcoming events and 4) have the ability to leave comments on the post. I started installing plugins one by one, entering a couple of events that were actually upcoming and looked for my four criteria. Below is a list of all the plugins I tried (in alphabetical order):

  1. All-In-One Event Calendar
  2. Calendar
  3. Calendar by WD
  4. Calendar Event Multi View
  5. Event Calendar – Responsive Calendar
  6. Event Calendar WD
  7. Event Organizer
  8. Events Made Easy
  9. Events Manager
  10. FooEvents Calendar
  11. FT Calendar
  12. Modern Events Calendar (Lite)
  13. My Calendar
  14. Simple Event Planner
  15. Spiffy Calendar
  16. Sugar Calendar (Lite)
  17. Super Simple Events Calendar
  18. The Events Calendar
  19. Tokify Events
  20. WP Event Manager
  21. XO Events Calendar

There were a few that wouldn’t work at all for one reason or another. About two-thirds of them wouldn’t meet the first one. The club’s site has a dark green background and the template worked by overlaying a lighter color for the posts and other information displayed and most of these plugins created a post that was somehow outside the normal WordPress “loop” so that light color didn’t display leaving the post information unrecognizable against the dark background. The only one I found that did display the posts correctly failed on generating a readable monthly calendar.

Eventually I came to the realization I was going have to modify the look of the site by making the background lighter. Once I did that I started going back through some of the more popular ones and finally ended up with the All-In-One Event Calendar. I’m not real thrilled with the look of the sidebar widget, I can’t modify it, but after installing and uninstalling 21 plugins, many multiple times, I’m done looking.

You know, now that I have slightly changed the template colors once, maybe I should do it again turning everything else blue to match that widget look…

Happy Birthday Google

When I opened Chrome this morning right there on the new tab page was a Google Doodle that looked like those birthday cake candles in the shape of letters. When I opened a news page there was a note about today being Google’s 20th birthday. Well, now the the doodle make sense. But then I notice the image attached to the news bit and it looked nothing like the one I got. What the heck?

I opened a new tab and when I went to hit the play button on my Google Doodle, as my mouse reached the edge a title attribute box popped up with the phrase “Happy Birthday, Brian!” in it. What do you know, today is my birthday and Google knew it, so, cool or creepy or what the heck did I expect? Or more importantly, does there really need to be a comma after birthday and before my name?

In Russia, Photo Manipulates YOU Redux

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of my discovering a website called PhotoFunia and my glee of finding it still up and running here you go:

Today on the Internet

After annoying both Google with my badly worded searches and my co-workers with badly worded questions, I had enough knowledge of what not to do, that I finally figured out how to share a post from my timeline to the timeline of a Facebook group.

I joined Instagram with the lofty goal of taking a random photo each day, running it through a filter, or not, with the goal of showing the cool kids that we adults are just as lame as they think we are. So far I have yet to post a photo or for that matter figure out to use it. My preferred user name, any variation of Brian the Red, was unavailable so I used mistermiata1.

I read this so sad, on point, state of our country’s politics today: The military parade debate is just the latest example of Americans missing the forest for the trees.

Good News Or Bad News?

Depends on who you ask.

In a weird way, I’m kind of disappointed, but Donna is probably pleased as punch by this development – the effects of my earache induced course of steroids is almost all gone. I slept right through last night, I’ve stopped fidgeting and have regained some control over my ability to stay focused at work. More importantly, I no longer have the compulsion to answer the question of “How’s it going?” by starting out with, “Well, I was born in Springfield, but raised in…”

Also good or bad, you decide, the blog posts will probably be a lot shorter and perhaps less frequent. To prove the point, that’s all I got tonight.

Go read something good: Before the Internet.