I’ve been doing some geek stuffs lately, which I really miss when I was still in college. I remember studying PHP on my own and tweaking my theme then to make it a valid XHTML markup. Since I’ve been doing Java and a lot of other things these days, I was lazy to do some customizations on my current theme. But now that I have some spare time (wag ka maingay sa boss ko), I was able to focus on those customizations and implemented them here.
I know that focusing more on the content is better, but since I have nothing to share today, I just thought that maybe some technical details might have some of my attention for now. Most of these changes may not concern you, but for me it’s really an accomplishment that I was able to figure out these things to think that I haven’t had any PHP activity for a long time. 
So first off, I created a child theme for K2 which is the theme that I currently use. K2 is pretty easy to customize, so I really didn’t held back on modifying things the way that I wanted to. Since I so adore my new camera and I am quite into photography these days, I thought of displaying some EXIF data in the sidebar while viewing pictures in a gallery. EXIF data contains additional image metadata (whoa! metadata!) like the focal length, the camera you were using, the works. So if you try to click the images in my past post, you will be redirected to its gallery, and will see the EXIF details from there. For some, this change might mean that I just wanted to show off. Correct. 
Next thing that I did on this blog is still related to images. When I posted images of my childhood toys, I find them so small that you can’t see the details. I opt to scale them that way so they may fit to the content part of the blog and not stretch its way through the sidebar. By default you can click the image and see it load on a blank page, but I think that is less convenient, since users may have to click the Back button to checkout other images. That’s the time I thought of incorporating Lokesh Dhakar’s Lightbox concept. That way users may click and view the pictures right there and then, without going back to previous pages. I searched for existing WordPress plugins that may offer this kind of functionality, but I think people just want to complicate stuffs. I found a plugin that offers some functionality close to what I wanted, so I tried modifying it. I couldn’t make it work for quite sometime, that I trashed the idea and just created my own plugin (yabang no?). After some coding, I was able to make it work! I just created my first WordPress plugin. So cool!
After coding the above customizations, I wanted to put them on a Subversion repository so if ever I would break something while experimenting, I can simply revert it back to the working version and start all over again. I thought of hosting it here in my web host by installing Subversion but I can’t contact the web host guy. I thought he won’t allow me anyway. Thanks to Google Code, I was able to host my codes there. I created two directories that will hold my works: one for plugins, and one for themes. I hope I could make another plugin for my blog. And who knows, maybe someday I would be able to create a totally new theme for this blog.
So there, completely geek stuff. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be back to normal. 
