Richard & Stephanie Sipe

My digg post on the Wearable Digg Button was featured in last weeks Diggnation. For a Digg user the height of Diggdom is reaching the homepage with a story and then even better its having your story featured on the Diggnation podcast. I actually found Digg through Diggnation which is exactly I am sure why they do the podcast. It was pretty awesome to see the story featured. I cropped the story from the podcast and featured it below.

Note: Diggnation features “mature” language and subjects and is what you may expect from two guys sitting on a couch drinking.

              

I recently received a twitter from Nick Finck about a contest his company Blue Flavor was running to award a free conference admission to WebVisions 2007. I entered two jargon phrases in textbook dictionary formatting and didn’t win. But, I was awarded first looser (IE: second place) and when the first place winner mysteriously could not attend, I won the tickets.

I am excited to attend the conference in my how town of Portland and get the chance to interact and learn from some of the great minds in web development and meet the masterminds? behind “Ask a Ninja.”

Technorati Tags: webvisions

              

The new WordPress 2.1 static homepage feature is awesome and finally makes WordPress a more viable contender in the greater Content Management System (CMS) fight but it has its difficulties. One of the main tricks to learn is how to access the main WordPress “Loop” in a static homepage. In my previous post, WordPress 2.1 static homepage , I mentioned the need to go about this differently and after multiple requests I decided to post a quick write-up on just how to do this.

The Problem: When you copy over your old template the WordPress PHP call to access the Loop now accesses just the loop for that particular page and not the global Loop. What this means is instead of displaying all your posts or even a few it just displays whatever you entered in the content box for your Static Homepage when you created it, following my writeup directions of course.

The Standard Loop Code:

<?php if ($posts) : foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp(); ?>
   <div class="post">
      <?php require(’post.php’); ?>
      <?php comments_template(); // Get wp-comments.php template ?>
   </div>
<?php endforeach; else: ?>
   <p><?php _e(’Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.’); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

The fix: Before the php code that uses the loop, you need to replace $posts with the global loop instead. To do that you call the WordPress get_posts(); function like so:

<?php $posts = get_posts( "numberposts=6" ); ?>

In the above code the variable “numberposts=6″ tells WordPress how many posts to retrieve and populate the loop with.

You can also specify a category if you want to only display posts from a certain category say …. Homepage?? First you go to the admin section under Categories and find the ID of the category you want to display and then change the get_posts(); call to be something like:

<?php $posts = get_posts( "category=10&numberposts=6" ); ?>

You can pass get_posts(); many other parameters so check out the WordPress codex for more information.

Formatting: Since the homepage is a one-off part of your site you probably do not want to include the post.php file as in the normal loop above. I have removed that and the comment include in my site and replaced them with a more homepage friendly version which is below. I am using the the_excerpt(); function which displays a couple hundred characters of your post body as well as the the_title(), the_permalink(), the_time(), etc functions to build my own post display on the homepage.

<?php $posts = get_posts( "category=10&numberposts=6" ); ?>
<?php if( $posts ) : ?>
     <?php foreach( $posts as $post ) : setup_postdata( $post ); ?>
       <div class="post">
          <p class="post-info-home"><?php the_title(); ?></p>
          <div class="post-title-home">
          <em><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>">READ ENTIRE POST</a></em><?php the_time('d M Y h:i a'); ?>
       </div>
       <div class="entry">
          <?php the_excerpt(); ?>
       </div>
     </div>
   <?php endforeach; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Let me know if this helped you and if you still have more questions.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, Static Homepage, WordPress Loop, WordPress 2.1

              

A common question among new digital camera buyers or even seasoned picture takers is “How many Megapixels do I need and how big of a picture can I print out if my camera is X Megapixels.” The answer is a little fuzzy because it depends on the quality you want but the calculations and table below can help you find the answer.

For each of these ratings you can squeeze out a larger image but you will be sacrificing quality for size at that point. If you have a 2 megapixel camera for instance you can print out an 8×10 photo but it will not be as clear and crisp because the image does not contain quite enough information to make that large of a print.

These calculations are based loosely on a requirement of 150 - 300 ppi or pixels per inch for a print depending on quality. The ppi calculation determines how much information your printer needs to make a nice quality print. With this estimation you can multiply the size you want in inches times 150 - 300 and get the estimation of the image size.

Less than 2 Megapixel
Web posting or on-screen viewing. Many cell phone and really old digital cameras are in the 1 MP range.

2 Megapixel = 1600 x 1200 pixels for Prints 4 x 6 inches, and 5 x 7 inches
3 Megapixel = 2048 x 1536 pixels for Prints 8 x 10 inches
4 Megapixel = 2272 x 1704 pixels for Prints 9 x 12 inches
5 Megapixel = 2592 x 1944 pixels for Prints 10 x 13 inches

Greater than 5 megapixels
Poster size prints. Also gives the photographer the ability to aggressively crop, color correct, or adjust the image. This processing step has become very important and widely used by most professional photographers.

Remember, the larger the megapixel rating of your camera the larger the file size for each image. This means more resolution and information captured but also means you can’t fit as many on a hard drive, memory stick, or CD and processing the image on your computer can take longer depending on your software and hardware. If you don’t see yourself ever printing out that picture of your cat poster size and you are running out of space consider setting your camera to capture at a lower resolution using the chart above.

              

 
I recently found the great website Photogamer.com. Photogamer is a group of photographers who got together to sponsor weekly photo competitions. The group sets the theme for the week and the photographers set out to capture photos that display that theme. You have from Thursday to Sunday night to take the pictures and the winners are picked the next week.

My first attempt at the contest yielded a wining photograph. My interpretation of “Glowing,” which is the picture at the beginning of this post, won for that week. This is a huge honor because photogamer includes many professional photographers and all are very very talented with many using superior DSLR cameras to my Konica point and shoot.

I am having a blast taking the pictures each week and it is really great to get ideas from other photographer’s submissions and be a part of the photographic community. You can view all of my flickr photos here or view just my photogamer flickr set here. You could also sign up on flickr, add richsipe to your contacts, and join the photogamer fun!

              

We celebrated Easter yesterday with family and it was wonderful. It was Kayla’s first easter and God provided beautiful weather. We started the day at 6:30am by attending the sunrise service at Brush Prairie Baptist Church. This time of year in the Northwest is usually very very wet but this morning it was 45 degrees and mostly cloudy. The service was great and Kayla sept through service and was super cute. Morning service was followed by a light breakfast which Kayla also slept through

We then went back home, relaxed a bit, then headed back to church for the egg hunt and service. Kayla had fun at the egg hunt but of course didn’t completely grasp the concept. We did get a bunch of great pictures with the weather being so nice and enjoyed some time in the sun. The Easter cantata service was very nice and it made for a very meaningful Easter service.

After service, we had Grandma and Grandpa Sipe and Grandma and Grandpa Harrier over to our house for a late Easter lunch. Our lunch was amazing and it was truly a Northwest menu. We had salmon cooked on the BBQ, a greek salad, pasta salad, green salad, sushi for an apeteizer, a Northwest white wine, and Parmesan French bread. We followed lunch with some games and then we went our separate ways because were all tired from the early morning.

Check out our Family Picture Gallery for all the pictures of Easter.

              

Micro-blogging superstar Twitter now has competition and its name is Jaiku. Recently internet and Mac Superstar Leo Laporte switched from Twitter to Jaiku because of possible confusion between his Podcast TWiT and Twitter and caused a bit of a rumble in Twitter and probably a huge upsurge in the Jaiku ranks. I signed up and am there at http://richsipe.jaiku.com. My first impressions is it is super slick looking. Also, it appears to be much more functional than Twitter. It includes the ability to latch into your RSS feeds combined with a super slick look and a few nifty ideas such as icons.

The concerns I have is Twitter can already quickly become way too much information and by adding in so many other hooks Jaiku has the chance of becoming a nifty looking blur of information and quickly useless because of that. I will be giving it a chance for the next week and see the differences and pros and cons of each. Really, there can be only one! Seriously, though, with blogging and then micro-blogging it would be way to time intensive to try to update both Twitter and Jaiku. That is Jaiku’s biggest challenge, I believe, is to pull enough people away from the SXSW pheonomena of Twitter to make this work because without those internet “superstars” it probably won’t fly.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Jaiku, Microblogging, Blogging