We’ll see how Google’s new index affects us all in the coming months, of course the gloss currently sounds great, but we’ll be sure to see the downside shortly.

In celebration, I’ve created a coupon for Caffeinated Content: MOTHERSDAY that will be good for the next few days for a whopping 30% off of the Caffeinated Content purchase price.  Just visit the product page at http://kansieo.com/members/buynow and enter the coupon during checkout.

ALSO…

Caffeinated Content 3.40 will be dropping later today.  This release will include a few fixes and the ability to use WordPress’ plugin installation feature to simplify installation.

Enjoy!

In the last part, I talked a little about what Caffeinated Content is and what it can be used for.  This time around, though, we’re going to get into the meat and potatoes of the plugin and get just a little dirty under the hood.  Though it might seem strange, I really want to explore only the templating system this time, so by the time we start getting into the actual usage of the software, the terms I use will all make sense.

That said, let me state what by now should be obvious: Caffeinated Content’s posted content is entirely template driven.  This is a double-edged sword.  On one hand, you can make the content look any way you want.  On the other, it’s possible to overdo things.

So we have templates…they are always located in the templates subdirectory under the CaffeinatedContent directory.  Post templates and comment templates have naming conventions that must be followed (stupid naming conventions, I know, but they work thus far).  Also located in the CaffeinatedContent directory is a text file named templates.txt.  This file will be your friend during template editing excercises.

The following tags can be used in Caffeinated Content for WordPress templates:

• [title] – Post title
• [date] – Post date
• [who] – Post author
• [video] – YouTube video.  Only works in YouTube mode.
• [post] – Post text
• [image] – Random image based on keyword
• [link] – Random link from the links file
• [rewrite_post] – Rewritten post text using markov chains
• [l_rewrite_post] – Subtle yet effective post rewriting using language translation techniques
• [b_rewrite_post] – A little less subtle post rewriting using language translation techniques
• [trans:ln]your text here[/trans] – Translate the text between the tags, using Google Translate, from English to a different language.  Your mileage may vary due to Google’s translation limitations!  Also, this WILL break HTML markup so be sure that only text is being included between the [trans] tags.  Replace ln with the language of your choice:  de – German, nl – Dutch, es – Spanish, fr – French, el – Greek, it – Italian, pt – Portuguese, ru – Russian, ja – Japanese, ko – Korean, cn – Chinese (Simplified), and tw – Chinese (Traditional) as well as sv – Swedish, ro – Romanian, bg – Bulgarian, pl – Polish, no – Norwegian, fi – Finnish, hi – Hindi, cs – Czech, and hr – Croatian.

Thus, to get a post containing only pulled text, we would simply create a template containing “[post]“.  Currently, the default template is as follows: “<div style=”float:left; padding: 12px”>[image]</div><div><em><strong>[who]</strong> asked: </em><br/><br/>[video]<br/>[post]<br/><br/>[link]</div>“.  This is a little more complicated with some basic layout HTML thrown in, but broken down piece by piece, it’s pretty simple.  Strip out the HTML and we have the tags [image], [who], [video], [post], and [link].  Looking in the above bulleted list, [image] attempts to find an image relevant to the content to post alongside the content, [who] posts the original author’s name, [video] posts a YouTube video (but only if we’re in YouTube mode!), [post] is the actual post text, and [link] will grab a link from the link files.  When all is said and done, the post will appear as follows (just a random image I had laying around…no it’s not applicable to the post text):

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. – Asimov

Caffeinated Content for WordPress, the BEST WordPress Content.

Caffeinated Content for WordPress, the BEST WordPress Content.

Even though we’ve only lightly touched the possibilities, I am confident you can see that Caffeinated Content’s templating system is an extremely powerful feature.

First, May 29th, my father-in-law passed away at age 69 from prostate cancer that metastasized into bone cancer.  This is really the first time I’ve dealt with cancer up close so looking back through the pictures over the past couple of years is a bit shocking.  I saw a robust man virtually eaten away from the inside.  I know I don’t need to say it, but it was horrible.  In any case, he was a good guy, basically the keystone of the family.  My mother-in-law is a bit shell-shocked still, but has a few good kids (and at least one bad one) that’ll help take care of her.  She’s the typical housewife of that era who has never opened a checkbook in her life, so there will be a lot of helping going on.  Not to mention she’s not without problems of her own–she has ALS (Lou Gherig’s disease) which is advancing fairly slowly, but surely.

Second, and I realize that it is trivial compared to the above, but I contracted a sinus infection (along with two brother-in-laws) sometime during this entire event.  I managed to float along during the funeral mass on NyQuil when DayQuil no longer held off the disgusting mess leaking from my sinuses.  Today, for the first time since last week, I woke up able to think relatively straight, though my head isn’t quite 100% clear.

Third, and not exactly unexpected…I’m about to have a baby.  Well, my wife is anyway.  We’re set for a c-section on June 18th, but it could happen anytime before then.  So much to do to prepare (I still need to paint the nursery!), and so little time…  Our 5 year old, Ethan, has been a lot of help and is excited as can be.

So anyway, these days I’m not slacking…just juggling!