Alright–with the help of magpie RSS, I cooked up my first WordPress Plugin–as you can see to the right, it takes the RSS gallery feed and generates N number of thumbnails (you specify) of the recently updated galleries of the particular gallery (you specify) , optionally displays captions (you specify) and allows you to style the unordered list via CSS tags specific to the plugin.

Suprisingly, I could find nothing that does this for WordPress.

It is available in its current form (caching isn’t working properly, in fact maybe not at all–I just haven’t seen any ill effects yet) below:

Upcoming Version: gallery_rss.phps
Current Release: gallery_rss_0.3.zip
CSS example (useful for "div" layout): gallery_rss.css

Installation and usage instructions are in the file.

An example of it in action is on the sidebar of my homepage.

UPDATE 2/23 – working on an update to the plugin–attempting to fix my personal problems of unexpected weirdness that seems to crop up depending on what images have been updated (i.e. the next set of text appearing immediately to the right of the four boxes on my site). You’ll be able to specify the number of columns maximum to display; i hope this will help some of you as much as it will, me. :) I’m encouraged to know that this runs just fine with Movable Type as well; gives me some motivation to cook up some other things around the plugin (i hate software bloat so my *intent* is to be as modular as possible).

As usual, there was plenty of music to choose from in 2004. With the help of having a record label, being a DJ, and having a wonderful set of friends and acquiaintences, I heard and was introduced to a load of music that has been meaningful to me–beautiful, and sometimes deep.

The following is my music/shout out list–I’ll try as much as possible to recall who or what introduced me to the wonderful piece of music. Some of this may be a song, some of it may be an entire album (which worked very well as a single song — not many of these now days in these single-driven times). Some may not have even been originally published in 2004–some earlier, some unreleased. Each of them were Heavily Rotated in 2004. None are in order. The following is a list of 7 musics (cut from 10) that one would perhaps be better off hearing. ;-)

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Add me to the list of users who have recently purchased a Macintosh due to the Ipod. Not only is my iBook color coordinated; it has a beautiful OS and houses Unix.

Special shout to the homie Kevin @ PetSmart for my first taste of OS X that piqued my interest.

Windows iPod users switching to Mac:
In response to an earlier column written about the iPod Halo Effect, The Wall Street Journal has published 27 letters from various iPod, Windows users, or Windows iPod users stating that the iPod or Windows problems is the reason they have switched to the Macintosh platform. One reader wrote, “After receiving an iPod as a gift, I was inspired to research other Apple products. In the last two months I’ve purchased an iMac G5 for my office and an eMac for home, both replacing…

very crazy stuff.

how to help

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It’s a girl! #3 for us (#2 girl)

mommy is doing well! thanks so much for the prayers and well wishes!

12.29 1:33a.m. PST – picture updates–added a “discharge day” set, and added my boy’s pic to the fold…

Times with Journey Gallery

heading to the hospital again…!

We called the hospital this morning at 6:00a.m. expecting to go in (to be induced); but they were booked…it was an odd experience that starts with almost going in Christmas eve, and i won’t go into much more (no love lost) except to say that Joy has been up since 5:45a.m.–we finally got called around 4 o’clock to come in…

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Merry Christmas all.

It was indeed a wet Christmas in the Seattle area. I called my fam back in Indiana, and it’s 5 below, so It’s all good here today, considering.

Wifey got me Hackers and Painters…the rest of my gifts were just icing on the cake. I wholeheartedly appreciate how much she understood how much I wanted that book. Made me feel a little guilty i didn’t break her off with any scrapbooking goodness this year.

With the new move, it’s been tough all around, to plan, and to even “have Christmas”–this is our first since our marriage, that we haven’t been with either of our in-laws, and we all feel it. It’s been particularly important to me to keep in mind the celebration of the birth of Yahushua the Messiah. It’s easy even, when you “have it easy” to focus completely on the family thing, and lose sight of why this holiday was appropriated in the first place.

Off to friends’ house for dinner.

Thanks Josh & Janny for the shirt!

Wow, Christmas Eve…looks like we’re about to go in tonight. we will see, however.

update 9:08pm PST — talked to midwife–not just yet. Thank God for the church–we have friends around the corner that are willing to take the kids if it happens in the middle of the night! That was a major concern for us, since we just moved out here.

listening to: That’z Whassup (T.bizzy Featuring Bro. Los) from the album “Untitled – 12-10-04 (1)” by Demo
One thing i really dig about classic hymns, is that the theology expressed is so many times so on point, and stirring. However, there is one Christmastime hymn that is completely bogus, mainly for the following line:

The cattle are lowing
The poor Baby wakes
But little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes

That’s from Away In a Manger. I guess back in the day, women didn’t speak much out on such matters, so there was none to knock the author in his head, smacking him into the reality of the fact that it’s highly unlikely that the above was the case.

Even more fundamentally, this kind of thought can lead to the perpetuation of the myth that it’s impossible to follow in Yahushua’s footsteps. I won’t go there, though.