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…