Blade Edge

Well alrighty, after spending nearly a full day working on this blog, I think I’ve finally settled on how I want it. The first change I made was to place WordPress back in my root directory. I did some quick research online and modified my default redirect script:

<%@Language=VBScript%>
<%
SiteNameURL =  Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME")
Query = Request.ServerVariables("QUERY_STRING")
%>
<%
If Query = "page_id=10" Then
  Response.redirect ("http://www.blade-edge.com/software/")
Elseif Query = "page_id=11" Then
  Response.redirect ("http://www.blade-edge.com/production/")
Elseif Query <> "" Then
  Response.redirect ("http://www.blade-edge.com/index.php?" + Query)
Else
  Select Case SiteNameURL
  Case "software.blade-edge.com"
    Response.redirect ("http://www.blade-edge.com/software/")
  Case "production.blade-edge.com"
    Response.redirect ("http://www.blade-edge.com/production/")
  Case Else
    Response.redirect ("http://www.blade-edge.com/index.php")
  End Select
End If
%>

Now the script is smart enough to detect when there is a query string being passed along by WordPress and sticks an “index.php” in front of it rather than letting the browser stick a “default.asp” there instead. Using this, I got even more cute and created two pages in the blog with no content, because when you clicked on them the script would catch the query and send you off to the BES and BEP sub-sites. This actually isn’t needed anymore since I edited the header of this template to include direct links to the sites (as you can see up above)

After spending an hour or so digging through the WordPress plugins archives, I came out with several that you see over to the right on the sidebar – except for the poll widget, which isn’t shown yet because I don’t have a poll created. The plugins I’m using are:

• AJAX Calendar
• Google Ajax Search
• Twitter Tools
• WassUp
• WP-Polls

These, plus some of the default widgets like the Plain Text (for the social links) and the Links (for the uh… links. Duh) make up what you see over on the sidebar.

Finally, I played around a bit with the script in the header file that controls the image that you see at the top of the screen. The image above is supposed to be a mismash of all the themes of this blog, some software, some video production, and some personal stuff. As you visit certain sections of the blog, you’ll get different header images. To see this in action now, click on the Blade Edge category to the right. You’ll see that the header changes. Now view any post in the Blade Edge category. Same header. That one will eventually be for just the Software category, I’ll make a new one for Blade Edge as a whole. Anyways it’s just a cool little extra.

Now then, I have to go watch Hellboy to prep myself for Hellboy II tomorrow. Anyone who happens by, leave a comment and let me know what you think so far!!