Extended Life….

I have just now realized that I’m a headline-junkie. Or whatever it is that you’d like to call a person who’s obsessive about getting the title of a post just-so…. would you prefer anal-retentive? :o)

This posting is a brief paean of praise for an amazing plugin for Wordpress - Extended Live Archives from the folk at Sons Of Skadi. This little wonder uses some really nifty code (I thought it was AJAX, but understand its a blend of PHP and Javascript, is there a difference?) to allow you/me/anybody to wander through the older contents of this and any other blog; and you could wander by date or by category, though its the convenience of the former that I personally find more interesting and useful.

Now, this excellent plugin had come in pre-packaged with the power-packed K2 Theme for Wordpress (which loves you like a kitten!), which was the theme I used on this site for a fairly long time. Then I encountered Hemingway, which led to the present look. Now Hemingway doesn’t seem to have caught mass fancy, and consequently does not have too much by way of snap-fit functionality - NinjaMonkeys has done some sterling work in widget-enabling this lovely theme, but that’s that. So after I’d jumped themes, I found that ELA was not working on the Archives page….. which made me very unhappy.

Decided to do some poking around the hood, began with a search and quickly stumbled on to the very informative and, for a headline junkie like me, stunningly named site called - 24 Fighting Chickens!! The posting on getting ELA up and going was simple enough for a complete dweeb like me to - get ELA up and going on this site!! Take a bow o most enlightened chickens!!

And yet…. there was a small shadow in this accomplishment - the default ELA style looked rather out of place with the rest of the site theme. And while I can make my way around somebody else’s CSS, its with all the grace of a blind bull in a glass factory, so I was a bit chagrined, to put it mildly. Hey, I don’t think I’ve used that word in a single post to date!! :o)

And then came a glimmer of light….. I’d liked the ELA style of K2, so was there a possibility of….. hmmmmm. Went looking around, and hurrah, found that K2 had a separate ela.css! Poking around ELA revealed that its default style is controlled by a separate style-sheet af-ela-style.css. So far so good. The glimmer was turning into a glow; substituted the ELA default styles with the K2 styles and ……… this was the result!

So, in case you want a dweeb’s quick-and-dirty guide to activate ELA in a widgetized Hemingway theme for Wordpress -

• follow the excellent instructions on 24 Fighting Chickens to create the archives page (not post),
• get the CSS from K2’s ela.css (located in wp-content > themes > k2),
• locate af-ela-style.css (located in wp-content/plugins/af-extended-live-archive/includes),
• keep a copy of the above (just to play safe, or if you ever want to switch back sometime),
• put in K2’s ela.css, with its new identity, i.e. as af-ela-style.css into wp-content/plugins/af-extended-live-archive/includes.

That’s it. And the outcome - extended life for my vintage postings, even though its probably only for me :o)