All Forces

View my “Be Right Back” page

Enough of this blank “Be Right Back” pages we usually throw together when we need to do website updates. It is time for a nicer, more web 2.0 savvy under construction. Next time I do an update to WordPress, I’ll be replacing my index.php file with this one, and then switch back when all is ready to go.

Here’s what I have:

1. Links to my other web sites and web services.

2. Flickr gallery via the flickr.com’s Make a Badge tool

3. Twitter updates via twitter.com’s Make a Badge tool

4. Last.fm gallery via Jeroen’s Last.fm Records standalone version which grabs images from amazon.com. I actually copied the whole script and included it in the PHP file so that it is not dependent in other files. I also disabled album art caching since this page is really going to be up for a few minutes. If you are going to use it for longer, then you should consider enabling caching the images. Consult the original script for more info on this.

To do this yourself:

1. Download my “Be Right Back”. Note, PHP 5 is required for the Last.fm portion to work. 

2. Open it in a file editor and change the following items:

• The page title
• The site links should point to your of course
• The Flickr user number in the Flickr javascript link. It might be best to create your own Flickr badge, grab the javascript and replace this one.
• The Twitter username in the javascript url.
• The last.fm username in the PHP code, right after $lfm->username.
• The footer info.

Let’s face it, Mac applications are cool. Even when the task is as geeky as editing html files by hand, we do it with style. There are many apps out there that do this job on the Mac, and I will probably be in the eternal hunt for the perfect one, but for now skEdit is probably the closest I’ve gotten to it. I must admit, I do end up launching TextWarngler for the occasional trip to edit hidden files or to edit actionscript files but for the most part I use skEdit for all my PHP/HTML/CSS editing.
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