I just started on Facebook and saw this guy in the corner trying to sell me on a Get Rich Quick scheme.

I almost bought into it. Anyone that large has money. Food ain’t cheap nowadays.

Working on a major overhaul of my blog site. It’s gonna look pretty crappy for a little while. Jeez…why do I always start this at like 1am???

Just as the title says. I am running the Mandigo Theme for Wordpress. It’s a great theme, so go give props to the author.

I was having trouble finding articles on how to make some minor changes to the theme to suit my tastes. Things like:

1) Changing the display of Categories to NOT show the number of articles like this:

2) Rid the site of these things:

So, for documentation purposes in case anyone stumbles upon it…here’s how they’re done:

Changing the display of Categories to NOT show the number of articles like this:

1) Navigate to sidebar.php
2) Search for the following string of code:

[php]
[/php]

3) Change “optioncount=1″ to “optioncount=0″

Sounds pretty easy, yes…but it took me a little while to find.

2) Rid the site of those little stars

1) Navigate to style.css.php
2) Find this snippet of code

[php].sidebars li {
list-style-image: url(images//star.gif);
}
[/php]

3) Delete it all.

Of course, it’s important that you BACK UP your pages before you make any changes, otherwise it will render your site completely inoperable.

I’ve always been impressed by those sites out there that have image overlays when you click on the thumbnails…and I’ve always wondered how it was done. I just assumed it was some kind of crazy Flash plugin or something. Nope.

To know what the Lightbox plugin is, I suppose you need to know what Lightbox is first. Lightbox uses Javascript to overlay images on your current site when you click on ‘em. Basically, you click on a picture and the site fades to the background and brings the focus to the picture. No need to load a new page, it’s all done via Javascript and CSS. Here’s an example using a pic I took in Vegas of New York New York:

LJ’ers - gotta make the jump over to see it. I’m sure you can do this via LJ somehow too, but I haven’t really looked into it.

You can also use it for image sets as well. Check out the author’s site. Pretty nifty.

Lightbox Image Overlay Script Homepage

For the users of WordPress, here’s a link to the plugin. No crazy trick to make it work. There are some minor changes you’ll have to make to some paths if you don’t have WordPress loaded in your root in both the .js and .php files, but you’ll figure it out. I’ll be happy to answer some questions if you need some help setting it up.

Link to WordPress plugin

So far, I’m seeing an issue when using this along with ‘Viper’s Video plugin’ which lets you view a variety of multimedia from sites like YouTube and MySpace via Wordpress. If you see the SNL skit below through your browser, that means I got it working! Otherwise, I hope to find a fix soon.