The World of Stuff .com

Fast approaching

From Friday night to Saturday night my church youth group is having a retreat. This isn’t your ordinary, run-of-the-mill religious retreat, though. It’s a Food Fast retreat for us to “[c]onnect in a personal way to the struggles and faith of our brothers and sisters who live with hunger everyday [sic].” In other words, not eat. For 24 hours. Yes, me! The guy who practically dies if he doesn’t eat for 5 hours. So how did this come about?

I think I want to do it just for the bragging rights, and to go for a personal record. To prepare, I’ll probably eat until I can’t eat any more. I wanted to bring a laptop computer so I could blog the fast in real time, but the most sophisticated electronic device I’m allowed to bring is a camera. So at least the facet of the plan in which I photographically document myself starving for a day can go on. In lieu of a computer, I think I’ll bring a pen and paper to jot down my thoughts as my stomach begins to digest itself (there will be juice periodically, but man cannot live on juice alone). When I come back I’ll post these entries to see just how hungry I was.

It should be interesting. But the best part is that after the fast, on Saturday night, there will be a barbecue. At the barbecue I’ll probably eat until I can’t eat any more.

And now an interview composed of Ask Jordons, conducted by one Yellow Chicken.

How do you organize all your site files?

Except for the blog, the files are pretty much organized as you can see in the structure of the site. Images for posts and the 2003-2004 archives are contained in the /archives directory. Images to be seen throughout the site are in the root directory. The main page and the 2005 archives are stitched together using common template files (World of Stuff header, footer, etc.) and several template files that live deep within my WordPress directory.

Can you explain more on the Quesca stuff, and can/how we can use it on our site

I’ll let the code do the talking. If you use WordPress 1.5, try this and you’ll see almost no comment spam (in fact, I haven’t gotten any since I added it last Friday).

First, add this to your /wordpress/wp-content/themes/[name of theme]/comments.php file after the comments textarea:

<p>2 + 2 = <input type="text" name="heyMyNameIsDave" size="1" maxlength="1" />
<span style="font-size: 8.5pt">(Enter the correct answer. This is a simple <a href="/archives/2005/02/23/eureka-quesca/">quesca</a> test to make sure you're a human being and not a spamming robot.)</span></p>

Now go to /wordpress/wp-comments-post.php. Right under these lines:

$comment_author = $_POST['author'];
$comment_author_email = $_POST['email'];
$comment_author_url = $_POST['url'];
$comment_content = $_POST['comment'];

add this line:

$heyMyNameIsDave = $_POST['heyMyNameIsDave'];

And after these lines:

if ( get_settings('require_name_email') && ('' == $comment_author_email || '' == $comment_author) )
die( __('Error: please fill the required fields (name, email).') );

add these:

if ('4' != $heyMyNameIsDave)
die( __('Error: please enter answer the question after the comment field correctly.') );

If you know how the code works, it should be pretty easy to configure it to your liking. All it does is create another field and doesn’t post the comment if the field doesn’t have the correct value.

The “exciting” “conclusion” of this “interview” will be included in the next post.

Arial or Helvetica? The two fonts are so similar; in fact, they’re almost identical. Can you tell the two apart? I had a hard time; I only got 4 of 10 right. If you’re wondering, here are the differences between Arial and Helvetica. I very much prefer the latter, but I have Windows and am not keen on having to buy the typeface. (5 cool points to Derren Wilson of I Live on Your Visits, the site that hosts the quiz, for giving his site a name that embodies the energetic spirit of many a blogger, including myself.)