Matthew Engel

It has been some time since I wrote a post on here, and it is for a good reason. A lot of great and interesting things have been happening, and I still plan on sharing them. I have to say the one thing about writing a blo, and that is the longer you wait to post something, the tougher it becomes. I have alot of great ideas floating around my head, and several of them already have legs. I often see or hear something in the news and think “Gee. That would be really great to write about on my website”. Alas, it hasn’t been happening as frequently as I would like. However, the topics I have in the pipeline are going to grab your attention and capture the current trends in energy, technology, and financial investments in these fields. They include a report on biofuel start up companies, the mass production and marketing of electric vehicles, a new 37 Megawatt solar panel plant being built at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the launch of a new website I have created and a note on my passing of the Ph.D. qualifying exam in biomedical engineering at Stony Brook University. This is alot of stuff to write about! For now, I just wanted to mention that I’ve linked this blog with my LinkedIn profile using their Wordpress application. To see this, you have to be signed into LinkedIn and able to view my full profile. Check it out, it’s really neat! I’m wondering if it’s possible to link multiple blogs there, since I actually manage almost half a dozen websites by this point. Hope to keep you posted and have a great week!

For some people, this is really big news! Millions worldwide use Wordpress as their web development software, including myself. The newest release is a real milestone in their development as it contains new features that will change the way users work for now on. For starters, it has an automatic upgrade package, which eliminates the tedious need to do this yourself. Upgrading wordpress was previously extremely difficult and risky. I had even been locked out of my own blog in the process, which can be quite frightening. The automatic upgrade will make this a lot easier!

Read all about it here!

Hi, I added a new plugin this week to my site which allows me to display photo thumbnails on my blog through flickr. This is extremely convenient and looks pretty cool on my front page. It also creates a /photos page where all the albums are displayed. I’m still trying to figure out how to customize that page. Right now, my problem is that on the photos page, the flickr widget is set to display photos in a very small format, and I would like them to be larger. It probably requires editing the css or php code for this template page. The plugin’s homepage explains in brief detail that this is possible, but not how to do it. In summary, I would highly recommend this plugin for creating a photo blog with embedded thumbnails. I was hesitant at first to use flickr because it meant that these images were now property of flickr, but I realized that this was not material to me. It should be noted that almost any image on the web is free game for someone to download and use in any way they see fit. For instructions on how to install and download this plugin, click here. The help forum is here.

I would like to acknowledge the source of the photo in my header which is a futuristic skyline of Manhattan in 2011. The original breathtaking photo is here.

In addition, several of the other skylines I have featured on this site come from Ken Gibson’s page, roadtripamerica.net. I have used his pictures of Seattle and Pittsburgh as headers throughout the rest of my blog.

Also, I have added a new plugin this week called Flexi Pages. It is excellent!!! Widgets have ben giving me TONS of added flexibility to how I display content on this site, and these features are intuitive to use and easy to install on your site. Specifically, the flexi pages widget lets you hide pages from your sidebar, display all or no sub-pages, or display sub-pages only on their parent page. this is what I have elected to do on my ‘Travel’ page. You will notice that the subpages are only visible from /Travel.

The flexi pages widget can be found here, in Srini’s Wordpress Laboratory.

I still have to figure out why my comments aren’t displaying properly with this theme.

Theres a million things I could write about here, but I will keep it tight. Focused, here we go. Spit it - wordpress right here.  Just updated the theme, customized the header.php file. I am using the Cutline Theme v1.3 designed by J. Angelo Racoma. This is an amazing theme, but I don’t want you to use it, too, because our blogs will look the same. Here’s the skinny anyway, just in case you are using it already.

Here is a link to the Cutline theme homepage

One thing I did not figure out how to use was the archives page. But instead I substituted this with my own Travel page, which is nice. That page needs to be seriously updated to fit into this new theme. On his site, Racoma explains how to edit the header so you can customize the pages which are displayed right under your banner.

Specifically, here’s the code I had to edit in my header.php

<li><a <?php if (is_archive() || is_page(’archives’)) echo(’class=”current” ‘); ?>href=”<?php bloginfo(’url’); ?>/travel/”>Travel</a></li>

Notice I changed the ‘archives’ text to ‘travel’ between <a>text</a>

Another I had to do was update my permalink structure. He explains this really well, and I would highly recommend NOT using the default permalinks structure since that will leave your pages looking awkward with unseamly URL’s like matthewaengel.com/blog/pageid=3? This looks ridiculous, and instead I can make matthewaengel.com/blog/travel. Much cleaner, nicer, and it actually servers a purpose.

So to get this to work exactly the way I wanted, it was necessary to update my header and change the permalink structure. Eventually I would like to get my archives page functioning, but this is in the future. For now I am still thinking what categories I should develop, and would like to begin focusing my writing on alternative energy technologies and the current political situation.

Right now I am looking for wordpress plugins to modify this site. Specifically, I need a plugin which allows me to collapse pages, and have them expand using a mouse roll over, or at least hide subpages in my right sidebar.

I like this new theme, it is much clearer, but does need modifications. I will look into replacing the header with a custom photography, and then fill in the about pages and modify my side bar.