Better Extended Live Archives

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Hugh Paterson III

A long time a go, when WordPress was young (like version 1.5), And K2 was young. There was a plugin called Extended Live Archive (ELA).

I love the organization that this plugin gave to a bolg’s entries. It is still my preferred presentation of posts on a blog. Over the years all the software has developed K2 is now in version 1.0.3, WordPress is in version 3.0 and ELA has become Better Extended Live Archive (BELA) thanks to Charles

Here is a series of links – in no particular order – which talk about the development of ELA.

I have had a problem with how BELA Presents the entries by Date:

Better Live Archives By Date

Notice how all the blog entires at the bottom are displayed on top of each other.
I can not figure out how to un-do that.

Notice also in the following two pictures of the sort by Tags and sort by Category list the entries are not displayed on top of each other.

Better Live Archives By Tag

Better Live Archives By Category

For checking this live: you can look at the archive. This has been checked in several browsers:

Safari
Flock
Firefox
Cruz

All to no avail. (That is it does not appear to be a Browser based issue.)

The Offending Element:

Things to Change per Charles.

Javascript Charts…

Posted on December 27, 2009 by Hugh Paterson III

These are some really cool looking Javascript Charts from Highcharts.

Highcharts Javascript charts

Another opinion on Highcharts.

They run off of JQuery, which is already used by WordPress and K2. It would be nice if someone could wrap this into a WordPress Plugin with a cool way to add / manage data from the WP admin panel. Let me see if someone did….

For WordPress there is WP-Table by alex.rabe. This project was handed over to another developer, Tobias Bäthge and retitled WP-Table Reloaded.
Tobias says

[one] can have both wp-Table and WP-Table Reloaded installed in your WordPress! They will not interfere (as they are not using anything together). They are completely independent from each other. If WP-Table Reloaded finds the wp-Table database tables, it can import the found tables into it’s own format, so that you can completely upgrade from wp-Table to WP-Table Reloaded.

There are some updated instructions for version 1.5, which didin’t seem to make to the WP plugin repository.

There is another jQuery plugin, called Visualize, that takes data from an HTML table and displays it as a chart. Cool. I wonder which, Visualize or Highcharts is better and why?

After we graph these data, is it possible to also make the data drive a SIMILE chart/timeline?

It looks like one can add data sets to be graphed with the WP-SIMILE plugin. Why not pull these directly from the current display table? or make SIMILE / TIMEPLOT graph time depth change. i.e. if the data displayed in the HTML table is propagated from a MySQL table then why not have several entries in the MySQL database with a time code to change? in a way tracking momentum. That is over time how much have these data changed? i.e. Display the same data set from 1945, from 1950, and 1955.

Why should we still use HTML tables instead of CSS?

ASIDE: My next question is: How do I keep track of all the jQuery plugins I use?
Is there an efficient way to do that?

FYI: There are several other Charting options currently available for WordPress. Most of these involve managing your data somewhere else and then using an API to bring that data to your WP install. The truth of the matter is that it is most likely that you are going to manage your data somewhere else anyway. However, I do not use Google docs to manage my data so I can not pull data from that source directly into my my WP install.
However, there is a plugin Easy Chart Builder. This plugin does not have “nice” admin section for creating the charts but does create an image from a data set inserted with a short code.

PS
Some solutions when using google apps to present data, but if Data Ownership is an issue. Then why use google apps?
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/html-tables-and-the-data-web/
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive/014014.html
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/data-scraping-wikipedia-with-google-spreadsheets/