A few weeks back I stayed at the Pirates Cove with Jeff Decker, Chandler and JJ. Needless to say it was a swashbuckling good time. Although the second night we slept on floor mats and inside closets (somehow J slept both nights inside of a closet). It was an epic place to visit, even if the near freezing temperatures at night kept me out of the always heated pools.

It’s astonishing that someone went through the trouble of constructing and maintaining a 22 room complex dedicated to pirate memorabilia (with the exterior decorations mostly, the interior was more Santa fe).

If you ever by chance find yourself at the pirates cove remember it was all brought to you by a sponsor: nu skin. Yes, that’s right.. The MLM giant known as nu skin is most likely what paid for most if not all of this complex.

Now freaks in this joint are part of the decor– that’s what you get for having cheap food on a major street down the road from the metro. But this guy was unusually freakish, continuing to talk to himself and stumble around, asking for water and then spilling it all over himself. I just wonder what this guy is on or is withdrawing from or how the hell he got here in the first place. I also felt like a jerk for even thinking that I am broke– sure I might not be as rich as others but I am also not as emotionally, mentally, physically and monetarily broke as this guy here.

He’s still outside right now as I’m writing this, casing the joint, waiting for some spare change to go back in and buy another $1.08 worth of pseudo-Mexican fare. I don’t know his story but sure as hell know that I don’t want to end up like him. Man. I’m not THAT broke.

The Google Docs Viewer is used by millions of people every day to quickly view PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint presentations online. Not only is viewing files in your browser far more secure than downloading and opening them locally, but it also saves time and doesn’t clutter up your hard-drive with unwanted files.

Today we’re excited to launch support for 12 new file types:

• Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
• Apple Pages (.PAGES)
• Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
• Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
• Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
• PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
• TrueType (.TTF)
• XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

Not only does this round out support for the major Microsoft Office file types (we now support DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS and XLSX), but it also adds quick viewing capabilities for many of the most popular and highly-requested document and image types.

In Gmail, these types of attachments will now show a “View” link, and clicking on this link will bring up the Google Docs Viewer.

View the full article: 12 New File Formats in Google Docs

So now Im pretty sure Im going to be using lots of hooks in my functions.php for the code snippets that I seldom change. It just makes the whole ordeal easier. I think I can do it a lot simpler than Thematic does and maybe even explain it better than their documentation… It was a feat navigating through the extensions library at times and modifying it for my own needs.

But hats off to the developer of Thematic for making a great framework that has given me a lot of insight into the world of real theme development.

So what was the solution? Well after three days of working on it, I decided I would just remove my functions.php from the theme directory. Bamn! It started working again. So I took a look at the file and what do you know? Two line breaks at the end. It was two little line breaks that caused all the problem.

So here is a use case scenario. I wanted to have a sliding featured content section on a landing page for this theme I was building. I had it working but wanted to use the google version of jquery min to minimize load on my server.  I chose easySlider because I have used it before and its very easy to use.  Here is how I got it working in my theme.

First step, in your functions.php deregister wordpress jquery and register google jquery:

<?php
function my_init_method() {

wp_deregister_script( ‘jquery’ );
wp_register_script(   ‘jquery’
, ‘http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js’);
}    

add_action(‘init’, ‘my_init_method’);
?>

Second step, use the wp_ enqueue_script in header.php:

<?php wp_enqueue_script(‘easySlider’, get_bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’) . ‘/js/easySlider1.7.js’, array(‘jquery’), true); ?>

I put the easySlider js in a js folder inside of my theme directory.  I use the stylesheet_directory location though you can also use the template_directory location.

Thirdly, add in your custom strings:

This is where I got tripped up.  I kept trying to use the examples and it wasnt working.  I was getting an error that said “$ is not a valid function”.  I scoured the net for a solution and came across a useful tip from devoracles:

The jQuery team was smart enough to realize that there will be conflicts between frameworks, especially the $ will cause massive headaches since it’s the basic of each framework. $ is the shortcut for the word “jQuery”

That was the missing key!  I just had to change the function reference in the custom array from “$” to “jQuery”.  Here is an example of my code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
jQuery(document).ready(function(){    
jQuery(“#slider”).easySlider({
auto: true,
continuous: true,
speed: 400,
pause: 9000,
numeric: true,
numericId: ‘controls’
});
});
</script>

After that, it worked! And I had a new method for adding custom scripts to my wordpress themes!

I hope this helps. I am not the best at javascript, but I know enough to get myself in trouble. Feel free to leave me comments with ideas and corrections.

By the way, Leo rocked the pandaclaw cards quick and they look good. Have to stock up before J and I head to Magic next week.