Unrelated News – Page 22 – My Thought Spot

VW Rabbit

Tonight I got into a discussion about the VW Rabbit with a young man. They never had the Rabbit here in Mexico, or at least not by that name. After spilling all of the information I knew about the Rabbit and the Golf (which is what he owns and what started the conversation), I thought I would look up a little Rabbit history.

Most of my facts were true. I was off by a couple of years in the production of the Rabbit. I also did not know that the Golf, in all its iterations, is just a Rabbit with many different names. Though it makes sense that they would not build a whole new car. They just changed some of its look and slapped a new name on it. Other names are Golf, Cabriolet, Cabrio, Varient and even the Jetta is a Rabbit.

The Rabbit name has come back into use since 2003.

I got most of my information from a history page at The Rabbit Archive. Wikipedia also has way too much to say about the subject if you are really interested.

Dean II

Dean is now projected to come in quite a bit further south from us. I still hold to the fact that I think it will turn north. Which now means, that if it does, instead of turning north and brushing, or missing us, it would come right at us.

I am not sure what the projected time of arrival is. But we are starting to get elevated winds. Nothing to write home about and not any higher than normal storm winds. We are probably 5 hours away from getting rain from the storm.

The Mrs. and I had a brain storm of an idea today. I won’t tell you about it until the storm is over, just in case it wasn’t as brilliant as we thought. I will take pictures to show you after the adventure is over.

There is a good possibility that we will lose power for some time. If so I get to fire up my ham radio and get to relay information back to the US about the health and welfare of all my friends. That will be fun. I have a nice antenna that I have never taken the time to set up that I will pull out to work with. I pulled my other antenna down yesterday afternoon so that I don’t lose it in the storm.

I will probably get a few more posts up before the storm moves in and knocks me out of commission. If I do lose electricity for any extended period of time, maybe I will be able to get caught up on my reading.

Mine!

We are at the “THAT’S MINE!” stage with our daughter (3 years old). Our son (9 years old) has done pretty well with it and is usually pretty patient with her. Usually.

You know it is getting bad when you hear this.

Scene: Daughter walks downstairs and sees ants crawling on the counter.

Daughter: “Ants! That’s MY ants.”

MightySearch

After I did all the work to customize a search results theme page, I found a link at the original site telling of an easier way to do the same thing.

Get the mightysearch plugin and follow a couple of tutorials for getting it up and running. You can see what this plugin does for your site by doing a search in the sidebar to the left. It allows you to do Google searches but display results with your own website’s theme.

Ironically, the page that got me started on all of this does not use either method to display his search results as of this writing.

New search tool and theme update

I just spent some time getting a new search box running on the site here. Now I am using Google to handle the searches. With this you are also able to search the web, not just my site. I don’t have it working completely the way I want, but I am getting closer.

As a result of this, I have had a wonderful side benefit. The theme that I have used and modified for the site was a nice theme, but poorly coded. What made it poorly coded was that the whole theme was in 1 (one) file! If you know anything about theming or style sheets, you know that is a horrible mess to manage. I did not notice that until I had been using the theme for a while. Then I did not want to change.

As I have been thinking about updating the theme in the future, I really needed to break this theme down into several documents and make it a proper theme. That has been done. Hopefully there is nothing that you will be able to notice in this change (yet). Everything should look and act exactly the same with the exception of the search box now serving results from Google.

I got my information about creating a custom search results page from another blogger who has a tutorial on generating a custom Google AdSense search page.