🏃 w. Patrick Gale 💻

Design, photography and ramblings

Month: March 2008

Quilting

March 10, 2008 /

In 1994, a friend and I drove from Greeneville Tennessee to Arkansas with our mountain bikes and camping supplies and spent a week riding the roads of Arkansas. This was the 8th Annual Ozark Mountains, Bicycle Challenge. In 2007, a friend and I hoped on a bus and rode from Cary NC to West Jefferson NC, with our bikes stashed in U-Haul trucks, and began our week long bike ride across North Carolina. Between these two events, I have collected a nice stash of event shirts, socks, and bandannas. Now I am cutting them all up and piecing them back together into my own creation. A quilt.

Yes there are companies you can send your t-shirts to and they will create a nice quilt for you (for several hundred dollars). Those quilts look professional. This one doesn’t. But that isn’t the point.

Where to start:

I basically started by just taking my t-shirts (or socks) and cutting out the designs I wanted to use. If you are trying to follow along and create your own quilt, make sure you leave plenty of spare fabric around the designs for when you start sewing.

Next I found a large bed and started laying out the pieces where I wanted them to go. I made sure I pulled them close enough together so the pieces would overlap. The designs all face the same direction and basically line up vertically but since the designs are all different sizes they do not match up horizontally. If you send your t-shirts to a company they will make everything symmetrical. This quilt is not.

Once the pieces were arranged the way I wanted, I started with the right side of vertical panels and pinned them together (3 pins holding each piece). One piece would just lay over the other so once you sewed them together you had to trim the spare fabric off the front and back (I was told to use pinking shears which works well). I did this because it was easiest to sew together, but it was pain to trim off the spare fabric.

Once one vertical row was sewn together I would lay it back out on the bed and pin the next row beside it. And so on, and so on. Then once I had all of the vertical rows connected and laid back out on the bed I started pinning the rows together one by one and sewing them together. This left me with a rough outside edge.

I then took about 1 foot strips of white cotton fabric and sewed it to the outside edges of the entire piece to give me a consistent outside color that I could then sew to the final outside border which will be a brown color.

I have not applied the brown outside border, the batting, or backing yet. Once I have the outside border and batting in place I will quilt stitch and then apply the backing. I haven’t really researched the quilting part of things yet, but I will let you know I work that out.

The pictures above show the designs sewn together and how the edges are just cut away using pinking shears. Oh yeah: Use small pieces like the Marine Corp Marathon piece shown above to cover up mistakes in your sewing, or holes where you get careless with the pinking shears.

Modifying the mod_feeds module in Joomla 1.5

March 7, 2008 /

Here I will discuss modifying a module using the mod_feed module as a starting point. We will change the feed module to allow sorting by date. So here goes.

Make a copy of the /modules/mod_feed directory (including the contents) and rename the folder to mod_feed_order (since we will be focusing on allowing ordering of the feeds by date). Do the same thing with the /administrator/modules/mod_feed directory as well.

Next rename the mod_feed.php file within both of your new module directories to mod_feed_order.php and the mod_feed.xml to mod_feed_order.xml

Copy the /language/en-GB/en-GB.mod_feed.ini and rename it /language/en-GB/en-GB.mod_feed_order.ini
then add the following entry at the end of the file
PARAMDATEORDER=Changes the date ordering of the feeds.

 

Now we make some file changes

/modules/mod_feed_order/mod_feed_order.php
Change the following lines from:
$feed = modFeedHelper::getFeed($params);
require(JModuleHelper::getLayoutPath('mod_feed'));
 to
$feed = modFeedOrderHelper::getFeed($params);
require(JModuleHelper::getLayoutPath('mod_feed_order'));

/administrator/modules/mod_feed_order/mod_feed_order.php
Change the following lines from:
require(JModuleHelper::getLayoutPath('mod_feed'));
 to
require(JModuleHelper::getLayoutPath('mod_feed_order'));

/modules/mod_feed_order/helper.php
Change the following lines:
class modFeedHelper
 to
class modFeedOrderHelper
 and right after the line
$rssDoc =& JFactory::getXMLparser('RSS', $options);
 add the lines
// wpg - enable ordering by date and order based on the date order parameter
$rssdateorder = $params->get('rssdateorder', '');
if ($rssdateorder != 2) {
$rssDoc->enable_order_by_date();
$rssDoc->order_by_date = $rssdateorder;
}

/modules/mod_feed_order/mod_feed_order.xml and /administrator/modules/mod_feed_order/mod_feed_order.xml
Change the files element from:
<files>
<filename module="mod_feed">mod_feed.php</filename>
</files>
 to
<files>
<filename module="mod_feed_order">mod_feed_order.php</filename>
</files>

Then change the name element from
<name>Feed Display</name>
 to (this will be used by the administrative view when adding a new module)
<name>Feed Display With Ordering</name>

then after the line
<param name="word_count" type="text" size="6" default="0" label="Word Count" description="PARAMWORDCOUNT" />
 add the lines (which will setup our date ordering parameter; you can default it to whatever you want but I have it defaulting to ‘no date ordering’)
<param name="rssdateorder" type="radio" default="2" label="Date Order" description="PARAMDATEORDER">
<option value="1">Descending</option>
<option value="0">Ascending</option>
<option value="2">No Date Ordering</option>
</param>
 also you may want to change the description element to
<description>This module allows the displaying of a syndicated feed. It was modified by wpg - March 2008 to include a sorting by date option.</description>

/administrator/modules/mod_feed_order/tmpl/default.php
Change the line
<?php echo modFeedHelper::render($params); ?>
 to
<?php echo modFeedOrderHelper::render($params); ?>

Now we should be all set to add the module to our site!
So you followed all of the directions above right? You should now have the module all set and ready to go. If you log into the Joomla administrator now and go to the Module Manager under Extensions, then select the New module button, and you should see a list of all of your modules. The new module you just added, Feed Display with Ordering, should now appear in the list. Click this option and you should now see our original feeds module with an additional parameter for specifying the Date Order.

Congrats, you just added a new module to Joomla!

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