You can sign up, and find resources and instructions (including a slick WordPress Plugin) at the official naked site.

Show off that markup!

I’ll take Potent Potables for $500, Alex

That’s right, today we welcome the return of the long lost food category. We’ll see where it goes, but let’s start with something short and sweet.

How to cut a mango

It’s Mango season, so I’ll kick us off with one of my favorite instructional videos, How to Cut a Mango.

I think I originally found this on Lifehacker, and there are a few variations mentioned in that thread that might be worth a shot (I like the idea of the straw technique).

Enjoy!

I started by looking at the available tools. I could easily put something like this together with raw WordPress Template Tags coded into the template, but I wanted something more flexible, and portable. I find that hard coded modifications to templates get crufty over time – if you keep your code in plugins and widgets, you’ll have smoother upgrades, moves, theme changes, etc.

The default recent posts widget that comes with WordPress looked close to what I wanted, but I needed to be able to specify a category to display, and I didn’t want to build something from scratch. So after poking around a bit, I found Mike Jolley’s excellent tutorial and widget, My Recent Posts.

From there, I just needed to make a few changes to get what I wanted. I modified the widget control panel to allow me to specify a category id to show. I also modified the display code to not use wp_post2cat, which has been deprecated. You can see the modified plugin here:

• My Recent (favorite) Posts widget

Update: Hindsight being what it is, a recent look in the WordPress plugins directory shows an existing plugin that suits this need. James Lao built a plugin that shows posts from a specific category. From the looks of it, I like his plugin better than my hacked one.

This isn’t a huge jump for this site, as it is currently just running the sandbox theme, with almost no modifications. The only real difference is layout – at least at first glance. That means that it was pretty easy to go naked – all I had to do was choose the “no CSS” skin from the presentation options. Incidentally, that might be another option to installing one of the plugins – just upload the theme, and switch the skin to “none”.

So, Happy Naked Day!

Oh, almost forgot – I also took the chance to drop the www while I was making changes.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. Heck, for a long time, I didn’t even know I was needed to do it – I just felt I needed to do something. A big part of this stems from the fact that while under that “roof”, I haven’t felt comfortable writing about what comes to mind. This is an attempt to remedy that. This is an the blurring of the lines between work, play, and home life. This is an attempt to get more comfortable with myself.

I’m starting this endeavor out simple. Real simple. The plan is to slowly add to this thing visually and structurally. More importantly, I’ll be blundering along in the dark looking for a focus and a direction to point this thing in. We’ll see.