Girl:

Hey guys, wanna see me naked?

Me:

What the &$#@?

Buddy:

Right here?

Girl:

No, you’ll have to come back to the room.

Buddy:

Aw hell no, forget it then.

HILARIOUS. I laughed for 15 minutes.

Son:

There was a booger in my nose.

Me:

And…what did you do with it?

Son:

I ate it.

Oh, the brutal honesty that is childhood.

What is it, and why?

Conversation Viewer is a WordPress 1.2 2.5 plugin that pulls a external text file into a post and formats it into a defined list, keeping you from having to manually code the conversation into a defined list, ordered list, or Heaven forbid, a ghastly table. I wanted to be able to easily and quickly include conversations into posts, while still keeping the code nice and clean. I tried this manually once with a table, and while the result looked good, the code was rather sloppy and very cumbersome to compose.

How it works

Basically, you tell the plugin the path to your conversation text files, and to insert a conversation, you simply call the text file(s) containing the conversation(s), and it (they) will appear in the post. You can call as many different conversations in one post as you want, just name them uniquely. The nitty gritty of how the plugin works is commented in the plugin code.

Usage

You need three things to get this up and running: the plugin, a text file of a conversation (with proper syntax), and some CSS for styling. Get the plugin here. Change $default_conv_path to the absolute path of the directory you plan on storing your text files of conversations (mine is something like http://www.super-cooper.com/conversations/), then slap it into your plugins folder and activate it. Next, construct your conversation file, which should look something like this:

1. Me,Why did the chicken cross the road?
2. The Wife,Why?.
3. Me,To get to the other side.
4. The Wife,You're crazy.
5. Download this code: conversation-viewer-example-1.txt

Now let’s break this down. This is a conversation between the Wife and I where I am showing off my joke-telling prowess, and she is obviously very impressed. There a basically two parts to the conversation: who’s talking and what they are saying, which are separated by a comma. The plugin looks for the occurence of the first comma, assumes everything to the left of it is the person, and everything to the right of it is what that person is saying. Call the text file in your post like so:

<conversation src="http://www.super-cooper.com/snippets/conversation-viewer-example-1.txt" />

I like to arrange mine in subdirectories by date, and if you have more than one to include in a post, just add the numbers on the end and call them accordingly. Note that this path is relative, you set the root of this path in $default_conv_path in the plugin earlier. The above text conversation, parsed through the browser, would look like so with the plugin and my CSS:

Me:

Why did the chicken cross the road?

The Wife:

Why?.

Me:

To get to the other side.

The Wife:

You’re crazy.

And the code that produced it would look like so:

1. <dl class="conversation">
2. <dt>Me:</dt>
3. <dd>Why did the chicken cross the road?</dd>
4. <dt>The Wife:</dt>
5. <dd>Why?.</dd>
6. <dt>Me:</dt>
7. <dd>To get to the other side.</dd>
8. <dt>The Wife:</dt>
9. <dd>You&#8217;re crazy.</dd>
10. </dl>

The definition term is the person’s name, and what they said is the definition.

Mixing it up

Let’s say you want to emphasize what someone is saying. I like to do this with italics. Well, to style what the person is saying in italics, simply add a pound sign (#) before the person’s name, like so:

1. The Son,I'm having a horndog for dinner.
2. #Me,Really?
3. The Son,U-huh.
4. Me,Don't you mean a corndog?
5. The Son,That's what I said, a corndog.

Which, when called through the plugin and parsed, would look like this:

The Son:

I’m having a horndog for dinner.

Me:

Really?

The Son:

U-huh.

Me:

Don’t you mean a corndog?

The Son:

That’s what I said, a corndog.

And the code that produced it would look like this:

1. <dl class="conversation">
2. <dt>The Son:</dt>
3. <dd>I&#8217;m having a horndog for dinner.</dd>
4. <dt>Me:</dt>
5. <dd class="emphasis">Really?</dd>
6. <dt>The Son:</dt>
7. <dd>U-huh.</dd>
8. <dt>Me:</dt>
9. <dd>Don&#8217;t you mean a corndog?</dd>
10. <dt>The Son:</dt>
11. <dd>That&#8217;s what I said, a corndog.</dd>
12. </dl>

Finally, here’s my CSS that I use for styling my conversations:

1. dl.conversation dt {
2. clear:left;
3. float:left;
4. text-align:right;
5. width:9em;
6. line-height:1.8em;
7. font-weight:bold;
8. }
9. dl.conversation dd {
10. margin:0 7px 0 10em;
11. padding:0;
12. vertical-align:top;
13. line-height:1.8em;
14. }
15. dl dd.emphasis {
16. font-style:italic;
17. }
18. Download this code: conversation-viewer-example-css.txt

Some other examples of this plugin in use can be found here and here.

Other stuff

This plugin was designed for WP 1.2 (yeah, I know I should migrate to 1.5, but I don’t have the time or desire to do so anytime soon), so I have no idea if it will work in 1.5. If it does or doesn’t, please let me know. EDIT: This works in 2.5 as of 2008-04-22. Also works on 2.7 as of 2009-01-02 Any feedback is appreciated, but remember, most of the code I just hacked up from Code Viewer.

A pretty simple, generic greeting, wouldn’t you say? Most people have their own generic greeting. Some use the timeless “Hey.”. Others use the classic “What’s up?”. Me? I use “How ya doin?”. Always have, probably always will. The thing with generic greetings is that they are just that – generic. They’re not really meant to be meaningful, and if stated in the form of a question, they’re not really meant to be answered. For example, if someone asks you “What’s up?”, you should respond with something along the lines of “Not much”; don’t really tell them what’s up.

With that in mind, the Wife and I rolled into our neighborhood Sonic this past Saturday for a couple of Cherry Limeaide’s to wet our whistles. We order, our drinks come out, and then it happens:

Me:

How ya doin?

Sonic Dude:

Well, I’ve seen better days. Just got word that my ex-cousin finally had his baby.

Me:

(Already taken back that he didn’t just give me "Alright" or some standard answer like that) Really?

Sonic Dude:

Yeah, I exhiled him from the family, but just recently here let him back in.

Me:

Uh-huh.

Sonic Dude:

I don’t feel sorry for him, I feel sorry for that baby.

Me:

Alright. Well..um, take it easy.

I turn to the Wife:

Me:

Did you get all of that?

The Wife:

I have no idea what just happened there.

I put my straw into my Cherry Limeaide, and we left, both wondering what the Hell had just happened.

Jack’s Wife:

What ever happened to old what’s his name?

Jack:

Who?

Jack’s Wife:

*Tries to describe "what’s his name" to Jack.*

Jack:

Oh, he moved to Montana.

Jack’s Wife:

MONTANA? But he’s a hairstylist, people in Montana don’t get haircuts, they cut their hair with hacksaws. And they kill their food with their bare hands.

Jack:

*Laughs*

Jack’s Wife:

Jack, there’s no speed limit in Montana.

Evidently Montana is inhabited, at least in the mind of Jack’s wife, only by hacksaw wielding animal killers that haul ass in their cars with no regard for how fast they are going. Well Jack’s wife, I have to say, I’ve spent a few summers in Montana myself, and I’d have to admit that you really aren’t that far from the truth.

Some time passes, we eat our wonderful breakfast. I make a trip to the men’s room just to get a peek at Sizemore. I come back from the men’s room.

Some more time passes. I attempt to casually get another peek at him, just to make sure it really is him, by doing the old stretch-and-look-over-the-shoulder move. I fail. Sizemore (yeah, I really think it’s him) spots me. Then it happens.

Breakfast ends. I keep reminding the wife that Sizemore is on the loose and he’s got her number. She isn’t worried. Long story short, we saw him later that day on the beach, and no, it wasn’t really Tom Sizemore, although that guy sure as shit looked like him.