At any rate, the Featured Content Carousel deactivated the slide-box on my main page, making me think it was broken.  I decided that this had happened because of the upgrade to WordPress 3.0 and decided I needed a new 3.0-compatible theme.  So I looked and looked — the theme I originally tweaked (Revolution Office) apparently no longer exists — and found something called Work Place from Press75.com looked the closest to my theme.

Bought it; installed it; realized it was never going to work without major tweaking.  Complete waste of $75!

A little more poking around on the web and I discovered that the Revolution Office theme on which I based my theme stops working correctly if the Featured Content Carousel is installed and activated.

Deactivated the plug-in.  Problem solved.

I’m still out $75.

You’re probably tired of hearing me say this (you who might have found this blog via some Google search and then started reading several of the articles, even though the site appears to be almost dead), but I haven’t blogged here in awhile.

The big problem boils down to this: I’m a lawyer. I don’t know why, but I’ve been concerned about maintaining a “personal” blog, like this one.  I worry that people — potential clients and clients, to be exact — will react to things I say on my personal blog, even though the main page (as the site is currently constructed; this may change) says, under the heading “Letting My Hair Down”:

This site is where I let my hair down. Everyone is different in private life versus professional life; everyone is entitled to both. Don’t judge my professionalism or ability as an attorney by what you might see on this site.  This site is meant to allow me some self- expression and enjoyment that isn’t necessarily related to what I do as a criminal defense lawyer.

I do, however, have other interests (particularly “writing”) and I do want a place where I can “play” and “experiment” and write about things that have nothing to do with the law.  To do what I want to do, I think I need to pay more attention to this site.  (And, now that I broke it, I might have to actually re-design it.)

So I’m just going to have to ask people — potential clients and clients, to be exact — to remember that, as I said above (and on the current main page), people’s private lives and professional lives are different.  What I write here may, or may not, tell you much about me.  What it probably won’t do is give you a very good idea of what kind of lawyer I am; it probably won’t tell you if I’m the attorney who could best handle your case.

On the other hand, I guess I have no control over how people make their decisions.

I can only be myself.  And hope for the best.

I bought a Gateway LT2030u. It’s red and weighs about 2.5 or so pounds. It’s tiny! But the keyboard is managable, even with my hands.

I bought this one because it came with a 250 GB hard drive, 1 MB RAM and said the battery life was 7+ hours, whereas all the other comparable laptops said the battery life was about 3.75 hours.

With this configuration, this laptop is actually more powerful than the laptop I use for work!

At any rate, I should be able to do more work when away from the office, since this is so much easier to carry than even my ordinary laptop. And with the Internet access, I can do legal research, blog, and will be able to advance my book project, as well.

Can you imagine if Jack Kerouac had had one of these puppies?

You might say, I’m a happy camper. You might hear me say, “Woo-hoo!”

Here you’ll find information about and links to other places where I’m active on the Internet, including websites I’ve built for my law practice and photographic activities, as well as my profiles on websites such as Facebook, JDSupra, Twitter and more.

Because RickHorowitz.com functions as the site for All Things Rick™, it focuses primarily on my non-lawyering activities, both personal and those non-law-related things for which I’m sometimes paid (like photography).

My understanding of PHP was somewhat limited when I first downloaded the Revolution Office theme.  I’d occasionally done some really minor tinkering, but nothing on the scale that I’ve had to do here.  In addition, it took me a couple of days to realize that I had to create “.php” files with particular text in the first few lines to create a “Template” and then to figure out how to connect that to a “Page.”  Frankly, I’m fairly proud of myself for figuring it out.

I think the design of RickHorowitz.com is pretty much where I want it to be right now (except for one thing).  The content needs to be modified, but the design is 99.9% complete.

The one thing that’s missing — and I will be amazingly and super-hyper-incredibly grateful if someone out there can supply me with information on this — is that I can’t seem to get the Blog page to be the way I want.

I’m fairly certain from what I’ve been able to read so far that the problem is caused by the fact that my primary page — the page you see when you type just RickHorowitz.com and nothing else — utilizes the Revolution Office main page, stripped of the bottom box. I wanted a cleaner design and I wanted the primary Blog to be a secondary page.

Well, I managed to get it to a secondary page, but I can either print full-posts-only, using the_content(), or I can get shorter versions with the_excerpt(). Using the_excerpt() means that people will have to click on the title of the post to read the entire post. This is because the_excerpt() doesn’t recognize and utilize the WordPress tag.

It’s about 1:30 a.m. here now and I’ve been at this since around 5 p.m. today, trying to finalize the design, so I think it’s time to “throw in the towel” for the night.

Hopefully, either some good soul will leave me the answer before I can get back to it, or I’ll find it myself in the next few days. I’d hate to think I can’t have a properly functioning Blog page without a site redesign!

The image may, or may not, be actually used within the post itself.  That doesn’t matter.

Sizing the image at 400 x 300 pixels seems to work for all such images except the larger one in the bottom box of the main page (which no longer exists since I’ve modified the theme to exclude it).

This means that you should designate a separate post, with a separate image, for each of those locations.

Self-Portrait (Click to Enlarge)

This site is where I let my hair down. Everyone is different in private life versus professional life; everyone is entitled to both. Don’t judge my professionalism or ability as an attorney by what you might see on this site.  This site is meant to allow me some self- expression and enjoyment that isn’t necessarily related to what I do as a criminal defense lawyer.

As promised, it will tie together “all things Rick™,” including other websites belonging to Rick and, possibly, links to his Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Linked-In and other sites.

Currently, you may see a number of pages that say, essentially, “blurb for X goes here.”  This is because I’m working on learning how the PHP which drives the template I’m using works.  I needed a way to insert some samples.  And, after all, the purpose of this site will be to draw together all my activities.

So stay tuned as this site is undergoing rapid development!