During the week of June 29, RTV6 staffers found a severely injured kitten outside the station. Some noticed him in the parking lot, others near the backyard weather set; whenever someone went to take him to a veterinarian he couldn’t be found.

On Wednesday, July 1 we were able to find him hunkered down next to the backyard weather set. He had a large gash in his head and appeared to have a broken front leg. He looked to be very near death. We took him to Michigan Road Animal Hospital where the staff evaluated his conditions and laid out the options.

The kitten weighed just slightly more than a pound and was very lethargic. Dr. Rodney Duncan came to the conclusion, based on his experience with similar injuries, that the cat was probably injured by an engine fan in a car in our parking lot.

Dr. Duncan took great care and spent several hours in surgery repairing the kitten’s injuries. He used more than 80 stitches to help repair wounds, more stitches than surface area on the kitten. Within two days the kitten was bouncing around like any other young animal and had an incredibly healthy appetite.

Despite his bouncing, he does have permanent blindness in his left eye and has a lame front right leg. Dr. Duncan believes the leg injury is actually nerve damage, which could eventually heal but wouldn’t need to be amputated. Even with just three legs and one eye, this cat is just like every other kitten; we doubt he knows anything is wrong with him.

The cat’s energy level is through the roof. It approaches everyone, loves to have its belly rubbed and even got out of the cage and on to my lap while I was there. The staff has been calling the cat Franky, as in Frankenstein’s monster, and Ali and Tyson, because he/she is such a fighter.

This is where you come in. There are two ways you can help:

1. Is your home lacking a kitten? Do you have friends, family or anyone you really trust who’s looking for a kitten?
   He’s very loving and affectionate. He’s going to need a special home, but not too special. Let me know if you’re interested. And feel free to stop by Michigan Road Animal Hospital to visit him.
2. We would like to take up a collection, from anyone willing to give, to help defray the cost of surgery, antibiotics and boarding the kitten.
   Michigan Road Animal Hospital has already made significant cuts to the cost, “forgetting” to include charges and discounting the boarding fees. Dr. Duncan is personally donating to help defray the cost. At last check, medical fees were near (if not over) $1,500. Anything you can give would be greatly appreciated. You can make a check out to “Michigan Road Animal Hospital” or give cash. I’ll have a collection basket in my office starting Friday.

If you want to visit him, feel free to stop by Michigan Road Animal Hospital.

Video from 7/6:

You can see the difference in his health even over the course of the week between the shooting of the video and the pictures.

Pictures from my last visit on 7/15:

Over the weekend:

Well, Frank/Ali/Wink/Quickdraw/Chance/Duncan/Rufus decided to make a change of scenery over the weekend and stay with a foster family in preparation for his trip to WRTV on Monday.

He’s not exactly used to being in a home (since he’s lived in a hospital for a month and on the streets before that), but he adapted rather quickly to the new surroundings. He’s figured out how to jump up on furniture including beds, couches and chairs, and (more importantly) how to get down. It took a few attempts, but he mastered getting up and down the stairs, though he needs someone to pace him going down so he doesn’t slam his lame leg into each step. Typical industrial/mechanical noises don’t seem to bother him, but he is spooked by noises coming from the television.

He’s great playing on hardwoods or napping on carpet and is very fascinated by the older female cat in the house, though she’s not sure she wants to have anything to do with him at this point.

He has an extremely healthy appetite, stopping for snack breaks occassionally, and he likes to stay very hydrated.

He doesn’t seem to notice, or mind, the bum leg and bad eye. He’s chased a fly, ran between chair legs and mastered getting in to tight spots (read: goes under nightstands and cedar chests).

One nice thing about him having stayed at the hospital for nearly a full month, is that his sleep schedule is less than kitten-normal. Saturday night, he spent the night in his “safe room,” with his toy, food, water and litter box, and didn’t make a peep until morning.

We’ve found out he is litter box trained, eats dry kitten food and prefers his water from a glass instead of a bowl.

If you would like to make a donation toward his vet bills please send a check to:

Michigan Road Animal Hospital
7720 N. Michigan Rd.
Indianapolis, IN 46268

Make the check payable to “Michigan Road Animal Hospital” and put “RTV6 stray kitten” in the memo line. Be sure to comment below!

+1 week out of the hospital

I just wanted to thank everyone for their support of the kitten during his recovery.

Many of you donated to the fund, and Michigan Road Animal Hospital says a few of you even stopped by to drop off donations or see the kitten.

A special thanks to everyone who posted, re-tweeted and e-mailed the story from this blog, as a complete stranger heard about the kitten and donated a quarter of the final $2,000.00 bill to MRAH.

The kitten is now officially going by the name Chance and has shown great improvement over the past week. His wounds are almost all healed up and everything else is coming along nicely, though he has lost some range of motion in his lame leg.

Chance will end up having a home with one of two RTV6 staffers; either one of our Multimedia Producers or our Commercial Producer/Director.

Again, thank you all so much. There will be more pictures to come.

If you’re reading this, then you probably already know we use WordPress MU to power our blogging ventures. It’s proven to be the easiest for our bloggers to learn and the easiest for administrators (read: me) to customize.

We borrowed a page from the WordPress.com playbook and decided that the main blog should be more than a dumping ground for blog lists and links to login pages. Plus, what site administrator wants dozens of links each going to a blog’s wp-login.php page? That just seems to be asking for trouble.

So here’s a quick little overview of exactly what we did (and a sneak peek of what’s coming to all of blogs in the not-too-distant future).

1. Google’s Custom Search Engine
   Get search results from the entire WPMU install, without using any extra plugins. (How we did it)
2. Global Blog List
   Depending on who you are, you can get different information here. Regular visitors get links to all of our different blogs. Logged in users get links to the blogs and each blog’s Dashboard. And administrators get the same links as users, plus links to comment and stats pages within /wp-admin. (How we did it)
3. Log In form
   Sign in to rtv6blogs.com, then you’re presented with links to your primary blog’s Dashboard, write a new post page, edit profile page and logout. (How we did it)
4. Our latest posts
   The latest posts from the root blog at rtv6blogs.com. (How we did it)
5. Randomly picked for you…
   A random post using the plugin “Featured-Posts” to pull a title, the excerpt, post author, published date and blog. (How we did it)
6. Most recent posts
   Using “WordPress MU Latest Posts,” we pull in the titles and author IDs from the latest 5 posts sitewide. (How we did it)
7. Latest trending tags
   Then we use “WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages” to generate a sitewide tag cloud on the main blog. (How we did it)
8. Latest rtv6blogs.com posts
   Then we use “Sitewide Multi-Widget” to pull in the latest 10 post titles and each post’s author. (How we did it)

Here’s how we made it all happen:

1. Google’s Custom Search Engine (CSE)
   1. Visit Google to set up an account
   2. After you set up your CSE, go to the search engine’s Control Panel and select “Host results on my website using an iframe”
   3. Enter your URL with “/index.php?” at the end
   4. Select “Top and Bottom” for ad placement
   5. Copy the code and place it in the proper places within your theme (searchform.php and search.php)
   6. If the results from Google are too wide on your site, go to your search.php file change “var googleSearchFrameWidth = 600″ to “var googleSearchFrameWidth = 500″ to narrow the results
2. Global Blog List
   1. Make a template called “blog-list.php” and add the following code

   2. <?php $user_id = get_current_user_id(); ?>
      <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
      <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
      <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
      <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
      <?php endwhile; ?>
      <?php endif; ?>
      <ul>
      <?php $blog_list = get_blog_list( 0, 'all' );
      foreach ($blog_list AS $blog) {
      $blog_name = get_blog_option ( $blog['blog_id'], 'blogname' ); ?>
      <li><?php if ($user_id != 0) { ?>Blog <?php echo $blog['blog_id'] ?> <small>(<a href="http://<?php echo $blog['domain'].$blog['path'] ?>wp-admin/" title="<?php echo $blog_name ?> - Dashboard">Dashboard</a>)</small> is <?php } ?><a href="http://<?php echo $blog['domain'].$blog['path'] ?>" title="<?php echo $blog_name ?>"><?php echo $blog_name ?></a></li>
      <?php } ?>
      </ul>
      <?php if ( $user_id == 1 || $user_id == 21 || $user_id == 31 ) { ?>
      <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Site Stats">Site Stats</a></h2>
      <ul>
      <?php $blog_list = get_blog_list( 0, 'all' );
      foreach ($blog_list AS $blog) {
      $blog_name = get_blog_option ( $blog['blog_id'], 'blogname' ); ?>
      <li><a href="http://<?php echo $blog['domain'].$blog['path'] ?>wp-admin/admin.php?page=cystats-time" title="<?php echo $blog_name ?>">CyStats by <em>TIME</em> for <strong><?php echo $blog_name ?></strong></a></li>
      <?php } ?>
      </ul>
      <?php } ?>
      </div>
      

   3. Line 15 sets up restricted access for blog administrators.
3. Log In form
   1. In your home.php file add the following code

   2. <?php global $user_ID, $user_identity, $user_level ?>
      <?php if ( $user_ID ) : ?>
      <?php $primary_blog = get_active_blog_for_user( $current_user->ID ); ?>
      <h2>Your account</h2>
      <ul>Welcome, <strong><?php echo $user_identity ?></strong>.
      <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?><?php echo $primary_blog->path; ?>wp-admin/" title="Dashboard">Dashboard</a></li>
      <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?><?php echo $primary_blog->path; ?>wp-admin/post-new.php" title="Write a post">Write a post</a></li>
      <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?><?php echo $primary_blog->path; ?>wp-admin/profile.php" title="Profile">Profile and personal options</a></li>
      <li><a href="<?php echo wp_logout_url(get_bloginfo('url')); ?>" title="Logout">Logout</a></li>
      </ul>
      <?php else : // ( get_option('users_can_register') ) : ?>
      <h2>Log In</h2>
      <ul>
      <form action="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/wp-login.php" method="post">
      <label for="log"><input type="text" name="log" id="log" class="s" value="<?php echo wp_specialchars(stripslashes($user_login), 1) ?>" size="20" /><br />User</label><br />
      <label for="pwd"><input type="password" name="pwd" id="pwd" class="s" size="20" /><br />Password</label><br /><br />
      <input type="submit" name="submit" id="loginsubmit" value="Log In" class="button" /><br />
      <label for="rememberme"><input name="rememberme" id="rememberme" type="checkbox" value="forever" /> Remember me</label><br />
      <input type="hidden" name="redirect_to" value="<?php echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>"/>
      </form>
      <a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword">Recover password</a>
      </ul>
      <?php endif // get_option('users_can_register') ?>

4. Our latest posts
   1. This is simply the regular loop for the main blog running in home.php
5. Randomly picked for you
   1. For this feature you need to use “Featured-Posts” by Daily Testimony
   2. Upload the plugin to /mu-plugins/
   3. Simply add the blogs you want to pull posts from to

      $featured_blogs

      on line 16 of featured-posts.php.

6. Most recent posts
   1. For this feature you need to use “WordPress MU Latest Posts” by Kandar
   2. Upload this plugin to /plugins/ and activate on your main blog
   3. Add

      $auth_desc = get_usermeta($id_author, 'description' );

      to line 145. This grabs the user’s bio, if you want to display this on your front page

   4. Add

      $results['auth_id'] = $id_author;
      $results['auth_desc'] = wpmu_cut_article_by_words($auth_desc, $how_many_words_desc);

      to wpmu-latest-posts.php at the end of the grouping around line 150. This will preserve the author’s ID in a variable so it can be called in home.php. To bring up the author’s photo we use

      <?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/heads/<?php the_author_ID(); ?>.png

      and save each author as their ID number. For example, the admin’s photo is 1.png

   5. Then we add the post titles and photo to home.php

      <div id="site-recent-wrapper">
      <h2 class="header">Most recent posts</h2>
      <?php $start_from = null; $how_many = null; $how_long_day = 10; $how_many_to_appear = 5; $how_many_words = 30; $clean_post = true; $short_by = 'post_date'; $how_many_words_desc = 50; $latest_posts = wpmu_latest_post($start_from, $how_many, $how_long_day, $how_many_to_appear, $how_many_words, $clean_post, $short_by, $how_many_words_desc); foreach($latest_posts as $latest_post){ ?>
      <div class="site-recent">
      <div class="site-recent-author"><img src="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/heads/<?php echo $latest_post->auth_id ?>.png" alt="<?php echo $latest_post->author_name ?>" align="left" /></div>
      <div class="site-recent-post">
      <h2><a href="<?php echo $latest_post->guid ?>"><?php echo $latest_post->post_title ?></a></h2>
      </div>
      <div class="clear"></div>
      </div>

7. Latest trending tags
   1. For this feature you need to use “WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages” from Donncha O Caoimh
   2. Upload the plugin to /mu-plugins/
   3. In your Dashboard, go to “Site Admin” > “Options” and at the bottom set the options for “Global Tags” as you want
   4. Then add the call for the tag cloud to home.php

      <div id="site-tags">
      <h2 class="header">Latest trending tags</h2>
      <?php $tags_blog = get_site_option( 'tags_blog_id' ); ?>
      <?php switch_to_blog(19); ?>
      <?php wp_tag_cloud(); ?>
      <?php restore_current_blog(); ?>
      </div>

      On line 4 replace “19″ with the blog ID of your brand new tag blog

   5. One tip, if you’re having trouble with the permalinks to the tags, modify your permalinks on the new tag blog
      1. Go to “Settings” > “Permalinks”
      2. Change “Tag base” to

         blog/tag

8. Latest rtv6blogs.com posts
   1. For this feature you need to use “Sitewide Multi-Widget” from D. Sader
   2. Simply go to “Appearance” > “Widgets” and enable the widget in one of your sidebars

A final suggestion.

After doing all or any of these, go through and resave each blog’s permalink settings. We ran in to problems with the “Most recent posts” linking to rtv6blogs.com/y.xxxx where y=blog_id and xxxx=post_id. The permalink re-save solved the problem.

What things do you like or dislike? Questions? Feel free to comment below

I wanted to be sure and keep you in the loop on the updates happening on our blogs.

Due to popular demand, and a desire to see how many people will subscribe to e-mail updates from the Capitol Watchblog tomorrow, we’ve added Subscribe2 to all of blogs to let you sign up for e-mail alerts whenever a new post is published.

Just find the box labeled “RECEIVE E-MAIL ALERTS” in the sidebar (right-hand side of the page) and enter your e-mail address. That’s it. It’s that simple.

Sign up now on your favorite RTV6 blog!

And I promise: No spam and unsubscribe is incredibly simple.

Though I’m not sure how it can be new and improved.

rtv6’s blogs have grown in leaps and bounds over the last year, but our main page hasn’t seen much change. It was mainly meant for blog contributors to have easy access to their blogs.

With this redesign, we’re trying to do more than get people to log in.

Now when you visit the rtv6blogs.com home page, you’ll find a random recent post from one of our blogs and a list of the latest posts, as well as the visit and login links we’ve all grown accustomed to clicking.

My hope is to provide helpful resources on blogging to our contributors and answer questions you may have about our blogs, or the station in general.