Currently browsing: theme design

New Neopets petpage template: Fairy Dust

I had originally designed this for a Blogger template, but ported to Neopets petpage format by request. I have several other designs that I will be (hopefully) porting soon.

Preview:

Code:

Download here.

To install:

Go to your Neopets’ homepages index. Click the “Edit” link under the pet whose page you want to modify. Copy the contents of the template’s code file into the edit box. Scroll down and click “Preview Changes.” After the preview page loads, scroll down and click “Save Changes.”

New WordPress Theme: Red Delicious

My first new theme featuring the WordPress 2.7-specific features. Hopefully, I’ll soon have the time to update my other themes.

Details

Red Delicious is a fruity red theme. Works with WordPress version 2.7 and is backward-compatible down to version 2.5. (If you were really desperate, it can work with 2.3 but I wouldn’t recommend it!) Background courtesy of Country Clipart by Lisa. Stock image for header by Creapril.

Availability

Demo & Download

Blogger How-To: Add Sticky Content / Fake Front Page

Working on my most recent side project, I’ve had to brush up on my Blogger/Blogspot coding. One of the things requested of me was to find a way to have a static front page on a Blogger site.

WordPress has this feature built-in, but Blogger currently does not.

I know of two ways that this can be accomplished:

Solution #1

Create a new post with the content you want to show on the index of your Blogger site and save as normal. When you add more content to your site, re-open your “front page” post. Click Post Options. Change the Post date and time to values which chronologically fall after those of your last “regular” post.

Now go to Settings, Formatting. Set it to show only 1 post on the main page.

The idea is to always keep the “front page” post as the newest, so it is the top post (and therefore the only one shown on the main page). You’ll have to do this every time you add new posts to your Blogger site.

Or …

Solution #2

I like to call this one the “Sticky Content method.”

A while back someone had shown me that enabling the showaddelement attribute in a Blogger XML template allowed you to add widgets above your posts. Basically, changing a small bit of code in your template …

… gave you this ability:

I’ve seen plenty of people do this to display Google Ads or other PPC stuff above their posts.

To do this, you’ll need to first download a fresh copy of your template — go to Layout, Edit HTML, Download Full Template.

Open it in your text editor of choice (use Notepad if you’re not sure) and search for type='Blog' or “posts”. Either of those should show you the section code containing the Blogger function for calling blog posts. You’ll see a line that says something along the lines of:

<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>

When you change showaddelement from ‘no’ to ‘yes’, you are then able to add widgets above your blog posts. Save the changes to your XML and upload it to Blogger (go to Layout, Edit HTML) using their upload form. Once that’s done, go add a widget by going to Page Elements (in Layout).

Click Add a Gadget, and add the HTML/JavaScript widget and type in the content you want to show on your front page and save.

Keep in mind: that this would show up on EVERY page on your site unless you adjust a couple things!

Download an updated copy of your template and open it in your text editor of choice. Now that you’ve added a widget, you should see something like this:

Hint: Look for the title of your widget if you get lost!

Change the following:

<div class='widget-content'>
<data:content/>
</div>


to this:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<div class='widget-content'>
<data:content/>
</div>
</b:if>


Basically, you are telling Blogger to only display that widget if the page you’re on is the home page (main page).

Now, let’s fix the blog settings so that nothing shows up on the main page except this widget. Go to Settings, Formatting, and set it to show no posts on the main page.

Pretty cool, huh?

Closing Thoughts

Whichever method you choose, make sure that you have some way for your visitors to access your site’s content. I suggest adding Blog Archive and Labels widgets. You could also use the Feed widget and put in your RSS feed to show your blog’s latest posts.

I hope the solutions I’ve posted are clear, but if you need anything explained further please feel free to ask in the comments below!

“Mobile” WordPress Sandboxing

With both Jessie and Jim being sick this weekend, I decided that it would be as good a time as ever to update my test WordPress installs so I could work on updating my themes for 2.7 as well as make sure there’s backward compatibility for previous versions of WordPress.

A while back, Jeremy Flint had posted about how he created his WordPress sandbox using Super Satellite’s WP Content Framework. Basically, you can take any empty WordPress blog and instantly fill it with content similar to that seen on the WordPress Themes preview pages. It comes with pages and sub-pages, categories and sub-categories. There are comments and formatting elements. This is especially handy for those of us who develop or want to update a WordPress theme to ensure that all elements are formatted properly.

I decided to take this a step further and want to have a WordPress test site for each of the last 3 or 4 major version releases. Rather than keep installing on my server, I decided to make it portable.

I love love LOVE portable apps!

I hopped on over to the MoWeS site and created a fresh install of Apache2, MySQL5, PHP5, PHPMyAdmin, and WordPress — it currently has WP 2.6.1, which is fine because you can get any version you want from the WordPress release archive! Once the package is compiled and downloaded, then installed, simply run the mini web server then add more WordPress installs as needed.

To populate your WordPress install, download the framework file from Super Satellite and import into your WordPress install.

Note: In WP 2.7, go to Tools, Import. For 2.6 or earlier, go to Manage, Import.

Choose the WordPress import option. It works so far for 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7 here. I plan on adding 2.1 and 2.3 later tonight.

Once I have everything set up just the way I like it, I copy everything to my handy-dandy thumbdrive and ‘Voila!’ — a “mobile” portable set of test environments for my theme designing and general muck-abouts and funnery.

WordPress dupe content workaround

Recently I’ve started paying more attention to Google’s Webmaster Tools. As much as I hate to admit it, they’ve been really useful in helping me track down outdated content and bad links, and really clean up search results for my site. One of the many things I had kept putting off for this site was removing duplicate content — in my case, posts with duplicate titles and descriptions.

Google is known for ‘punishing‘ websites with lower rank for this. Donna Fontenot touched on this in her “SEO For WordPress” presentation at WordCamp Birmingham earlier this month. She had displayed some examples for nuking duplicate content search results by modifying your header’s meta robots, title, and description tags.

As you can see, my weekly “Humpday Hilarities” posts, although not yet completely indexed by Google’s bots, definitely fall into this category.

As it stood, my site loomed perilously on the edge of getting one of those infamous “Duplicate Content Penalty” from Google (assuming it hadn’t already!). So to get around this, I made a few changes to my template’s headers.php file. In addition to Donna’s robots suggestion, I modified my description based loosely from the code in her presentation:

I also modified my title a bit based on her coding as well:

Basically in both of these snippets, I am checking the post title to see if it’s “Humpday Hilarities” and if it is, add the date into the code to make both the meta title and description tags unique. While most users would never need anything like this, anyone who posts a specific topic with repeating titles might find this handy.

What do you think?

Feedback, questions, constructive criticism is (as always) welcome. Feel free to use the comment form below!

Site changes coming soon!

I’ve been working on a design for this site over the past few months and am pleased to say that it’s nearing completion. I’ve spent just about every lunch hour for the past three weeks debugging scripts and correcting sloppy code. An updated look is overdue and I think it will make browsing easier on my readers (y’all!) — and will hopefully keep any new ones that may breeze in from the random Google search results that I see in my server logs.

My and Jim’s one year anniversary is a week from today, and with that our trip and travel deals less time to concentrate on this. I had originally set a week from today as my “go live by” date. With any luck, I’ll be done in the next couple of days, so I may move it over sooner.

Anywho, I just wanted to post a note of warning … if you see the site down or something’s looking “off”, it’s just me futsing around at the controls!

New WordPress Theme: Vista-Like

This is another theme that I have been working on over the past several months. It is also my second theme featuring a few customization options. This one gives you the choice of three different header images (with matching side images and background colors).

Details

Vista-Like is a Vista-inspired theme for WordPress version 2.1+ (recommended for 2.3+). It includes Gravatar support down to version 2.1. With three different header images to choose from, you can change the look to fit your taste.

Screenshots

Here are the four styles available as well as a shot of the Theme Options page:

Live Preview: via the WordPress Theme Directory

Availability

Download from the WordPress Theme Directory

New WordPress Theme: Furry Family

This is a theme I’ve spent the last several months tinkering with. I had wanted to create a theme with customization options — more specifically, different color schemes and header images for the user to choose from. I had struggled getting the options to “stick” and recently ran across this how-to which showed me a round-abouts way to get it done (think going through Atlanta to get to Texas). But it took a hand from Otto42 in the WordPress forums to get me straightened out and back on track. (Thank you, Otto!)

I’m toying around with the idea of modifying some of my previous themes to have multiple looks and/or other options. This will take time — something I’ve not had an abundance of lately, so we’ll see …

I’ve held off on “publicly” releasing this theme until after it was approved by the kind (and extremely patient, LOL!) editors at WordPress’ Theme Directory — however, it has been available on my themes page for a short while. Now that the theme is available via the WordPress Theme Directory, I’m announcing it to the Blogosphere!

So without further ado …

Details

Furry Family is a slim kid-friendly animal theme for WordPress version 2.1+ (recommended for 2.3+). It includes Gravatar support down to version 2.1. With four different options for header images with matching text and background coloring to choose from, you can change the theme style to fit your taste.

This theme is dedicated to Jessie for her love and devotion to all of God’s creatures.

Screenshots

Here are the four styles available as well as a shot of the Theme Options page:

Live Preview: via the WordPress Theme Directory

Availability

Download from the WordPress Theme Directory

WordPress updated

It’s over with, and it wasn’t too painful. At least I remembered to update my WP-Config this time.

That said, I’ve been hearing horror stories from others who’ve tried to upgrade, so I guess I’m counting myself lucky. So far I’ve updated this site and BYKYC. I’ll most likely be doing the others later this week (or whenever time allows).

My darling Jim passed this gem to me and I know there are a couple readers here who’ve asked me if I knew of such a thing: WordPress Automatic Upgrade. The website says it’s compatible with the latest version of WP, but I have not yet had a chance to try it out myself. (may do so on a less ‘popular’ site, LOL!)

An update on things …

New Orleans was fun, but like all vacations it wasn’t long enough. Work has been absolute Hell lately, and the insurance company that we’ve been trying to settle with (remember my wreck, going on 2 months ago?) is giving us the run-around, so I’m stressing a bit more than usual.

To those who’ve asked about the Lunarpages WordPress Theme Design contest, no I didn’t win anything. But I am VERY grateful to those who voted for me! There’s been some speculation as to how the deciding votes (LP staff?) really came out, but in all honesty I’m just happy being nominated … for now. ;P

Speaking of theme designs, I’ve submitted a handful of mine to the new WordPress Theme Directory. So hopefully those will show up soon.

SA on the slow track …

I feel pretty bad that I haven’t gotten as much done on my Soldiers’ Angels stuff as I’d hoped. I am beginning to think that maybe I’ve bitten off more than I can chew in helping the warehouse/donations tracking, Walmart grants, all the websites, and even my own projects here for SA of Alabama. I’m feeling VERY overwhelmed, and frankly a little disappointed because the local response hasn’t gone as well as I’d been hoping.

There is a glimmer of hope though. A gentleman waved at me while stopped at a redlight last week and told me that he saw my bumper stickers (Soldiers’ Angels) and that he just had to thank me for supporting our soldiers. I’m not in SA for any kind of recognition or personal glory, but it IS nice feeling appreciated, and reminds me of why I want to do so much …

Geekery

About three weeks ago I heard from one of my old Neopets buddies, Rose. We talked for a bit and caught each other up on how our families were doing, and the usual. She nudged me about possibly re-joining Neopets, so on a whim I did. My character name this time around is BamaAngels so if you’re on, look me up!

(boy, what I wouldn’t give to have all that NP stuff I gave away, LOL!!!)

Also, I am now an active Editor for Addons.Mozilla.org again. I feel badly for neglecting those duties for so long, but am happy to say that I’m now back and trying to do a little each week to help out the AMO gang.

New on the ‘To Do’

Jo tweeted me a few minutes ago with a head’s up on WordPress’ new Theme Directory.

YAY!!!!!

Seriously, this is definitely something to bump up on the ole ‘To Do’ list this weekend. Thanks, Jo!

And WordPress, if I could reach you, I’d hug you!

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