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My own blizzard

Boy, such a flurry of events have been whirling around me and my kin lately!

An American Visit

Friday I chaperoned Jessie’s class field trip to American Village in Montevallo. Even with the bad weather coming through (tornadoes and rain galore, yuck!), we still had a very good time. And I tell ya, I really wish I had visited American Village when I was Jessie’s age … I think I would have looked at history a whole LOT differently!

I’ve suggested to Jim that we head down there one weekend for one of their events or sometime in the summer when the weather is a little more accommodating!

Despite the bad weather and dampened spirits (my Lord, I’ve never seen so many pouty faces in one place! LOL!), I did manage to snap off a few shots:

The Home Front

We had our first interested party view the house last week. Friday night, to be exact. Our realtor called this weekend to let us know that they liked the layout and wanted to come back and see it again. So this weekend we busted some tail and cleaned and painted the entire bottom level. Jessie hasn’t packed a whole lot because she’s with her mother more these days, so we’ll get around to finishing her room last.

I’m trying not to get TOO excited, but I can’t help but want to get my hopes up!

We still haven’t gotten an answer yet on whether or not we got the loan on the new house. More paperwork was needed and faxed off last week. I’m hoping we hear something this week.

OMG … snow? In the South?!

Yes, it snowed here. We received between 3 and 4 inches here. Some parts of Birmingham received up to 7 inches!!!

Jessie was at her mother’s, so I’m sure she had a good ole time in it. I did manage to get a few shots of the pretty white stuff before the other neighborhood kids ran amok and transformed it all to dirty snowballs and lumpy stick-wielding snowmen. :lol:

Pass the Halls!

Either it’s the irritants in the cleaners, the paint fumes, or being out in the rain all day Friday (or a combination of all three), but I have been sick all weekend and feel generally like death warmed over today. I traipsed in to work to discover that my machine was hosed, so I couldn’t have done much of anything productive even if I wanted to.

Everyone kept telling me I should’ve stayed home because I sounded terrible — I think I’ll take their advice and stay in tomorrow. *ugh*

And last but not least …

One of my themes has recently been featured in a WordPress tutorial over on YouTube:

A big thanks to Kristie for letting me know about it, and to ktinboulder for selecting my theme!

WP Themes How to: Revolving Images in the Header

I was contacted a while back by Barbara Weibel, a very nice lady with a question about a WordPress theme modification. She wanted to know the best way to add a set of rotating images into the header — not like the rotating images php scripts that have been making the rounds for the last few years. She needed something dynamic, similar to the “cover flow” effect used by iTunes.

Boy, that one stumped me. I’m not a Flash or Ajax guru, and Jim was tied up in his own projects. I gave her what little helpful advice I had and hoped for the best.

Barbara emailed me again last week to let me know she had found a solution. She’s used my Translucent Dreams theme as a base for her blog‘s design (which, by the way, is a VERY good read if you’re looking for new bloggers to add to your blogroll!) and has found that using the NextGEN Gallery in the header accomplished the effect she was wanting.

Take a look at her blog, Hole in the Donut, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Barbara was nice enough to allow me to publish her notes detailing the steps she took to implement this into her blog. I took the liberty of adding some screenshots from my own test blog to help make it easier to follow along.

Note: You may need to play with the settings once you have it set up to adjust to your liking …

First, I installed and activated the WordPress NextGEN Gallery plugin. This adds a settings panel to the Dashboard that is titled “Gallery”

Second, I installed and activated the NextGEN ImageFlow add-on for the NextGEN Gallery. This shows up as an added option at the bottom of the “Gallery” settings panel on the Dashboard.

**IMPORTANT:** Be sure to upload reflect2.php and reflect3.php to your WordPress root folder!!

Next, I created and uploaded a gallery of the photos I wanted to show up in the header using the “Add Gallery/Images options in the NextGEN Gallery settings panel. I made sure they were all the same size (500 x 333) and although the documentation says you can use vertical format photos, I limited mine to horizontal, simply because I knew they would work better in the header.

Some changes were needed in the stylesheet in order to get the design to align correctly. Add this to the style.css file:

#gallery {
height:259px;
width:800px;
position:absolute;
top:-100px;
left:40px;
}

Then I modified the header.php to be:

<body>
<div id="wrap">
<div id="header">
<div id="gallery">
<?php
echo nggShowImageFlow(2);
?>
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name');
?></a></h1>
<h4><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></h4>
</div>
</div>
<div id="sidemagic">


NOTE: The (2) in the above php echo code refers to the number of the gallery I created — your number may be different!

Then I went back to the style.css and made the h1 and h4 position absolute and tinkered with the height for the headline and sub-headline to get them to lay where I wanted them. It now looks like this:

#header {
margin:0 auto;
padding:0;
height:259px;
width:900px;
background-image:url(images/header.jpg);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position:top center;
position:relative;
}

#header h1 {
font-family: Trebuchet MS, arial, sans-serif;
font-size:35px;
color:#ffffff;
line-height:normal;
position:absolute;
top:100px;
left:-30px;
}

#header h1 a, #header h1 a:hover, #header h1 a:link, #header h1 a:visited, #header h1 a:active {
color:#ffffff;
text-decoration:none;
}

#header h4 {
text-align: right;
line-height: 25px;
font-family: Trebuchet MS, arial, sans-serif;
width: 300px;
height: 80px;
overflow: hidden;
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: normal;
font-style: italic;
color: #5dc6cf;
position:absolute;
top:105px;
right:-30px;
}

Also, you’ll need to replace the header.jpg file in the images directory with this one.

You may need to tinker a bit to get everything in just the right place. The nice thing about the NextGEN Gallery plugin is that you can exclude photos with just a check mark, so I still have all 36 in the gallery and I can go back periodically and change which ones show up.

A note on gallery settings

These are suggested, but feel free to deviate to fit your theme:

Gallery, ImageFlow, General Settings:

For this one, set “Max. number of images” to zero: (Gallery, Options)

Barbara’s information

Barbara Ann Weibel, Writer/Photographer
Blog: http://holeinthedonut.com
Photo Library: http://easywebsite.net

In closing

A big thanks goes to Barbara for sharing this with me and allowing it to be posted here. Again, I hope this is helpful to some of y’all. Feel free to comment and ask questions via the comments form below!

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.

My WordPress 2.7 comment fix

I spent pretty much every waking moment I had at home this weekend trying to wrap my head around the new comment loop in WordPress 2.7. Otto’s detailed explanation was helpful, but did not give me a way to “break down” the new wp_list_comments function.

Finally frustrated, I hit the WordPress forums and mailing lists. Several posts in the forums pointed to Justin Tadlock’s recent post about making themes backwards compatible. Basically, you save a copy of your current (2.6) comments.php file and name it legacy.comments.php. Then add a small bit of code to your theme’s functions.php file:

This IS very useful and I’ll be needing it to update my released themes, but not quite what I was looking for for updating this site. Checking WP-Hackers, I hit gold — a post by Ryan Boren a couple months back detailing how to separate pings from comments gave me the nudge in the right direction that I had been looking for.

Callbacks

I don’t know why it never occurred to me before now, but using a callback allows you to breakdown a function (similar to the foreach loop used for comments in previous versions of WordPress). Hitting the forums again, I found a reference to Jeremy Clark’s post on using the comment callback function. This gave me exactly what I needed.

I used Jeremy’s comment threading post as a starting point for my comments.php file (view code). I fixed the alignment of most of the coding to make it a little easier to follow (and muck about, LOL).

Here’s a close-up of my modified the wp_list_comments reference:

Here I am changing the avatar size to 70 and will be using a callback function called “custom_comment” to format the results of the loop. Also, notice that the type is set to ‘comment’. For the time being, I am showing only comments (no trackbacks/pingbacks) until I figure out how I want them styled.

Now on to the functions.php file to show you how I formatted and corralled everything (view code).

Taking this route seems a bit overwhelming at first but IMO is the best way to go if you want your comments to look and/or behave a certain way.

Last but not least

If you haven’t already, don’t forget to add this snippet to your theme’s header.php file:

As shown in my example, make sure you add it before the wp_head() call.

Everything clear?

I hope this all makes some kind of sense. Please feel free to ask me to elaborate on anything I’ve posted here and I’ll try my best to explain!

Upgraded to WP 2.7

I figured I’d go ahead and bite the bullet this weekend and update to 2.7 now that it’s available. So far, I am impressed by all the WP Admin changes but haven’t had time to look much into anything else. I know I will have to update this theme and all of my releases to include the new comment functions and other good stuff. With any luck, I’ll get this done next week.

I can see from the WP feeds that 2.7.1 is hot on 2.7′s heels, so as soon as that’s available in the upgrade options, I’ll do that too.

Let me know if anything looks out of place or wonky!

Some room to breathe …

Ever have one of those really good productive days at work? One where when you get done accomplishing things you just feel like you can breathe again? I’ve had one today. I spent a good bit of the afternoon clearing out my major email accounts and am pleased to say that I got quite a lot done. Jess is over at her mother’s tonight. Jim came home from work early and has been in bed most of the afternoon (most likely he’s finally coming down with that awful crud that Jess and I have both already had), so the house is nice and quiet.

Tonight I treated myself to a very fantabulous meal from Hamburger Heaven and am currently downloading 6 months’ worth of photos from my Helio Ocean to my laptop. I’ve finally had time to sit down and go through a new cookbook I had bought on Black Friday. I’ve made a laundry list of items I’d need for various recipes that caught my eye — from Chicken Tortilla Soup, to Easy Cajun Stew, to 30-minute Paella, to Spanish Skillet Supper, to Catalonian Stew, …

Yum, yum!

I’ve also started clearing out my desk. I found myself tossing out old notes, papers, and various promotional brochures — everything from Victorinox Swiss Army watches to vacation places …

Gah, I collect a lot of crap!

I’m toying around with the thought of upgrading this blog to WordPress 2.7 RC1, but I think I’ll hold off as I have not yet updated this theme to handle all the new features. I’ve also started on and have almost finished my Christmas card mailing list, and am scanning the Soldiers’ Angels forums to see if there are any new card or letter requests.

Something I had meant to post a couple weeks back — my soldiers’ Christmas packages. Jess, Jim, and I had a lot of fun playing “Santa” and filling up a stocking for each soldier. Each stocking was filled with all kinds of Christmas cookies and candies, different types of trail mixes, a CD of Christmas songs, a wool scarf, various little toys, a novelty tie, and a handful of other things …

I so wish I could see their faces when their packages arrive over there!

I hope everyone’s having a good week. I think I’m going to take off for now and curl up next to the snoring snuffle monster (Jim, LOL!) to catch up on some DVDs.

Ja, mata ne!

The Luv is back!

CommentLuv that is.

This handy-dandy plugin allows commenters the option of displaying a link to their latest blog post (and thereby gaining free linkylove!). I had been using this plugin previously, but ran into problems when I updated to the latest version. The author, Andy Bailey, kindly helped me get things running again via the CommentLuv support forums.

What’s more, this neat tool isn’t limited to just WordPress users. There are also versions available for WordPress MU, Blogger, Typepad, and many other blogging softwares/services and CMS platforms. This plugin has come a long way in the last few versions!

Nice work, Andy.

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!

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