Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category


Adjusting and fixing my RSS feeds

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

There is a good chance that RSS subscribers just got blasted with a back log of posts, so please don’t think that I made about ten posts in a single day. I did some rearranging a couple of months ago when I re-themed my site, restructured my WordPress install, and upgraded to the latest and greatest version of 2.5.

I neglected to make adjustments to FeedBurner, and that has been fixed. Let that be a mental note to the rest of you with similar setups. If you make significant, back end changes to your WordPress site, don’t forget to double check you RSS feed if you are using a third party site like FeedBurner.

Using CSS to attribute photos in your blog posts

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

Rebecca recently made a post about using the AddQuickTags plugin for WordPress to display captions on photos in her blog posts, I would elaborate on the CSS styling it takes to get this. The WordPress plugin makes this easier, but I thought it would be useful to share how you can do this with some simple CSS, especially if you don’t have WordPress at your disposal.

First, how do you get this…

John and Becks by duanestorey on Flickr
Photo credit: duane storey on Flickr

to work?

To start with, you need your image and then link it to its origin or creator to attribute credit to. This is just good practice and makes the original author happy. We’ll have to peak at some quick HTML to get a sense of what’s going on here because we don’t like using visual editors. Code might be tough to work with for some, but it’s second nature to us.

<a href="http://website.com"><img src="http://photosharingsite.com/photo/image.jpg" /></a>

Your HTML might look different, but the premise should be the same. It’s a linked image, but how do you get the “Photo by:” tag underneath the image? Let’s start by adding some code to your CSS.

.captioncentered {
display: block;
text-align: center; /*centers text & image*/
margin: 10px auto; /*centers the whole div*/
padding-bottom: 1px; /*this depends of your design*/
font-size: 0.85em;
color: #ccc;
}

This will make like somewhat simple for you in the long run because this will set the design of your blog to work for all posts you use this styling for. So now what do you do with it?

You just setup a “class” to use in the “div” tag. It works like this.

<div class="captioncentered"><a href="http://website.com"><img src="http://photosharingsite.com/photo/image.jpg" /></a></div>

That centers the image, so now you need to add a little more HTML to this in order to get the credit where it deserves to be. This just requires some text and then linking the words you want linked. However, this extra text must be inside the div tags in order for this to work!

<div class="captioncentered"><a href="http://website.com"><img src="http://photosharingsite.com/photo/image.jpg" /></a>
<br />Photo by: <a href="http://website.com" />author</a> on PhotoSharingSite.com</div>

Once you have this, you are able to to display an image, such as a photo from Flickr, with proper attribution. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do, not to mention a legal way to not get yourself into trouble with the original author for taking their content.

The next thing you can do is edit your CSS to make some adjustment to the look of your text or perhaps the background. It really comes down to what you want to do. There might be a better way to do this, but this is how we get this function to work.

Checking out Firefox 3 beta RC3

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

In an effort to at least post something in about a week, I thought I would make a quick mention of some initial thoughts I had when I downloaded Firefox 3 beta 3. Now to get that in normal people speak, that would be version 3.0 of Firefox, but it’s still in the beta phase of development, meaning that it’s not ready for official, widespread release and/or use. The second 3 means that it’s third in a series of release candidates for the big day when Firefox 3 is finally here.

You still with me?

The first thing I noticed, on my Powerbook G4 with a 1GHz processor circa 2003, is the speed that this browser works. It’s fast. The current release of Firefox, 2.0.0.12, is rough on my laptop. I can only achieve half the speed of the latest beta by plugging in a hard wire connection, and that only makes me even more sad to the reality that this beautiful laptop is ending its life cycle, but that’s a whole other story.

Rebecca has been using it a bit more than I after I told her about how well it operated, but it starts and stops with the speed. There are some minor bugs that still need to be worked out. There are key commands for WordPress that don’t work in the beta release, but that’s less important than the numerous plugins that I rely on daily which need to be updated and ported into this new version. That will come in time, but certainly makes me hesitate to make the upgrade before I get all my tools lined up and readily available.

Phillip sent me a Twitter the other night when I mentioned this, asking if he should download it. I would say that it wouldn’t hurt if you are a multi-browser user. Firefox is my main workhorse, but I also bounce in and out of Safari and Camino. I expect to do the same with this beta release as well, so if you think you are along those lines, then go for it. Otherwise, hold off. This beta release (beta being the very important word here) isn’t quite ready for the big time.

Northern Voice Day 2: Keynote with Matt Mullenweg

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

I’m not going to say a lot as I wait for this keynote to start, but it’s incredibly cool to have Matt Mullenweg here to start the day off at Northern Voice 2008. So much of what I do is WordPress, so it’s pretty freaking neat that the guy who founded the project is speaking today.

Boris and Matt
Photo credit: Duane Storey on Flickr

Interesting notes during the keynote:

  • WP 2.5 to have one click upgrades to plugins. WP 2.6 to hopefully have one click upgrade to core software.
  • Ha! This Matt just mentioned the Matt I mentioned in my last post. They are in a battle for the highest Google ranking for their first name.
  • “Kill the Megabrands”
  • “When you have the taste of freedom, it’s tough to go back.” Basically, no matter what the open source project is, everyone has the ability to contribute to it, knowing how to code or not.
  • Why shouldn’t the government have more open source information? Otherwise, they are just stealing from us and keeping information to themselves.
  • You can listen to his keynote here.

Cool WordPress plugin: FeedEntryHeader

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

Feed Sample I got an email from someone who subscribes to my RSS[wiki] feed that noticed something new in their subscription lately, and you might have as well.

The image here is a snippet of how a post of mine looks in Google Reader. Basically, it’s a simple plugin that provides a copyright stamp at the beginning of every post that goes into your RSS feed. There are a few variations of how you can do this with WordPress, but the one I am using is FeedEntryHeader. It puts a copyright, a link to your site, and a link to the original post at the start of all your posts.

Why would you want to do this? Well the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of aggregator sites that like to take the content from your RSS feeds and put them up on their sites as original content. Better yet, there are some sites that will completely credit you for your content but strip away all the embedded links. This plugin at least puts all this information at the top where it’s slightly hard to miss. At the very least, the URL to your original content will show up on those sites that “borrow” your content.

If you use WordPress and care about the things you publish, you should look at using this plugin. It’s more than just getting credit for what you publish. There is also something to be said about other people making money off of the content you generate, and that’s just inconsiderate.

WordPress site design: elizabethbollwitt.com

Friday, December 28th, 2007

elizabethbollwitt.com ElizabethBollwitt.com is a site that I recently designed and launched for my sister and her artistic endeavors as a painter. The site is a few months old, and it’s another site that I’ve been meaning to write about. Every time I attempt to, I found a flaw in the site and wanted to wait until I fixed it.

My sister had a site for a while before I offered my services in terms of design, and I also consulted her on how blogging can help boost her efforts in getting her works, if not name, recognized a little more on the internet. The previous site was built purely on HTML with a 4D WebServer working in the background. Getting into the guts of what that programming can do is powerful, but based on what I’ve learned about WordPress and PHP over the past few years, a switch just seemed to make sense.

The one thing that is difficult about the site is the speed in which it loads. I’m unsure if the site I built has something to do with it, and the server that it resides on is of my doing as well. It’s an Apache server that I configured from the ground up, so there is a chance that I might have setup something wrong in the process. Never doing such things before, it was a tough time getting all the ins and outs of Unix sorted out, but I learned a lot. The connection to the server isn’t the fastest, and it shows when you go to load the site.

The design was intended to be simple but based off the previous design to the site. Being the artist, I let Beth pick out more of those elements while I focused on the function of the site. We are currently using the WP e-Commerce plugin to run the store, and for what it does, it’s a fairly effective element to the site.

The overall goal to the site is to provide a better platform for Beth to display her works online. The purchasing is one thing, but she also does a variety of art shows as well as growing opportunities to display her original paintings in galleries on the east coast of the U.S. With the addition of a blog, visitors to her site can follow along as she creates new works as well as get information about upcoming events where her works can be seen and purchased.

There has already been some small successes in the site in terms of sales and exposure. As with anything you do on the internet, success comes over time, and we’re hoping for the best in 2008.

Launched a new WordPress site: noboundaries.org

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

NoBoundaries.org NoBoundaries.org isn’t a new site, nor is this relaunch of this design that new because it was unveiled about a month or so ago. I haven’t gotten around to posting anything about it because I got it put into the public realm while switching to a new day job, so it’s been a hectic last few months in my life.

Speaking of, getting this WordPress design put together was quite the task. NoBoundaries.org is a travelogue by my friend, Andy Stoll. He put his money where his month was and set out on an around the world trip, the intention of seeing as much of it as he can. While in the first legs of the adventure, he contacted me about helping him out with his site. That turned into a redesign, so while in China, we coordinated strictly through email to exchange ideas and critiques as the process went along.

The site is probably not as finished as I might like it to be, but it can get pretty difficult to get the details sorted out when Andy is emailing you from Kazakhstan, when he is able to find some bandwidth to check his email. You also don’t want to make changes that he isn’t overly sure about or informed of, not to mention doing something that will take a lot of explanation through email. Remember, Andy is traveling as I write this, and the last thing I want him to be doing is thinking heavily about his website when he should be cranking out blog posts and videos of his travels.

The one, overall goal of the design was to make it not look like a typical blog. Andy had a lot of great ideas, and I did my best to structure it in the way that he envisioned. Sometimes that is easier said than done, but we came to a common conclusion that what we had was good to go before he ended an extended stay in China. If we had more time, especially before he left on his trip, we might have thought out the site in more detail.

As a side note, I might have pushed a Drupal design for the site if this project would have occurred before his departure from the U.S., but Andy already had a WordPress site established. He wasn’t satisfied with what he had at the time he contacted me, looking to overhaul the theme to his site. Switching him to Drupal would have taken too much to teach when someone is busy trying to travel the world.

If you’d like to see an example of some of the things Andy has been doing on his travels, check out the video below of, “What It’s Like: To Walk Through A House In A Fishing Village In China“.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1

Friday, November 30th, 2007

It’s taken me a while to get this site upgraded to the WordPress 2.3.1, but there are a few other sites that I work with that have been running this latest version. I’ve had some low level interaction with this latest release, and there are a lot of positive things that I’ve experienced. Still, there is one thing that bothers me.

Tags.

Now we exist in a world of tags and categories, and they both do nearly the same thing, at least when they work correctly. Still, it makes my wonder about the whole scheme, more to the effect of what it is that I should or shouldn’t be doing with the way I interact with my WordPress blog.

I’ve read enough to know that the tagging feature was scrapped from the 2.2 release because it was getting rushed, so developers opted to wait until 2.3. Well, it’s here. I’m not so sure that it’s ready to be launched into the grand scheme of things because I really am not sure what I should be doing with tags, even after reading a few things by those close to the development process.

Preferably, I would have liked to see one replaced by the other, if tags are indeed going to replace categories like I read into, in one big sweep. For the most part, I’m going to keep ignoring tags for the time being, but that might screw me over in the future.

When it comes down to it, you shouldn’t have to try so hard to understand it. I switched to WordPress from Blogger because I looked at it, and it made sense. Keep it simple, stupid. That’s how I roll, and now I’m the one left scratching my head over what I should be preparing myself for down the line.

Filed under: WordPress

Launched a new Drupal site: knox-church.org

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007

knox-church.org I’ve built a Drupal site for a church that contacted me some time ago about building them a website. The goal, originally, was to make something that would help Knox Church to not only publicize events at the church and provide information about it, but staff wanted a way to easily interact with the site. This meant updating it and getting some sort of events calendar on the site.

The initial creation of the site was in WordPress. I did a lot to separate the site into categories that would manipulate how the page was displayed to those who surfed into the site. The only problem was the training that took place to bring the staff up to speed on how the site operates. WordPress is intuitive, but the average, intermediate to beginner user might have a difficult time grasping the technology. The various plugins I found and used for listing events were effective, but there was a lot more to be desired from what was available at that time.

Since building the first site, I’ve been doing more and more development with Drupal, and the potential has really hit me in the past few months. I have to give a lot of credit to some conversations that I’ve had with Boris Mann about a couple of projects, including this one, that I’ve been working on. Being a guy on the forefront of Drupal development on a global scale, he has really helped to give me ideas on the possible things I can do. Getting from point A to about point G or P takes a little work some times, but when you reach Z, it’s like a lightning bolt hitting you in the face. In other words, yes, Drupal has elements in it that makes changing the world quite possible.

Well, in this case, it’s going to make it easier for Knox Church staff to interact with the site, not to mention an actual events calendar, which is incredibly cool. There is even iCal integration and a slew of other things that I can do that I don’t know about or how to do, but it’s all possible. It’s just a matter of having the time to sort it out.

What I do know is starting to not only make a lot of sense, but it’s going to streamline interaction for those on the site. As events come up, they can be added from any computer from anywhere and at anytime. As information changes, it can be edited and kept up to date on the website. That goes a long way when you make a typo on the church bulletin that forces everyone to show up at the wrong place and/or the wrong time, not to mention an easy way to post cancellations of events.

There is still a learning process to undertake with the staff. You can build all you want and have lots of cool things, but it’s the content that’s key. This is the next step, and the excitement is starting from those who know about the impending transition to a new content management system.

WP-Cache plugin to help boost page loading time

Monday, September 17th, 2007

I’ve installed the WP-Cache NoSymLink plugin to my site for a little experimentation. The goal of this is to cut down on the amount of time it takes to load the various pages and posts within my site, and this plugin is a tweaked version of the original WP-Cache plugin.

If you have a WordPress site that attracts a lot of traffic, this will help speed up page loading by a few seconds. What it does is takes some of the load off your server in terms of generating pages on the fly. With every, single post that you read on any WordPress site, the server it sits on pulls information from a handful of data sources to present you a web page on your browser.

Instead of dragging down server performance and making you wait for all this information to load from a database, the cache stores this data on a temporary basis to get the page to show up on your browser faster. This is really helpful if you have a site with a lot of traffic or host your WordPress blog on a server with a slow connection to the outside world.

Can’t say that I have the worst server or the number of readers that heeds the need for such a plugin, but I’ve noticed a little bit more speed to the load time on my site.