That’s right! Take a freakin’ walk! You’re done, finished, ka-put, ceased, closed, come to an end, concluded, discharged, dispatched, disposed of, ended, finalized, in the past, lapsed, realized, resolved, settled, sewn up, terminated, through, tied up, worked out, wound up, wrapped up, and just plain history!

Do you get the feeling I’m glad to see it go? Yeah, it hasn’t been one of my best years by a long shot.

So, as I look forward to 2009 I can only share my optimism by saying:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

May 2009 make you happy, healthy and prosperous.

Odds N Ends Asides

I’ve been surfing around to other blogs quite a bit recently and I’m shocked at how much sidebar pollution is out there. Specifically – advertising.

I’m all for making a few bucks and I’m hoping the few spots I’ve allocated to ads will at least cover my hosting at the end of the year. The last thing I want to do is distract people from the content. Or worse yet, send them screaming for the hills just because it takes forever for the site to load.

If you’ve taken the pains to optimize your theme, then why are you going to turn around and slow things down by overpopulating your sidebar? In some cases I’ve been able to finish reading a post before the page had even finished loading. (Thankfully, content was rendered first.)

The first thing I learned in web design was the fact you have approximately 15-20 seconds to grab a user’s attention. After that you can consider them gone. In these days of high speed access, most designers and site owners have pretty much forgotten about this. We still have a certain portion of the Internet population that still uses Dial-up.

Slow loading sidebar? Here’s a few things to look for:

• Flash Video Ads. These things take a fair amount of resources and bandwidth. I have the luxury (?!) of running an older computer. These ads, especially when more than one appears on a page, bog down my system to the point where I have to wait for the ad to finish playing before I can do anything else. The quickest solution to this is to simply close the window or tab. Not something a blogger wants. Not all flash video ads demand such resources but a good portion do. (Especially those Telus ads which dominated Adsense prior to Christmas)
• Plugins and Widgets. Some people are just wild about adding all the latest greatest sidebar widgets and plugins. Truth be told, many of these make a huge amount of http and database requests. Some plugins are just coded poorly which doesn’t help matters either. If you think your sidebar is slowing things down, deactivate all plugins and corresponding widgets then start them up again one at a time. Eventually you’ll find the culprit.
• Community Avatar Widgets. Yay! It’s great to see who’s been visiting, but each one of those tiny little avatars require an http request to load. If you run several of these community widgets (each displaying last 100 visitors) then you slow down the load time considerably. Next to flash ads, I found these to be once of the highest load times on many sidebars.
• External Content. If a plugin or widget needs to pull it’s information from a 3rd party site, this can slow things down if the target site is either busy or experiencing technical difficulties. Ensure that the site provides it’s content on a timely basis, otherwise lose it.

I’m yet to finalize exactly what will appear in my sidebar, but rest assured. I’ll be watching the above points very closely.

Plugins Optimization, Plugins, WordPress

It’s officially been 10 days since uploading WordPress to my server. I thought I would take a quick moment to review the actions and results so far.

Actions:

1. Selected a Theme and hacked it into place.
2. Added relevant content.
3. Added essential Plugins (Firestats, Discus, Google XML Sitemaps, etc)
4. Added my URL to forum signatures and profiles.
5. Almost swallowed an Earwig.
6. Set myself up in various social networks. (Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc)

Results:

1. A Theme that is easy to read and more importantly, easy on the eyes.
2. Getting hits from Search Engines for several posts I’ve made to this point.
3. Plugins just make life easier and in some cases neater.
4. I’m now seeing backlinks due to Forum Signatures. Like I said previously, it takes some time but I’m expecting to see anywhere from 500-1000 backlinks in the coming months just from previous Forum Posts. (Even more if I remain active in these forums)
5. Puke!
6. A blog is useless without connecting to other people. By adding and updating Social Media accounts, I’ve seen several visits from these services.

Some Stats:

• Over 150 Unique visitors
• Over 250 Page views
• 14 RSS subscribers. (As of today… this number fluctuates daily)
• 6 hits from Search Engines for content added to this point.
• Over 100 backlinks. This will likely grow daily for the next while as more Forum Posts are added to the list.
• Over 48 (double sized!) cups of coffee have been consumed.
• Approximately 300 cigarettes have been smoked.
• A dozen meals skipped.

I guess the next step is to get out there and start reading and commenting on other blogs. I’ll be yapping about this method in another post later. Doing this will also prompt more ideas for better posting. To this point I’ve just been posting about what I’ve been doing here and other things off the top of my head from experiences gone by.

It’s time to bring myself up to current speed in the topics I plan to cover here.

Blog Promotion Blog Promotion, Blog Startup

So, you’ve been out there for hours (or even days) looking for that perfect theme. Suddenly, pay dirt! You hit one that suits your needs beautifully.

You download it, activate it, then head off to the widget screen to set up the sidebar. But Oh no! The theme doesn’t support widgets!

At this point you have two choices:

1. Continue looking for another theme which does support sidebar widgets.
2. Get brave and start hacking in your own widget support.

Since the first option is boring, we’ll talk about the second. Widgetizing a hard coded theme is drop dead simple and only takes 3 simple steps!

(Disclaimer: Don’t yell at me! Backup your theme first. Have a quick restore option handy)

Step 1

Locate "sidebar.php" in your theme directory. (Note: Code will vary!!) Load it up and you will see something like this: (search for: <div id="sidebar">)

<div id="sidebar">
<ul>    
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=<h2>Main Menu</h2>' ); ?>
    <li><h2><?php _e('Categories'); ?></h2>
    <ul>
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>
    </ul>
    </li>
    <li><h2><?php _e('Archives'); ?></h2>
    <ul>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>
    </ul>
    </li>
        <<<<Snip!>>>> <-- To keep this brief  
</ul></div>

There’ll be more code but here I snipped it for the sake of brevity. Basically you want to remove any hard code that makes up the sidebar (wp_list_pages, wp_list_cats, etc) and replace it with support for widgets.

Step 2

In the example given here, we replace all that with this:

<div id="sidebar">
<ul>
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')
        || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul></div>

Save and upload this to your server.

Step 3

Find and load "functions.php" (If it doesn’t exist, create it) Make sure the file contains this line:

<?php if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )register_sidebars(2);?>

Save and upload this to your server.

Now you can activate and use widgets. You may need to adjust some CSS, depending on how the theme was coded, but you should be done.

You can also run a combination of both hard coded and widgeted sidebars:

<div id="sidebar">
<ul><li><h2>Main Menu</h2>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="http://www.example.com/about/"  
    title="About example">About example</a></li>
    <li><a href=http://www.example.com/ 
    title="Back to the Home Page">Home</a></li>
    </ul>
    </li>    
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')
        || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
    <li><h2>W3C Valid</h2>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer" title="<?php _e('This page validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional'); ?>"><?php _e('Valid <abbr title="eXtensible HyperText Markup Language">XHTML</abbr>'); ?></a></li>
    <li><a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.example.com"><?php _e('Valid  <abbr title="Valid Css!">CSS</abbr>'); ?></a></li>
    </ul>
    </li>
</ul></div>

I’ve been through many theme hunts. It wasn’t long before I realized this method as essential knowledge. It broadened my theme-hunting options greatly.

Hope someone finds this useful.

Themes Themes, WordPress

I’d decided I wanted a ‘Random Thoughts’ area in my sidebar for little tidbits worth mentioning but not worthy of posting about.

So, off I went on a plugin hunt. After a half hour of hunting and asking around in IRC I was finally given a link. By that time I’d come up with a better idea.

Text Widget. By creating one line of HTML within a Text Widget I managed to get my sick little thought out into the open.

Keep in mind that Text Widgets obey the laws of HTML very nicely. If you can do it on a HTML web page, you can likely do it in a Text Widget as well.

<ul><li>Ever notice how Puritan Stew comes in the same size cans as dog food?</li></ul>

That’s all the code I needed to scare readers off Puritan Stew forever.

I could likely fancy it up a bit using CSS but it seems to fit well into the sidebar as is.

As far as maintaining something like this… It can’t be any more work than maintaining a plugin. A quick line of code, save, and we’re done.

<li> <i>Give a man a program, you frustrate him for a day. Teach a man to program, you frustrate him for a lifetime.</i> — unknown</li>

Plus, as an added bonus, you’ll never have to worry about those pesky upgrades that plugins seem to go through so frequently these days. It’s all you!

So, next time you’re thinking about something simple for your sidebar, think Text Widget first, plugin second.

Plugins Plugins, WordPress

Sometimes I think I take the long road just because the short road may not be interesting enough. Today’s post illustrates this perfectly.

Now that the site is somewhat complete my thoughts have been turning to getting the word out. I’ll be joining several social networks in the coming days (weeks?), so I’ll be posting about them once I’ve formulated a few thoughts in their use.

My first stop in doing this was Twitter. Great little social utility and appears simple enough. The hardest part of using it is the selection of a suitable Twitter Client.

The Long Road

The first client suggested to me was twirl. A brief visit to their website informed me that Adobe Air needed to be installed on my system first. Great! More overhead to strain FrankenPuter (a computer built from the dead bodies of 4 other computers).

Deciding to pass on installing more overhead, my thoughts turned to a .NET application. At least I already had that installed!

I decided to give a .NET client a try as I figured it would require no additional installs to get it to run. A simple solution to my aversion to installing more stuff, right?

Wrong! Sure, the client installed in seconds, but it also initiated a download/install of additional .NET crap which took approximately 30 minutes to install. Then, the horrors of all horrors presented itself. A reboot. Gah! (This was seriously starting to cut in on my ‘goofing around’ time!)

Once rebooted the above mentioned client installed itself quite quickly. After taking a quick (?!) 5 minutes to restart all my desktop apps, I launched it. Cannot connect and other error messages dominated the rest of my hour.

Where did this simple task go wrong? Join Twitter, grab a client, done! How hard can this be? As it turns out, not hard at all.

The Short Road

I was not getting any younger here! This above process had now wasted an hour and a half of my life. Screw it!

Install AIR, twirl, done! (With NO reboots!)

I was installed, connected, and ready to tweet within minutes. Ah yes, the boring Short Road.

FrankenPuter will just have to deal with it.

If you’re interested at all, you can follow me: http://twitter.com/LarryMonte

Blog Promotion Asides, Blog Promotion, Social Media

Before I get started here I thought I would just give a quick ‘hat tip’ to mg12 for creating such a great free theme. I’ve only worked on 4 blogs to this point but I’ve been through many themes. This one is an absolute pleasure to work with! Thanks!

However, there were just a few more things I wanted to do.

My installation of Disqus broke the comment links on the single post page. (single.php)

Neither of these links went anywhere as they were making calls to the internal WordPress comment system. Since we’re using Disqus we’ll have to code things a tad differently.

In single.php

<span class="date"><?php the_modified_time(__(‘F jS, Y’, ‘inove’)); ?></span>
            <div class="act">
                <?php if ($comments || comments_open()) : ?>
                    <span class="comments"><a href="#comments"><?php _e(‘Goto comments’, ‘inove’); ?></a></span>
                    <span class="addcomment"><a href="#respond"><?php _e(‘Leave a comment’, ‘inove’); ?></a></span>

Since Disqus does the job for both of these links we can simply remove the line making the #comment reference.

<span class="date"><?php the_time(__(‘F jS, Y’, ‘inove’)); echo ‘. Posted By <a title="author" href="’; the_author_url(); echo ‘">’; the_author(); echo ‘</a>’; ?></span>
            <div class="act">
                <?php if ($comments || comments_open()) : ?>
                    <span class="addcomment"><a href="#disqus_thread"><?php _e(‘Leave a comment’, ‘inove’); ?></a></span>

While here, I added author info to the single post display just like we did previously for the front page. Also we changed #respond to #disqus_thread in our link reference.

While working in single.php I thought I would add code to display an Adsense block just after the post but before the comments. I’ve been told this is a prime ad spot so I thought I would take advantage of it.

Unlike the sidebar ads which were inserted using Text Widgets this had to be hard coded into the theme page. (single.php)

<p class="under">
                <?php if ($options['categories']) : ?><span class="categories"><?php the_category(‘, ‘); ?></span><?php endif; ?>
                <?php if ($options['tags']) : ?><span class="tags"><?php the_tags(”, ‘, ‘, ”); ?></span><?php endif; ?>
            </p>
            <p align="center"><script type="text/javascript"><!–
google_ad_client = "pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";
/* 468×60, created 12/26/08 */
google_ad_slot = "xxxxxxxxxx";
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
//–>
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script></p>

Finding the code which displays categories and tags, I inserted my adsense code between that and the call to the comments function. Tucked in nicely.

Now that I’m making millions (ha!) I turned to my final task.

I’ve always found that having a comment link at the end of the post is preferable to me than at the top. This theme only features a comment link at the top of the post. We don’t want to move it, we just want to add another at the end of the post.

In index.php

<?php if ($options['tags']) : ?><span class="tags"><?php the_tags(”, ‘, ‘, ”); ?></span><?php endif; ?>
                    <span class="comments"><?php comments_popup_link(__(‘No comments’, ‘inove’), __(’1 comment’, ‘inove’), __(‘% comments’, ‘inove’)); ?></span>

We simply duplicate the code used at the top of the post and insert it after the category and tag code at the bottom.

Now that the user has read the post, there’s a handy link right there to make a comment.

I was honestly expecting this Theme Hacking series to go on a bit more. But, thanks to such great work by the theme author, I think I just might be done hacking.

I bet some of you are wondering about why I’m posting about such simple tasks. Two words: relevant content baby! While I’ve been screwing around getting things setup I’ve been seeing hits for search terms such as: ShareThis, ‘startup wordpress blog’ and most recently, ‘disqus startup’ All of these are due to the content I’ve added up to this point.

A head start, so to speak.

Themes Blog Startup, Themes, WordPress

Christmas is not only about catching up with the ‘long lost’, but also about sitting around reminiscing about days gone by with friends and family. My post today reflects this as I take a short stroll into the past.

The words ‘Open Source’ are pretty much on everyone’s lips these days and most projects are subjected to some kind of licensing agreement or such. There was a day when licensing didn’t mean squat as hobbyist programmers freely shared code amongst themselves and with the public via FidoNet EchoMail.

I myself was part of this movement. I developed modules for the Maximus CBCS Bulletin Board System. An overview of my work with this can be found here: Maximus!

I remember days where I would come home from work on Friday at 5pm. I would go straight to bed and get up about Midnight. I would then work straight through until Sunday night trying to get projects finished up. I performed many of these 48 hour stretches.

int check_tag(int: count, ref int: que)     // See if file is tagged
{
  int: times, flags;
  string: filescheck;

  for(times:=que+1;times>-1;times:=times-1)
  {
    tag_get_name(que,flags,filescheck);
    if(strfind(filescheck,finfo[count].fname)>0)
      return 1;
    que := que -1;
  }
  return 0;
}

Code segments like this would dance in my head. I’d lose sleep over bugs and meals over unrealistic deadlines I’d set for myself. So much passion back then.

Coding modules for something like Maximus is NO DIFFERENT than coding themes and plugins for CMS’s today. You’re given an engine and it’s up to you how you present it. Hell, even the coding style is similar! (The above snippet is MEX coding for Maximus)

… The More They Remain the Same (To complete the title of this post)

So if these two eras of Open Source are so damned similar then why has my passion eluded me? What am I missing this time around? I need to get all fired up about this again!

Well, that in itself is why this blog now exists. We’ll see how things turn out.

Anyway, not too many people are following this blog yet, but I’ll just insert a quick “Merry Christmas” here to those who are. Hope you got everything you asked for!

Odds N Ends Asides, Coding, Open Source

At this point, sharing my posts is starting to become more of a focus. (Not that I’m writing anything Earth shattering here! ) To this end I have installed a couple more plugins to help with this.

GOOGLE XML SITEMAPS

The first place you want to share your posts is with Google and other Search Engines. This superb plugin regenerates XML sitemaps after posts are published and notifies Search Engines of the changes automatically.

No muss, no fuss. Activate it, review the settings then simply forget about it.

I wasn’t sure if I still needed to go into WebMaster Tools at Google and initially submit the sitemap manually or not, but I did just that anyway. I figured it couldn’t hurt.

WebSite: http://www.arnebrachhold.de … sitemaps-generator/

SHARETHIS

One thing you want on your blog is an very simple way for people to share your posts with others. The ShareThis plugin pulls this off beautifully with many options.

Instead of blathering on about it, check out the ShareThis icon at the bottom of this post and give it a try.

WebSite: http://sharethis.com/

WP-PAGENAVI

This has nothing to do with sharing but does add pagination for navigating through post pages. I like it as it tidies the pages up a bit.

WebSite: http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/ (You’ll have to scroll down)

As you can see I don’t get into a lot of technical detail when describing plugins. At this point those topics have been blogged to death already. I doubt I could add anything new.

I’m just suggesting what I like here.

Plugins Blog Startup, Plugins, WordPress

I’m not sure why I’ve avoided this plugin for so long. I’ve been aware of it for about a year now but never tried it other than to make comments on other blogs. I guess the idea of storing my comment data elsewhere made me a little nervous. I think I’m over that now.

So, balancing myself on the edge of the diving board, I took the plunge and installed it.

The install was drop-dead simple. Create an account with them, upload a few files, activate the plugin and make the desired settings. Done! The only thing missing now are people to make comments. They’ll come soon enough. We’re only on day three here.

So far it looks to be an awesome Comment System. Just from surfing around a bit it looks like support is also top notch.

Come the new year people will be able to comment on blogs with Disqus using their FaceBook Profiles. Also Comments post to the Facebook news feed. I’m too much of a FaceBook dummy to know how this will benefit a blog, but we’ll see.

What more can you ask for?

Well, I do have one issue with Disqus. It breaks XHTML validation. There are several solutions out there but most are for earlier versions and simply didn’t work for me. I did see mention of promises to look into this problem by support staff. So, even though it breaks my efforts to keep everything validated, I’m still willing to use it. That should say a lot about how I feel about Disqus.

This is definitely a plug in you should look into right from the get-go.

Visit their site: http://disqus.com

Plugins Blog Startup, Plugins