Torn Elements

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 View Comments

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 View Comments

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 View Comments

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 View Comments

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 View Comments

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 View Comments

Ok! My days of working in the dark are over. Lights on at all times.

I’m up late doing some tweaking of the web site. In the low glow of my monitors I reach over and take a big haul from my can of Diet Pepsi.

I was suddenly aware of a solid object in this mouthful. Without swallowing I managed to push the object through my lips with my tongue. Picking it from my lips I look to my fingers to find AN EARWIG!

Gross right? (I’m not done yet)

Before I had a chance to freak out and call the Pepsi Bottling Company every name in the book, it scurried away. Gah! It was still alive!

I wanted to scream but I was suddenly aware that I still had the mouthful of Diet Pepsi which I hadn’t swallowed yet. (And wasn’t going to) Running quickly to the kitchen sink I tripped over the cat and swallowed the mouthful anyway. Thankfully Earwigs don’t travel in packs. lol

It must have either been on the rim of the can or had crawled in before I took a drink.

… 2 French hens,
And an Earwig in a can of Pep-si!

Odds N Ends Asides View Comments

As you can see by the screenshot (and site itself) I’ve found a theme! And after only 2 days of searching! I actually found this theme early in my hunt but I wasn’t about to deny myself 48 hours of agonizing searching anyway.

Why I chose this theme…

• Clean look. (Who wants a dirty blog?)
• Supports Widgets.
• Valid CSS and XHTML. (A must!)
• Table-less design. (Also a must!)
• Right Sidebar.

The Right Sidebar was a primary criteria in my search. Likely no real advantage to it but I like the idea of rendering content before anything else. I suspect Search Engines prefer it too.

But with all themes there are some things I wanted changed. So, with my trusty code editor on standby I started hacking.

First up was the XHTML validation. The theme dictated XHTML1.1. Unfortunately, this presents a problem for me. I use Windows Live Writer to compose my posts and I always use images. For some reason WLW will break strict XHTML (and in this case XHTML1.1) validation. It has something to do with image parameters but I won’t go into that in any detail here.

Changing this was simple.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

The above line appears at the top of index.php. A simple change to XHTML Transitional will solve my problem.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Now I can use WLW to my heart’s content without fear of breaking validation.

Next on my to-do list was to include author information to the post header info.

Previously this theme only included date and comment links. It may just be my sick need to see my name in lights, but I’m thinking ‘recognition’ is a big key in blogging. Be it a picture or a name you want something to stick in peoples minds. The more people see it, them more likely they’ll remember it later.

By changing this line…

<span class="date"><?php the_time(__(‘F jS, Y’, ‘inove’)) ?></span>

 

… to …

<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>

I was able to easily insert the author info.

With my name in lights I pushed on. Time to insert my FeedBurner Chicklet.

The RSS feed link was hard coded into the theme so back to our trusty editor. I needed a new CSS style for this. I created the following element in style.css:

#burner {
float:right; /* make the box look full */
padding: 5px; /* so chicklet image would line up with RSS image
}

Then in sidebar.php i added this line…

<div id="burner"><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TornElements"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/TornElements?bg=E1E1E1&amp;fg=000000&amp;anim=1" height="26" width="88" style="border:0" alt="" /></a></div>

… just after the RSS code but within the same display element. Tucked in nicely.

Pretty basic stuff here. I hope I’m not boring too many people. Hopefully it’ll help out some of the newer people entering into blogging.

Themes Blog Startup, Themes, WordPress View Comments

Although I’m nowhere near finished with my setup of this blog, I’ve taken some early steps toward getting some backlinks coming in. Certainly nothing major, but the coming weeks will see some good results from doing this.

Forum profiles and signatures are great ways to get the word out. My longevity on the web provides me with an abundance of Forum Accounts and Posts. Busy forums are best, but even dead forums will return a certain amount of link juice. So be sure to hit those long forgotten forum accounts if you decide to go this route.

Forum Profiles are not only viewed by people but Search Engine Spiders as well. A perfect place to stuff your blog URL. I’ve seen several of my Forum Profiles appear in Google within an hour of my joining a forum. Google LOVES forums. Make no mistake!

Forum Signatures is where it’s at! Attaching your blog link to your signature instantly adds the URL to any previous posts you’ve made. I have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5,000 posts lurking out there. A good portion of these (but not all) will start showing up as backlinks to my blog. It may take a bit of time for them to start showing so it’s best to do this activity ASAP.

I launched a blog about a year ago and achieved a Page Rank of 3 within the first 7 weeks mainly due to Forum Signature links. So yeah, it’s a very effective way to achieve ranking. And people DO click on signature links.

I also added the link to places like FaceBook, LinkedIn and other social networks.

I’ll be discussing other methods of promotion as we go along. For now, we’ll fly with this.

Blog Promotion Blog Promotion, Blog Startup View Comments

I’ve been using this Stats Plugin for over a year now on another blog. I love it! It’s the very first Plugin I installed here.

There’s nothing like real time when it comes to stats and FireStats delivers. Why wait for your web server to process the logs? See how busy your blog is NOW.

FireStats has just entered RC4 of their new 1.6 version. Here are a few features this version delivers:

• Performance improvements
• Hits table pagination (Finally!!)
• RSS Subscription tracking (Available to donators only)
• Some other technical stuff… bla bla bla…

I recommend using their other plugin: FireStats Installer. No muss, no fuss. And no waiting for over an hour to FTP this massive archive. You’re literally done in seconds using this. It will also allow you to upgrade to newer versions in the future.

Check it out: http://firestats.cc/

Plugins Blog Startup, Plugins, WordPress View Comments