Wordpress
A chance to enjoy Thanks Giving
Jaypee's Thanks Giving Give Away
It’s thanks giving season once again in the US, and not everyone in the world get a chance to enjoy it. It’s just lately that more and more people in any part of the world may take advantage of the day, because lots of items from apparels to electronics drop their prices, not only in local shops in the states, but also in so many online stores. Even though, I still can’t make the most out of it, because I can’t keep a good fund on my Paypal account. Hehe…
This time, I will try my best to get something from Thanks Giving. A famous WordPress blogger, Jaypee, is running a contest on his blog for the celebration. Lots of prices can be won by lucky winners summing the amount to $1500. So if you belong to my category, I encourage you to join the contest and see how you fair against other participants.
For prizes at stake, check out the list below. And as to appreciate the Philippine Bloggers, there will be exclusive Pinoy Blogger Tees courtesy of Batang Yagit.
More of the details after this break…
The wife takes over…
Today I am changing this blog’s theme again for the nth time. I hate that cliche but it’s the first to come out of my brains. Anyway, the main reason behind this is that I want this blog to look ‘girl-esque‘ since my wife will take over soon on updating this blog. That’s what I hope. She just recently resigned from her IT job and decided to take a more challenging and tiring job that is to take care of our lovely daughters. She will also do extra jobs on the side which includes taking care of the house, washing the clothes and of course, take care of herself and me. So, she might probably not update this still.
But, we still have not come up with a strong plan for this blog to return some income for us. My wife loves cooking so we are considering to make this a food blog. I think she’s also wants to become a fitness instructor so maybe she gives health tips as well. She will focus mainly on the kids, so this blog might discuss ‘Parenting’ topics as well. I’m also teaching her how to take good photos from our SLR (super-low-res) camera so it might be a photoblog as well.
This new theme I am using is called Atpeace 1.0 by Make Quick. This, I think, looks girl-esque enough for my wife and it looks very simple. We like to keep its brown color, but soon I will try to incorporate some touches of pink and green too. This theme is pretty easy to customize to suit your taste, like what I did to the header. As of the moment, I can’t think of the best thing to do with that huge real estate right above the blog title. But soon I will figure out. (it’s only a matter of creating new AdSense unit)
Changing WordPress themes is somehow challenging too. Most of the times, after you chose the theme you liked that you thought would perfectly look good, it might not. Specially if you have previous blog posts that have images on, if they are too wide, most of the times it messes up the alignment of your theme. (Like this one) You may set the maximum image width on your CSS, but for the “Caption” feature of WordPress, I’m not sure if it will work. So to at least give some credits to my effort of maintaining this blog, I ask my wife to at least post once a week for the new start.
WordPress: Conditional Widget Display on Sidebar
Before when WordPress themes do not support widgets, we used to control lists on our sidebars via PHP modifications. It’s not a task for everyone, and widgets were created.
But the thing is, once you add a widget to your sidebar, it will automatically display itself on your homepage and your single pages as well.
Today I learned that you can control it, not via PHP, but on your style.css.
Every widget on your sidebar has a unique id. So you can control them easily on your style.css.
Ex.
li#tag_cloud { display:none; }
This will hide the Tags widget from the sidebar, but the thing is it won’t be shown to any page either. So you need to know what division it is included to. In my case, I use #home class for my main division when on homepage and #page class when on single pages.
So on my style.css, I have:
#page li#tag_cloud { display:none; }
This hides the Tags widget when on single pages.
You just have to make sure that you use different divisions for home and single pages. But if you have a better workaround for displaying widgets conditionally, let me know. I’d like to learn from you too.
How to Install WMD Editor Plugin on WordPress
Our dearest WordPress extraordinaire Jaypee discussed about the WMD Editor last week over at his blog, which is a rather cool comment plugin for WordPress that gives visitors the ability to put style on their comments plus they can easily create hyperlinks, list, blockquotes, etc… The plugin is very light at 32kb which you can download from here. And basically, what it does is it turn your comment < textarea> element to an editor.
As you may notice, WMD Plugin is not a regular plugin that you activate from the Plugins page of your WordPress. It only contains javascripts, and the first time I saw the files, I already knew they only have to be called somewhere on your page to activate it. But if you’re still confused, let me help you get around with it by listing the steps I take.
- Download the plugin.
- Extract the .zip file.
- Upload the “wmd” folder to your host. (since it’s still a plugin, I recommend placing it under plugins folder)
- Insert the following code somewhere within your page. In my case I placed it inside my single.php, right after the comment.php is called. I just thought it’s safer there.
< script type="text/javascript" src="/wmd.js"> - Check your comments page and see if it works.
And of course, I still recommend reading the readme.txt as you might learn something more about the plugin.
If you have any further questions, just leave ‘em on the comment section.
Upgrading WordPress
In a few minutes, you might experience slowdown with this blog site OR might be totally unable to access it. I will be doing some upgrades at the backend. Sorry for the inconvenience.