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Amateur webmaster tip. This is yet another easy tip to include a widget with your (or someone else’s) Flickr pictures on your website.

This one comes courtesy of Widgetbox. Here is a step-by-step procedure:

1. Go to widgetbox

2. Click on “Make a widget”

3. Click on “Blog/Feed”

4. Go to Flickr

5. Choose a photo set and click on “feed” on the lower left corner of the page

6. Copy the feed url that appears in your web address bar, or control click the feed button and copy the link

7. Go back to the widgetbox page, paste the address and click on “continue”

8. Paste the address again in the lower box and click on “OK”

9. Adjust the appearance settings of your widget, and click on “publish blidget”

10. Grab the code (you will need to register first on widgetbox). Once you click on “Get widget”, you will be presented with a few ready-made options. If you use Rapidweaver or your own Wordpress blog, click on “get code”. You will then need to paste the code where it fits best on your website.

For Rapidweaver, you can paste the code in any styled page or in your sidebar. On Wordpress, you can either edit sidebar.php (for your sidebar) or another file such as header.php (for your header), or create a Wordpress widget and paste the code there.

I have pasted the code in my Wordpress post. Here is the result:

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tags: Flickr, pictures, widgets

I have been quietly working for a while on a phpBB3 upgrade of Mike Lothar’s great forum templates. You can check out the Nosebleed, Conundrum and AdInfinitum templates in action on the Countries in Colors forums. The most adventurous among the forum members can already download the first alpha release of Nosebleed.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Tags: Templates, Themes

Lots of new resources have become available since my previous post on the subject. Here’s an updated list of iPhone website templates and of iphone themes and skins for mobile phones.

iPhone compatible website themes

Once installed, your website will look good on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

1. Countries in Colors RapidWeaver iPhone theme [source - download]
2. Real Mac Software RapidWeaver iPhone theme [source - download]
3. iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme [source - download]
4. all4wordpress WordPress Theme [preview - download]
5. Not exactly a theme, but MoFuse is a web-based service that allows the easy creation of mobile websites [go to Mofuse]
6. Again not a single theme, but a tool allowing for the easy creation of iPhone and iPod Touch compatible photo sites [go to Foliolink]

iPhone centered website themes

1. Hello 1.0 / iPhone Wordpress theme [source - download]
2. Jinsona’s Hello iPhone Wordpress theme [source - download]
3. iFoney Wordpress theme [source - download]
4. Hello by 2bitoperation theme for RapidWeaver [source - download]

iPhone skins and styles for popular phones

• iPhone theme for Nokia N80 [source - download]
• iPhone theme for Nokia N6300 and Nokia 40 Series [source - download]
• iPhone theme for Sony Ericsson w810i [source - download]
• iPhone themes for BlackBerries [source - download]
• bPhone, another iPhone theme for BlackBerries [source - download]
• iPhone theme for Sony Ericsson w900i [source - download]
• iPhone theme for Sony Ericsson k750, w700, w800, w810 [source - download]
• iPhone theme for Sony Ericsson k610i [source - download]
• iPhone theme for pocket pc [source - download]
• Gigabit Software’s iPhone theme for pocket pc [source - download]
• Leo S60 iPhone theme for Symbian OS S60. Works with Nokia N70, N72, 6630, 6620, 6680, 6681, 6682, 6670, 7610, 6260, 3230, 6600 Samsung SGH-D720, SGH-D730 Panasonic X700, X800 [source - download]
• iPhone Black theme for Sony Ericsson k750, d750, k600, w800, w700 [source - download]
• iPhone theme for Sony Ericsson K800, K790 [source - download]
• iBored theme for Sidekick [source - download]
• iPhone theme for Sony Ericsson w850 [source - download]
• iPhone theme for Sony Ericsson k800, w850 [source - download]
• iPhone theme for Sony Ericsson k750, w800 [source - download]
• k800 iphone theme for Sony Ericsson k800 [source - download]
• iPhone style for BenqSiemens E71 [source - download]
• iPhone theme for Sony Ericsson k800 [source - download]
• iPhone theme for Sony Ericsson w900 [source - download]

Popularity: 11% [?]

There are a number of different forum solutions available, but I really like phpbb as it integrates well with Mike Lothar’s Nosebleed theme which I have been using for my Bluebulgaria site.

The problem is that the themes were developed by Mike Lothar for the previous version of phpbb (version 2), and will not work on phpbb3. So my new project will be to adapt - to the extent of my meagre abilities - the theme to phpbb3 as Mike does not seem to have the time to do it.

You can watch the work in progress here. I will also be making the updated theme files available as I progress. Everyone is welcome to join the development efforts!

First step

Download phpbb’s latest stable version here.

Second step

Create a new mysql database on your server. If you are hosting with GoDaddy, go to your account manager, open your control panel, click on databases, then on mysql, and then on create database.

As phpbb3 was optimized for version 5 of mysql, I suggest you use that version. Enter a description for your database, as well as a username and a password.

Third step

Create a new folder on your server, using a ftp program. Upload the contents of the phpbb3 folder in that folder. So if you created a new folder called “forum”, copy the contents of the phpbb3 folder you downloaded there. Your forum will be accessible from yoursiteaddress.com/forum/. In my case it is countriesincolors.com/forum/.

Fourth step

Go to yoursiteaddress.com/forum/ (in my case countriesincolors.com/forum/) and follow the install instructions. You will need your database name, user name, password, and address for your database (most often this is localhost but Godaddy users should use the specific address provided during database setup instead).

Final step

Once you have installed and configured your board, you should delete the “install” folder which is in your forum folder. Once that’s done, you have a running forum.

Now let’s try to see if we can amend the style to match the Nosebleed/Adinfinitum/Conundrum styles…

Popularity: 56% [?]

Since I am upgrading my sites to the wonderful Conundrum/Ad Infinitum/Nosebleed themes, which are not yet compatible with Wordpress 2.3, I had to manually add the (only) feature which I find worth upgrading for: tags. In addition to categories, posts may now be tagged with certain keywords.

Adding to Conundrum/Ad Infinitum/Nosebleed. It is easy to upgrade the Conundrum/Ad Infinitum/Nosebleed themes: currently those themes show the categories in which the posts are put below each post. This is a line that starts with “Posted in”. The corresponding code in the Wordpress theme file is “Posted in < ? php the_category(', ') ? >“. To add tags, simply add the code “< ? php the_tags(); ? >” after the category code, and the tags you have entered for each post will appear like magic!

The files to edit in the Conundrum/Ad Infinitum/Nosebleed themes are index.php, archive.php, search.php and single.php.

Adding a tag cloud in the sidebar. A simple tag cloud can be added by editing sidebar.php and adding the following lines of code:

< ? php if ( function_exists('wp_tag_cloud') ) : ? >
< li >
< h2 >Popular Tags< /h2 >
< ul >
< ? php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=22'); ? >
< /ul >
< /li >
< ? php endif; ? >

In the above codes make sure to delete the spaces after “<" and before ">“.

Popularity: 29% [?]

One of the main reasons for switching part of my Bluebulgaria site to Wordpress was the need to have a cross-platform, cross-browser theme that would work with not too many adjustments. The hard lesson I learned as a newbie webmaster is that the more changes you make to your RapidWeaver or Wordpress style, the higher the risks that something will not work with one browser or another.

That’s why I chose one of the most robust yet eye pleasing Wordpress theme: Mike Lothar’s Nosebleed (also available in different colors as Conundrum or as Ad Infinitum). I limited my changes to changing the image at the top (the file to edit or replace is called “top_image.jpg” and is found in the “images” folder of the theme) and the text colors in the cascading style sheet: simply edit the “style.css” file which is in the theme folder. Every time you see “color” followed by an hexadecimal number preceded with the “#” character, simply change the value to what you need.

In Nosebleed/Conundrum/Ad Infinitum, I also wanted to change the background color on both sides of this fixed-width theme. That was more complicated as this is not defined by a css. Instead the theme puts a “background-color” value in the first and last columns of the table. To achieve a color change there, you need to edit the value in the “header.php” file for the left column, and again in the “footer.php” file for the right column.

Popularity: 29% [?]

I’ve finally taken the decision to move part of the Bluebulgaria.com site to Wordpress. Up until now I was republishing Bulgarian content from Countries in Colors through a rss feed in a Rapidweaver template, but that led to too much formatting trouble across different browsers and platforms.

Moving posts. Once my new Wordpress database was set up, I had to think of ways to move the relevant posts from one database to the other. Now Wordpress gives you a few options to do so, and the most relevant seemed to be importing the RSS feed or using the Wordpress export/import functions, which create an xml file for you to import in the new blog. Problem is that you can only select posts based by author, and not by category. Once the import is done, you will have to manually select those posts that are relevant to your new blog. Another problem for me was the size of the file: the import function only works with files of up to 2 megabytes, and mine was strangely larger… until I found out that the export/import method actually also saves comments, including those comments that have been caught and hidden by the great Akismet plugin. I simply had to delete a month worth of spam comments which were hidden (669 in total), and my database was down to a much more reasonable size…

Dealing with categories. With the latest version of Wordpress come tags in addition to categories. The import created a very long list of categories based on keywords. Instead of one of two categories, I ended up having close to a hundred! I could not find any other way but to delete them by hand. Luckily I do not move posts every day!

Popularity: 28% [?]