Wordpress 2.7 is here with a new design for the admin side. I’ll try to start work on an update for Mike Lothar’s Nosebleed, Ad Infinitum and Conundrum templates for Wordpress soon.
Here’s some info about the new Wordpress version:
The autoupdate feature – which was already available for plugins – is now available for the whole software. If only phpbb could take a cue!
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:
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 ">“.
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.
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!
123Flickr is a gallery creating utility that generates code for you to insert a cute Flickr gallery in your website. It is available at 123Flickr.com. It is not restricted to your own pictures, and you can create galleries from any Flickr picture set or Flickr user you have an interest in. It does not work (yet) with Flickr collections.
First, you will have to find a user or a picture set that you like in Flickr. Let’s take our Countries in Colors Flickr account as an example. You simply copy the name of the user (in our case countries in colors) and paste it into the username dialog that appears on the first page at 123Flickr.
Second you determine the number of pictures that should appear in your gallery. Be mindful not to add too many images as this slows down loading when you will access your page.
Third, you receive a rather long string of code which you copy and paste into any styled or html page on RapidWeaver (it also works on plugins that are compliant with the styled mode, such as carousel), or in any page, post or on your sidebar.php file in Wordpress. I suggest you preview your gallery before you copy and paste the code, as you will need enough pictures to fill in the gallery space: look at the various examples below.
The problem is that 123Flickr will create a gallery holder that will often not have the proper height and width. It will not adjust automatically to the number of pictures you put in the gallery. There is fortunately a way around it. In the code provided by 123Flickr, you can adjust width and height parameters. You must play around a little with it, until you find the correct settings for your gallery, as shown below. Note that you must enter your parameters twice in the code.
I have added html “< center >” tags before and after the code to center in this page. The result is not stunning but it is still very nice, with nifty transparency effects. I find the image display a bit on the slow side, but otherwise it is a very nice solution to add a small gallery to your website.
Slideflickr
Slideflickr touts that it “will help you create and embed Flickr slideshows in less than 10 seconds”. Simply type in a username, user, group, or a set URL on Slideflickr’s homepage, hit enter, and you receive a url to copy and paste on your website. When entering the “countries in colors” username, the result looks like this:
The standard size of the slideshow window is a 500 by 500 pixels square, but you can easily customize this by modifying the simple code you pasted by for example reducing it to 400 by 400 as I did in the above example. Better still, you can click on the “advanced options” tab and customize the appearance of your slideshow in various ways: window size, customize text messages, background color, speed, enter a custom logo text and url link, or even add a background music.
But Slideflickr’s versatility does not end there: you can also select the content of your slideshow by set, tags or favorites. The only downside of Slideflickr is that it is but a nice interface to Flickr’s standard slideshow. It does not create any new slideshow template or transitions.
Still, it is a very easy to use and free slideshow creator and I would recommend it to Wordpress users. RapidWeaver users may consider a more powerful alternative which I reviewed before: RapidFlickr.
Telling more about you is one of the most common objectives of a blog. What’s more personal than musical tastes? You could write about your favorite artists, but there is a great way to share your musical tastes: Last.fm. Once signed up, Last.fm will keep track of the songs you play on your computer or on your iPod, and let you share them with the world. You can use the Last.fm scrobbler to do this, but many third party applications also pick up your musical tastes. Personaly I like Cover Sutra, which allows you to control iTunes, display album art, rate your songs, and last but not least scrobble your songs and report them to Last.fm.
Adding your musical tastes on your Wordpress or RapidWeaver site
A pictorial is better than words, so here it is, a quick how-to guide to publishing a Last.fm widget on your website.
You can paste the widget on any html or styled page on RapidWeaver, or choose to paste it in the sidebar. The process is similar for Wordpress. If you choose to put the widget in your sidebar, you should choose a vertical format. Below you can see the horizontal format. Needless to say that it updates live as more songs get scrobbled.
With the advent of tens of popular social websites, there is an increasing urge to integrate your site with your social virtual network. Let’s see how to do it on sites designed with RapidWeaver and Wordpress. For a change we will try to show how to achieve this with pictures and only a few words.
The most obvious place to insert your badge is in the sidebar, but you can put it anywhere using different pages styles. It works in html, styled text and any other pages compatible with styled text, such as RapidFlickr or Carousel.
Insert your badge on your Wordpress site
The easy way to insert a badge on your sidebar is to use the Flickr badge widget. However, if you do not use widgets or prefer to put your badge in a post or in a page, simply paste the code you got from the Flickr website in your post or page.
Countries in Colors