For the brave souls who get this far: You are the chosen ones, the valiant knights of programming who toil away, without rest, fixing our most awful code.
Random Header Images in WordPress
Many times in past years I have wanted to display random photos in galleries and/or sidebars, why not do the same for the WordPress header graphics?
Update your WordPress blog’s security
If you have not already, I highly recommend reading “Smashing WordPress -beyond the blog.” The book is a concise, no-nonsense approach to WordPress and beyond. Most of you have probably heard of Smashing magazine. If not, google them and go visit. The first chapter I read was on my WordPress blog’s security. It gave VERY [...]
Laying out your WordPress post
Some people have a lot of material to deal with and they are not sure how to break it up visually. Try EXCERPT!
EXCERPT your WordPress post with MORE
I know many of you utilize a plug-in for the excerpt (abridged) version of your post. There are better ways…
Protect your WordPress Blog -Users
Seems like we may be giving up our blog usernames when posting author links to profiles or simply listing an author archive. If you are building themes in WordPress or simply a user with a standalone install then you may want to read “Protect your WordPress Blog -Users” for a quick and handy tip in [...]
Post WordPress articles on Twitter
Since Twitter launched its services 2006 it became one of the most popular social media networks, which if you’re serious about blogging, you can’t ignore. Keeping this in mind most blogs use some way to post an excerpt of their articles on Twitter using a link back to those articles. There are several ways to [...]
Personalize your WordPress author archive page
Updated for Wordpress 2.8 and above. Want to update and personalize your archive.php (not archives.php) for an Author archive? Without creating an author.php? Then this article may help you. I’m assuming you already have a barebones archive template with a typical flow control statement. According to the WordPress file hierarchy, all archives (date, category, author and tag) each have their own template file, but they all fall back on a single file… the archive.php file.
The idea here is that if you are clever, you can save yourself creating a couple of additional files. Upon opening the file, you will be see the familiar get_header and the loop followed by PHP if statements if this is a category archive, display this, if this is a tag archive, display this etc. It is similar to the index.php page, all that is happening is that there are a couple of if statements to change the titles according to the archive.
How not to build a website
. . . A Personal Experience … So, we have built ourselves a web site! Great – now it’s time to get all the guests and awards! We have a fantastic web site, a real world-beater. All our friends say it is and even we believe it’s rather ‘cool.’
Our prized web site has all the bells and whistles, displays the latest in Java and JavaScript and state of the art animations flashing here, there and everywhere. There is also music to soothe our visitors. Sounds rather good, don’t you think?
Entrance Junk
We crammed the entrance and other pages with as much info, clutter and as many animations and other useless unrelated garbage as we could. Visitors are waiting an age for the entrance page to load and by the time it’s even half loaded, they’re gone – never to return. But isn’t it quantity people seek? Well, we’re giving it to them!
As Web Designers Why Should We Care
. . . about whether those among us who are less fortunate can have easy use of our web sites? Do you realize that more than 100 million people worldwide have a disability? In fact, an estimated 10% of the population has a disability {although not all disabilities keep people from the web.} One cannot state that is exactly a small niche market! Oh, and before I forget, there may well be some legal reasons why we should look at making our web sites more easily accessible. However, all is not lost and here are some guidelines that may help many of us in our accessibility efforts. This is by no means a comprehensive list, just a short one to get us all thinking and perhaps start us on the way to achieving a more accessible web site.
