Jun
10
2010
My Memory is Terrible
The purpose of this blog is to document things I think I’ll need to reference in the future. You may not find it at all helpful, and that’s ok.Tags: blog, memory, purpose
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blog
Aug
23
2010
Event Calendar 3 – get rid of dates in brackets on category pages
I use Alex Tingle’s Event Calendar very often. Although it’s overkill for some chores and doesn’t offer quite enough flexibility for others, I can usually make it work.
Lately I’ve been creating special category templates and I’ve found that the EC3 generated dates show up twice in excerpts – one version is the one that I style, and the other is just a duplicate in brackets. It’s not even something you can hide via CSS since it doesn’t have it’s own div or class. It must serve some purpose, but I haven’t discovered it yet. I was lucky enough to find a simple solution here: http://themehybrid.com/support/topic/delete-dates-added-by-event-calendar-plugin-in-options-theme-excerpts
To make the bracketed dates disappear, comment out the following line found in this file: wp-content/plugins/event-calendar/eventcalendar3.php. add_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'ec3_get_the_excerpt');
Jul
12
2010
Wordpress and Subdomains
The primary domain for my hosting account is “jill.com”. I add another domain to my hosting account called “jack.com”. And since my awesome hosting company (bluehost) lets me host multiple domains on my one account, I can build sites for jill.com and jack.com and no one will know that they both come from the same account. Jack.com is an “addon” domain, and it’s assigned a specific folder. If I want to make this a wordpress site I simply install wp inside that folder. The wp url will be jack.com and the blog address will be jack.com. The index.php and htaccess files can stay in this folder. This is different than assigning your wp installation a subfolder. In that case, you do have to change the url and blog address, and index.php and htaccess files according to these instructions: http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory Thinking about an addondomain which IS it’s own folder in the same way you’d think about stuffing wp into it’s own folder is an easy mistake to make, and one that can cause many mild annoyances.Jun
10
2010
Backupify Is Super Awesome
I needed to backup my clients’ blogs which means the database and the theme. I can do both on a nightly basis with backupify.com. Currently I’m only backing up 6 sites or so, and am able to use a free account which allows for 2GB of data, but if I continue to love it as much as I currently do, I may use a paid plan. I suppose I could open an account for each client, but that seems like yet another account for people who have other things to do. I’m doing it gratis currently as a test, but will have to add it as a managed service down the road. Now, how do I backup those annoying framework settings???? I suppose that’s all manual.Jun
10
2010
FastCGI Conflicts with WordPress
I just visited a couple of my newly launched sites (ipacknc.com and hillsboroughselfstorage.com) to tie up some loose ends only to find a 500 error. What? A week after launch and they’re already down? They’re hosted on GoDaddy, and since this is the first time I’ve worked with GoDaddy and since their site is a labyrinth that I still don’t understand (seriously, does anyone else feel like their site is unmanageable) I decided to call tech support. Anyway, the tech guy was very nice and was able to get the site back up in minutes by eliminating FastCGI from the site. We basically changed PHP4 + FastCGI to PHP4 and PHP5 + FastCGI to PHP5. Read the rest of this entry »Tags: backup, fastcgi, godaddy, site management, upgrade
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Jan
06
2010
If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves, you can make your own site.
Building a totally customized website is a time intensive project that requires tons of decisions, and a great deal of work by the designer and the client. Think about building a house from the ground up – you have to select every piece from roofing material to door knobs and even door stops. Websites aren’t so different, and they’re just as personal. Sometimes you’re ready to make a from-the-ground-up commitment, and sometimes you’re not. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: custom, diy, websites, wordpress
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Dec
14
2009
Remove those pesky dotted lines around image links
This is what I’m talking about:
Dotted lines around active image before and after.
* { outline: none; }
I guess I kind of get it – the browsers are making it apparent when you select an active area. But isn’t it the designer’s job to do that?
Dec
10
2009
New Go-To Slider
This is the best: Smooth Slider It works as a post/content slider, and has settings to remove the post text to become an image slider. Simply create a new post with the image in the body and you’re set. In order to make it show up on my home page, I created a new template for Home and inserted the following php:if ( function_exists( 'get_smooth_slider_cat' ) ) {
get_smooth_slider_cat('spotlight'); }
I also created a category called ’spotlight’ to make sure only posts in that category would display.
It just works! Tags: clickonf5, plugin, smooth slider, wordpress
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Oct
19
2009
WP Minify
I needed to make the pages of a site with many http request (17 javascript, and 5 css) load faster. I found WP_Minify, and it cut the load time in half.Tags: compress, http requests, load time, wp minify
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Oct
16
2009
301 Redirects within Apache
I needed to redirect plain html pages of an old site to the new and improved wordpress site. I tried the Redirect plugin, and it was full of features, but only works within wordpress. It took me a little while to realize that since I’m working outside of wordpress, that I needed to go straight to the .htaccess file in the root of my server. Seems obvious, right? For simple page to page redirects it’s very straight forward – just add the following to your .htaccess file:redirect 301 /page1.htm http://www.mysite.com/page1
redirect 301 /page2.htm http://www.mysite.com/page2
redirect 301 /page3.htm http://www.mysite.com/page3
Tags: 301 redirect, apache, htaccess
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