renet@web

Bah oui, en ce moment je suis pas mal sur le “bench” alors je m’occupe comme je peux. Donc voila, j’ouvre mon photoblog. Ce dernier ne change en rien les photos que je telecharge sur mon flux flickr. Le photoblog me servira uniquement a telecharger une photo de temps en temps parce que (a mon humble avis) j’estime qu’elle sort un peu du lot par rapport a toutes les autres que je prends. Si vous voulez y faire un tour, il suffit de cliquer ici ou bien de suivre le menu permanent FOTOBLOG ci-dessus.

Pour les geeks parmis vous, le photoblog est toujours propulse par wordpress, mais il fait utilisation d’un plugin intitule YAPB Yet another photoblog. Vous pouvez telecharger ce plugin ici.

It seems that after much debate and a multitude of emails, Derek Punsalan decided to release his Grid Focus WordPress theme to the general public. I, for one am grateful for this as the Grid Focus theme has now become the base theme for my new site design. It’s work in progress and I still have a few things I want to try out before I can call it complete.

One of the things I wanted to add to this theme, was support for widgets. Grid Focs is a 3 column theme. Out of the box, the two right most columns contain hard coded elements. But what if you wanted to change the content of those two columns regularly with no fuss? Widget support is the ticket.
So, inline with Derek’s philosophy here is my contribution to the theme: I bring you, how to widgetise the Grid Focus wordpress theme. In this tutorial I will show you how you can add widget support to the columns shown in red in the picture below.

It’s very simple and you can probably do it in 5 minutes. Remember before you start, to backup all the files you will require to modify – I will not be held responsible if it does work. This has been tested on my web site running wordpress version 2.2.
Details »

In WordPress (at least as far as I know – please correct me if I’m wrong) there are two functions that allow you to output your post content.

These functions are:

• the_content (to which certain parameters can be passed). This function will output images, links…basically everything as you typed it in your post.
• the_excerpt (to which no parameters can be passed). This function will output the post excerpt if there is one or it will output up to the first 55 words of your post content in a pure text form.

As you will have noticed I use both these functions here at renet@web. I use the_content to output the latest post and then the_excerpt to display the next 4 posts.

There are two things that I never liked with the function the_excerpt:

• The post excerpt displayed terminates with the characters [...]
• The length of the post excerpt is 55 words long and I never knew where that value could be changed

But despair no more, thanks to John Wrana a cure is at hand and in fact full credits are given to him for coming up with this trick of sorts. I should also warn you that if you do not understand what is indicated below, then you should not attempt to do this at home (then again maybe it’s my accent that makes it hard to understand) – this implies changing standard WordPress files – proceed at your own risk.

My comprehension of German is a bit dodgy (haven’t been using it for quite some time), but what I could make in John’s post is that we need to change a bit of code in the file functions-formatting.php which you should find in the wp-includes folder of your WordPress installation. What you need to do is to, in that file find the function

d3BfdHJpbV9leGNlcnB0KCk6

.

Bearing in mind what I said above, in that function I changed two things:

A) The number of words displayed in the post excerpt.
1. Change in the line where it says:

2. JGV4Y2VycHRfbGVuZ3RoID0gNTU7

3. the number of words you want to see in your excerpt.
4. Change the value ’55′ to whatever you want.

B) The standard ending characters [...] in the post excerpt.
1. Change in the line where it says:

2. YXJyYXlfcHVzaCgkd29yZHMsICdbLi4uXScpOw==

3. The characters [...] to whatever you want.
4. You may decide to just change it to something like –> or … or >>>

Before, I press this post, I should also point out that Chris J. Davis has written a wonderful post where he explains how to customize post excerpt using a more sophisticated method.

In a little over 24 hours cssreboot will be all systems go.
Although more than 1000 rebooters (last time I looked the count was 1442) have taken part in this spring reboot, it seems that some are waiting till the last minute to upload a picture of their new design (if the lack of an ‘after’ screenshot is anything to go by) or maybe they will not bother at all. In any case I’m sure that those that are ready will have amazing stuff to show off…let’s wait and see.

Just a quick update. My reboot is featured here.

Holy Schmoly – renet@web has been featured on cssremix. Welcome to all visitors – feel free to leave a comment.

It’s almost there! I say 99.9% because a) I’m still getting errors when I try to validate the page and b) I’m sure that there will always be something that needs to be changed, tweaked or improved upon. Details »