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.
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 wp_trim_excerpt():.
Bearing in mind what I said above, in that function I changed two things:
- A) The number of words displayed in the post excerpt.
- Change in the line where it says:
$excerpt_length = 55;- the number of words you want to see in your excerpt.
- Change the value ’55′ to whatever you want.
- B) The standard ending characters [...] in the post excerpt.
- Change in the line where it says:
array_push($words, '[...]');- The characters [...] to whatever you want.
- 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.
Like a lot of people, I one day stumbled onto the shauninman.com website. One thing I really liked about it, was the navigation/search bar that he has sitting at the top of the screen and the fact that it appears only if I want it to do so.
Over at Maxpower, Kirk Montgomery wrote a nice ‘How To’ post that dealt with adding a tabbed navigation to the sidebar of K2/WordPress, similar to that done on the AlwaysBeta site. To quote Kirk, he says “they have incorporated some slick slide and fade effects — to savy for this guy”. Well here is my contribution to this how-to – yet be warned, this is probably down and dirty code…but it works. As I always say I can’t code to save my life I just copy/paste what others do.
I’ve changed the picture gallery software that drives this site. When I first opened this blog I used the wihphoto php scripts with additions and changes of my own brew. However most of the code was “dirty” – not pretty but it did and still does, the job. Lately I also tried flickr – the upside being that I’m not using my bandwidth
A new standard is trying to be established on the web to identify syndicated content. That syndicated content is identified by the above logo. Spread the word and use it. You can get a whole collection of Feed icons in numerous formats from feedicons.
I’ve just added the Extended Live Archives plugin to the site. I really like the way that it offers you to drill down in a site’s archives. You can choose to drill down by date or by category. If you want to install the plugin, it can be found here.
I’ve had a bit more time lately to update my site. I’ve completely revisited the picture gallery and I’ve also added a script to randomly display a picture from it in the sidebar. If you are interested in getting the code, drop me a mail using the contact form (follow the link in the sidebar). Also the picture gallery scripts might at some be available (the code still needs a lot of cleaning up too). The theme is still work in progress though. I’m using the Relaxation theme as a base and experimenting with it. Stay posted for updates.