However, on some sites the new window brings up a 404 error, indicating that something’s amiss. Turns out that Wordpress is getting confused about certain mod-rewrite rules or something… Whatever the reason: Fret not, there’s an easy solution to fix this (thanks to Blogmum and the Wordpress Forum for these instructions).

• Right-click the Press This link on your browser bar, and select “properties”
• You’ll see a long line of javascript code in the location box
• Find the following code: u=’+e(l.href)+’
• Change it to this: u=’+e(l.href.replace(/\//g,’\\/’))+’
• Tada – Press This is working now. Hurra!

Please note that you might find it easier to copy the entire line of code into a text editor, search for the string and then post it back into the Properties section.

Happy Pressing

Modularity Lite is Thad Allender’s freebie version of a larger framework. I was customising this theme for Jerry Hyde’s site recently, and thought I’d take some notes to share with you.

Slowing Down the Slideshow

I’ve been through every PHP file I could find to no avail for a “display duration” setting of sorts. Turns our the slideshow is generated in Java Script, hence the correct setting can be found in the header.php file, somewhere down the lower thrid end. The code block starts with >> if ($slideshow_state == ‘On’) <<

In it, you’ll find two parameters: SPEED which is in fact the cross fade duration, and TIMEOUT which is the duration of each slide. 1000 is about 1 second, 2000 is 2 seconds, and so forth.

Display Slideshow on pages other than The Blog

This is a tricky one, but there’s an easy solution as ever.

The slideshow Java Script code is contained in the header.php file, which means it loads on every page – it just doesn’t get activated. Activation for the slideshow happens in index.php, which only gets loaded when blog posts are displayed – not when pages are loaded (because they use the page.php template if available – which it is in this case). All we need to do is to copy this code from index.php into our page.php file and the slideshow will show up on ALL pages.

<!-- Begin Slideshow -->
<?php include (THEMELIB . '/apps/slideshow-static.php'); ?>

If you’d like to make it show only on one particular page, find out its page ID and use an if-then statement.

Displaying more images in the Slideshow

The file you need to modify for this is /library/apps/slideshow-static.php – it’ll list 5 images, just add more or use your own file names. The images for the slideshow are stored in the /images subfolder of your theme.

Playing with the Navigation Menu

If you’d like to add or remove items from the Nav Menu, have a look at the nav.php file in the main theme directory. All dropdowns are CSS styled HTML lists, so amending them with your requirements shouldn’t be too taxing.

Modify the Credits

The Credits are part of the footer.php file, should you wish to add, remove or amend portions (such as your affiliate link to Graph Paper Press). Please note that it’s good practice to give credit where credit is due, and if you’re using a free theme, why not give the author a link to say thanks.

Have fun

Advertising should supports your site, not destroy it. Say you’re writing about technical aspects of web design, then ads for web hosting and domain registration are helpful – and supportive. But ads about rather unrelated material are not, especially if they’re generated by contextual algorithms. Which products and services work best is a matter of trial and error I’m afraid, and there’s no set formula.

Here’s another example:

Imagine you’re writing about music and bands, then maybe iTunes is a good ad to have. Say you’re writing a post specifically about Alexandra Burke’s new tour, why not have “Buy her album on iTunes” at the bottom – if someone makes a purchase via that link, you’ll get a cut. This link has to go diretcly to one song or one specific album, not to “iTunes in general” though.

Getting your hands on specific ads and banners is fairly easy by joining some of the big advertising affiliate partners. Amazon and many others have their own affiflate scheme, but larger brands often outsource this business to companies like

• Linkshare
  
• Affiliate Window
• Share A Sale
• E-junkie
• Clickbank
• Commission Junction

Let’s look at some vocabulary:

You as an “advertising displayer” are called an “affiliate”. The other side of the business is called a “merchant”, which is you have a product or site and ads that you want other affiliates to display. For now, you’re an “affilate”.

You’ll get paid into your bank account once you reach a certain threshold of cash (say £50 or £100). You’ll make money either by people clicking on those links (that’s called “pay-per-click”), or if people actually buy something on the advertiser’s site (that’s called “pay-per-lead”). The money comes from “merchants”, who in turn pay people like you and me for having adverts displayed.

The list of programmes above – like many others out there – provide text links and banners in all different sizes to suit your posts and sidebars. A banner is usually part of a “campaign”, which can change from time to time. Ads in a campaign will dynamicaly update to the next campaign so you won’t have to get involved – unless you’d like to of course.

The way to display ads is either as a text link like this or banner (usually used in a plan text widget in your sidebar, or hard coded say into your header). Some theme developers leave comments in their code to indicate where to put an ad, and which dimensions will work well. An example for such a theme is Aerodrome by Joe Fishler.

Navigating the affiliate programmes can be a tad cumbersome though. They’re fairly complex and provide a LOT of data. Your first step is to join one of those sites above, say Link Share. They approve or decline you as an affiliate.

But someone like Link Share has thousands of merchants on file. To display a specific advertiser’s links (say iTunes for example), you’ll have to “join” that particular merchant. That merchant will then have a look at your site and either approve or decline your application. There are plenty of spam sites out there, and of course big brands don’t want to be associated with those. Once a merchant has approved your site, you’re ready to display their ads. It can take a day or two until you hear from them, but sometimes the decision is made in minutes.

In a nutshell:

Someone like Link Share is only the “delivery platform” for adverts and deals with tracking those ads and giving you payouts. But the actual adverts and campaings come from merchants (like iTunes or Sky) who have also joined.

There are MANY other affiliate schemes you can join, and it’s about finding the one(s) that are right for you, or have the products/brands you’d like to promote. If you like a particular site, have a look at the bottom and look for something like “webmasters” or “make money promoting us”.

The key is to use these affiliate links casually – you can use them in a post, or even tweet them when it’s relevant. Don’t overload your visitors though. Nothing is worse than a site cluttered with more adverts than content!

One last thought to consider:

if you’re running an e-commerce site (i.e. you have products for sale, and the website is primarily there to sell them), why drive customers away to other services? Amazon and eBay do this sometimes, and there’s really no need for it. An e-commerce site makes money by selling products, not by advertising.

Good luck

When you’re out in the field and all that’s at hand is a trusty SSH connection from your mobile, here’s an alternative way to bring your Wordpress Sites back to life.

You need the following ingredients:

• Database Name (I’m using “databasename” here)
• User Name (I’m using “username” here)
• Password for the above

All three will be in your wp-admin.php file, use Vi to check if you’ve forgotten them.

Next it’s time to get busy with some MySQL commands I keep forgetting (hence this article):

mysql -u username -p

This will ask you for your password, which you can type but won’t see written out onscreen. Upon success, you’ll be deep in MySQL territory, not the Linux prompt anymore. Next, we’ll select our actual database in use for the site:

use databasename;

Note the importance of the semicolon at the end of the line. Now let’s see which tables are in that database and what they’re called:

show tables;

Excellent! We’re getting there! You’ll see everything that’s in your database, almost like in phpMyAdmin (just less convenient). By default, you should be seeing entries like “wp_options”, “wp_links”, wp_posts” and so forth. The “wp_” is the default prefix for Wordpress tables, but depending on your installation this may have changed to something else.

Depending on what else you’re using your database for, there may well be other entries from projects such as PHPList, Drupal, phpBB and so forth. The principles are applicable for every application that’s using MySQL.

You’ve got a whole host of commands at your fingertips now, but the most important ones for a rescue mission like this are probably

check table yourtablename;

repair table yourtablename;

The “check table” command seems to repair minor errors, like hosts not having closed connections. It also shows you what’s wrong with a table, or if it’s OK. The “repair” command checks, optimizes and repairs a table – so it’s probably the best one to use.

Unlike phpMyAdmin, you have to issue one command per table; you can’t select all tables and say “repair all” (and if you can, I don’t know about it – in which case, please leave a comment and enlighten us).

For Wordpress, that’s 11 tables you need to check – so it’s not a major inconvenience.

Once you’re ready to leave the heady heights of MySQL, type “quit” and you’re back to the command prompt.

Good Luck!

You’d expect to go to Plugins, check the ones you want to upgrade and choose “Upgrade All” from the bulk actions drop down. Er… no.

Instead you need to go to TOOLS – UPGRADE and see a list of upgradable plugins there. You can tick the ones you want to upgrade, or check all, then hit the button as usual and hack in your FTP details. Note that this list won’t be there if all your plugins are up-tp-date.

The upgrade process will then be started in what’s known as “maintenance mode”. It can take some time with little to no feedback, so please be patient while you watch an empty browser window. Make sure you leave your browser alone until you see a “success” message.

According to this trac ticket, this functionality may well see an overhaul in future releases.

Until then, enjoy

/var/lib/psa/dumps

It’s useful to clear this directory out every once in a while, especially because Plesk doesn’t overwrite old backups.

So if you ever find that you’re using 60GB of storage on your system, but are fully aware that your entire site shouln’t be bigger than 100MB, then this is a good place to start looking.

You can find a good manual for all the switches at Tux Files or ask The Die, or simply try “cp –help” at the command prompt.

I use “cp” to update multiple installations of Wordpress on the same server, whenever an upgrade is available.

Rather than hit the “upgrade”button in each back end, which will download and unpack the files for each installation, I only need to download the latest Wordpress tarball once (it’s available at http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz or http://wordpress.org/latest.zip). I then make amendmends if and when I need them, and then cp the whole directory into all my installations.

Here’s the full command I use:

cp -r /tmp/wordpress/* /path/to/my/site

-r means I want to copy directories as well as files (recursively).

The trouble here is that I’m being asked each time if I really want to overwrite that one file – so we need to find a workaround there. The -f switch doesn’t do the trick, for reasons unbeknownest to me. Therefore, let’s look at Pipes. Since our answer is always YES (or y for short), we can put that in front of our command, and then execute it like so:

y | cp -r /tmp/wordpress/* path/to/my/site

You could even go a step further and write a shell script that’ll take care of all your installations for you.

Maybe we’ll cover that when I figured out how to do it.

Until then, enjoy

• Blogger (by Google)
• Typepad
• Moveable Type
• Live Journal (by Microsoft)
• Drupal
• Wordpress

The latter two are Content Management Systems, which makes them more complex than an online diary and ideal for building websites. The others are more like online diaries, but all of them let you jot down some thoughts and share them with others, who in turn can leave their thoughts and comments.

Wordpress is different from all the others because it comes in two flavours:

Wordpress.com

is a free for all hosted service with a good choice of Layouts (called Themes) and Plugins (those are sidebar widgets and little programmes to add functionality to your blog). You get 5GB of web space and don’t have to worry about finding a web host. You’ll be part of a big blogging community and can start with literally no knowledge of HTML & Co. However, this version is limited in what you can achieve with it.

Then there’s

Wordpress.org,

which is the “software” you can install on a web server and expand to whatever you see fit. It works just like the free version, with the advantage that you can add as many Themes and Plugins to it as you like: turn your site into a shopping cart, use it as Framework to build a proper website, or amend the code to your heart’s content. It’s all open source. You’ll have to have your own webspace with MySQL database, a little knowledge about HTML and how to use an FTP client though.

I reccomend signung up for a free account at Wordpress.com first and play around with it to get a feel for the platform. You’ll have a URL like yourblog.wordpress.com, but you can add a proper domain (like yourblog.com) for a little bit extra if you want. If it does what you want it to, great! If you find the choice of Themes and Plugins a bit limited, or if you’re looking for a special function you want on your new site, you can always import your posts and pages into a self-hosted version of Wordpress later.

The main advantage of a self hosted Wordpress over the free version is that you have unlimited control of how your website looks and what it does. Any functionality you can think of, someone’s written a plugin for it. There are hundreds of thousands of designs available, and if you’re comfortable hacking code, you can even build your own Themes and Plugins.

• Need an ecommerce site?
• A unique photo blog?
• Want to automatically post a new picture every so many hours?
• Want to write or take pictures on your mobile, the send it to your site?

In that case, Self hosted is for you.

Hosting is easy to get (Easyspace and 1&1 are good hosts), and I also offer hosting packages specifically for Wordpress. You get the latest version pre-installed on my server and automatic core upgrades too. I can use a domain you already own, or register one for you too. Check out Guru Hosting for all that and more.

Plenty of tutorials on how to get started are on Wordpress.com, and they even have some cool video tutorials about every aspect of the platform on Wordpress.tv.

Happy Blogging

Help is at hand by adding this code to your Cutsom CSS File in Thesis:

.custom .format_text input, #commentform input, #commentform textarea {
width:auto;
}

Instant relief.

Easy remidy is at hand, even though it means that you need to add code to each video.

Here’s how you do it:

Your videos will be embedded with both <OBJECT> and <EMBED> tags to make Internet Explorer and Firefox happy at the same time. You need to amend the following statement in the <OBJECT></OBJECT> tags:

<param value="transparent" name="wmode"></param>

You also need to put the following attribute into your <EMBED> statement:

wmode="transparent"

Happy Days

yum install php-mysql mysql mysql-server
/sbin/chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

You have to be loggen on as root to do this.

The next thing you probably want to do is create a database so you can run Wordpress on it. As you may know, we need phpMyAdmin to do this, so we’ll install that next:

yum install phpmyadmin

In case it doesn’t work, phpmyadmin is available from EPEL or RPM Forge – check out this article if you haven’t got it on your system.

Now we need to restart apache so it’ll know about his new companion:

service httpd restart

Excellent! We’re getting there. Now let’s create that database….

Well, I’m stuck here! I’ll let you know when I’ve figured it out. Until then, happy googling

The Wordpress Codex is very good at explaining in detail how to modify a theme, but it’s fairly complex if you’re starting out. Let me give you a quick overview on what Wordpress does to display your page in a browser:

Display your favourite WP site in your favourite browser. Then right click and display the source code of that site. What you see now is what your browser turns into something nice to look at: your page.

Even though all this code gets displayed at once, it is sent to the browser “on the fly” by Wordpress if a user requests the page. This process happens in snippets of code, which is made up for several files that make up “the theme”.

If you have a look at a theme directory (usually wp-content/themes/youthemehere/), you’ll see several files. One of them (index.php) is the first file that’ is used to display a theme. This file calls other files, such as header.php, sidebar.php, footer.php and many others.

Part of the challenge is to find where the piece of code is that you’d like to modify. Your navigation menu at the top may be called in the header.php file,  or it may be called from index.php. You have to play detective to figure it out.

You can do this from within Wordpress by navigating to Appearance – Editor. Select the theme you want to modify at the top right your current theme is already selected. On the right side you see all the files your theme is made of. Have a look at Anatomy of a Theme to find out more about those.

If you want to make a change, your files need to be writable on the server (do this with an FTP client such as FileZilla, and set your theme files’ permissions to CHMOD 777).

Before you start to modify any code, I highly reccomend to copy your entire theme folder to a safe place. You’d be surprised what a missing </div> tag can do to your design…

Have fun!