Unintentionally Blank

Having decided to mix up my front page with a latest article section, I then had to work out how to manipulate the Wordpress Loop in order to display what I wanted. It took quite a lot of thinking, one wrong (oh so wrong) attempt and then I cracked it. Please note, this involves playing about with the index.php file in your theme, if you don’t want to spoil anything, please back it up! Now, here’s how to do it:

Continue reading “Adventures With The Wordpress Loop: Sticky Articles” »

If you are looking at the front page of my blog, you will see the layout of the posts is quite different to most other blogs. The home page displays the latest post, then the latest article, then a few more posts. There are a number of posts out there showing how to display a sticky post, even displaying a news post as sticky for only a day or two but none of them quite did everything I wanted them to do. So, after a while looking through the codex article on the loop and scratching my head, I finally got down and worked it out myself, here’s how.

Continue reading “My New Front Page: Adventures With The Wordpress Loop” »

One of the biggest benefits of upgrading to Wordpress 2.1 has been the new version of the Akismet plugin. All the other tweaks are all very nice, but the automatic deletion of spam on posts over a month old has left my spam queue almost empty. Considering I was receiving more that 100 spam comments a day previous to that (sadly double my unique daily visitors and nothing compared to some blogs), this has been a miracle. To date, Akismet has stopped 11,670 spam comments and I couldn’t be happier that I no longer have to look at 99% of them.

I can’t give all the credit to the new Akismet though. I recently installed Bad Behaviour to try to stop spammers even reaching the blog. It is currently displaying that it has blocked 735 access attempts in the last 7 days, so it must be helping too.

Comment spam is the bane of blogging and the existence of fantastic plugins like Akismet, Bad Behaviour and, not forgetting, Spam Karma (which I haven’t used, but is spoken of in the same breath as the other two) makes thousands of lives easier. I can’t imagine what I would have done, had I been made to moderate or delete each and every one of those 11,000 comments! Maybe one day the spammers will give up, until then we have the above to thank. Plugin authors are amazing, but the ones who save this much trouble need extra thanks, maybe one day I’ll even drop a donation in a Paypal account. Yeah, I will, I think they’ll appreciate that.

Nearly a year ago, MyBlogLog was just another way of tracking your blog’s stats, boosting your ego by checking where your visitors were coming from and where they were going, their original selling point. I don’t know much about their early progress, but after a year they had attracted over 13 thousand users. More recently they posted how 40 thousand sites had signed up and the numbers signing up per day were growing steadily. Then they were bought by Yahoo and continue to pop up all over the blogosphere, but what happened to this little stat tracking site to cause it’s popularity to soar recently?

Continue reading “MyBlogLog: Bringing The Community To The Blog” »

Through the magic of MyBlogLog statistics, I found someone trying to use one of my javascript codes. It is always touching to find out that someone has found your work useful and it spurs you on to better things.

In this case, the user wanted something slightly different out of the code than what I had provided. Changing a page’s font size was the code in question here, but rather than changing it using the link method I had provided, they wanted to display a different font size based on a reader’s screen resolution. This is an inspired idea, I thought, as monitors get bigger and resolutions get smaller and text on screen disappears. This is why I use 1024×768 otherwise I wouldn’t be able to read anything!

Continue reading “How To Size Your Font Based On Your Reader’s Screen Resolution” »