Tag Archives: wordpress

WordPress themes

John | 15 October, 2009 - 12:13 am

Yesterday the thought crossed my mind that anyone who visits this blog page fairly often will by now have got used to the Thesis theme design and the rotating image gallery, and will perhaps have come to believe that it’s how the page looks and that its appearance is set in concrete.

So I decided to browse around for a new theme that would dramatically change the look of this page, for one day only, and this is the one I chose:

Tyson_Black_theme

Well, Reno made a comment on the new theme, using my last post to do it, as I hadn’t made a new post to go with the new theme.  The problem is that his very enthusiastic comment would make no sense after I reverted to the Thesis theme today.  So I’m adding this post with a record of the theme he was writing about, and as you can see it  looks totally different.  Not only the colours and header, but also the layout and the number of posts you can scroll down in full.  Thesis only allows the most two recent posts to be displayed in full.

One of the reasons that the appearance of the page can be changed with a mouse click is because of CSS.  My website has a long page devoted to my experience in learning CSS, where content and design are separated.  And the content is in one box, so to speak, and the layout and design instructions are in another box – and this includes fonts, colours, lines, and so on.

I’ve adopted another new theme today.  I really like the look of this one, and it has some neat features like tabs for categories.

I’m looking forward to Australian Idol next Sunday, because the guest mentor to the contestants, guest judge and performer is the legendary Liza with a Z.

For me, Liza Minnelli is an extraordinary singer and performer, and it amazes me that such a great legend is alive and visiting and performing in Australia – and she’s no stranger to our shores.  She married an Aussie.

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audio player test

John | 6 September, 2009 - 12:28 am

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Update:

The arrow is a play button.  Once you press this, music starts playing and a display opens with a pause button, a scrubber button on the timeline, and scrolling details of the music playing.

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Spamalot

John | 6 September, 2009 - 12:12 am

Today I got my second Comment on this page which my WordPress spam filter has identified as spam.  It read as follows:

Hello. My name is Chris. I’m from USA. I’m new to this forum, i was hoping you could maybe teach me some stuff.

This is me- (link to website and jpg photo) – Just so you know who i am! feel free to post your own photos. Allways best to know who you talk to!

I’ve deleted the link to the website and photo.  My checks of the link showed that it tries to download an “install.exe” file (not a jpg photo) and the website is rated as a dangerous website.

I’ve now installed a new anti-spam plugin that will hopefully prevent all further spam.

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A new feature in my WordPress blog

John | 24 August, 2009 - 11:42 pm

Friendly Permalinks!

Until today I didn’t even know what a permalink is, let alone how to modify them.

I’ll explain.  Whenever I create a new post on my blog page, WordPress creates a new page for that post, and gives it a unique Id, so that it can find the page when needed (such as when you click on its heading, or search for it, etc.).  The default way that WordPress names the page is /?p=345 where 345 is the numerical Id of the page.  This is the permalink (permanent link) by which the page is named.

If you don’t quite understand the “new page for each post” concept, just click on the heading of this post, and you’ll be taken to the individual page for this post, with the comments (if any) and the option to make your own comments.

Until today, the URL in your browser would have shown the permalink of my blog pages as http://www.jthonline.com/WordPress/?p=345 or whatever the numeric Id is.  That’s unfriendly and meaningless.  It doesn’t tell you or me, or more importantly, search engines, anything about the content of that page.

Today I adopted “friendly permalinks” which give the date and subject in the URL addresses that you can see in your browser.

As a result, the correct  URL for this post is now http://www.jthonline.com/WordPress/2009/08/24/friendly-permalinks-on-my-blog/ instead of http://www.jthonline.com/WordPress/?p=396

If you look at the URL now, all you’ll see is http://www.jthonline.com/WordPress/ and that’s because you’re looking at this post on my WordPress blog page at http://www.jthonline.com/WordPress/index.php

If you’d like a bit of fun, click on the heading of this post, to open its own page; then go up to the URL in your browser and delete all the text after the date of this date of this post.  Then change the day (24 in this case) to another date.

Pick a date highlighted in blue on the calendar, when I made a post, to take you to the post for that day.  Be careful not to remove the “/” when selecting dates.

When you’re happy with what you can do with all that, pick a date when I didn’t make a post.  You’ll then get a 404 message because you’re looking for a page that doesn’t exist.  But this time it’s a 404 message with a difference.

It’s a personal 404 message, dude.

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New page title needed

John | 16 August, 2009 - 10:07 pm

This weekend I did a Google search for “The Silver Fox speaks up” to see if this blog page is indexed, and this is what I came across.  It’s the  heading of an article about Bill Clinton.  I made a screen grab of it not realising that it’s headed in the same Georgia font as I use.  So it looks as if I wrote the heading.  No way!  I’d never think of calling Mr Clinton “The Big Dog” – and I don’t know why whoever wrote that article did.

Silver Fox480

Shock horror! The name is already taken, by a former President of the United States no less. But worse still, my Google search led to this web site:

http://www.comicbookmovie.com/x-men_movies/x-men_origins_wolverine/news/?a=5015

Silver Fox is Hugh Jackman’s (Wolverine) former girlfriend?

Given all of the above, I now don’t think the Silver Fox concept works for the image I’d like to project.  So, I have to put my thinking cap on again.

I have no idea what I’ll come up with for the title and subtitle.  All I can say is that I’m working on it.

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West Coast Swing

John | 12 August, 2009 - 11:50 pm

Late last night I tried to move the WordPress directory that powers this page from the subdomain of blog.jthonline.com to www.jthonline.com the same as the rest of my web site.  I’ve been wanting to make this change ever since I installed WordPress but I didn’t know how to do it.  WordPress is not just the web page you can see, but a whole system of over 15 Mb on my server with maybe 60-100 folders and sub folders and sub-sub folders etc and hundreds of files.  The index page you are reading is not an HTML page.  It’s a PHP page and that means it has PHP  programs as well as HTML and CSS.  This page is also linked to a MySQL database.  So there is lots going on.  By the way the PHP programs are server-side, which means they run on my server and are not downloaded to your computer (client-side).

As I mentioned, late last night, cheered on by a few glasses of red wine, I got up the courage to move the WordPress folder.  Disaster.  My blog page went offline and worse still, I could no longer access the admin page.

After a good night’s sleep I tackled the task again this morning.  Phew!  I was able to  reverse last night’s damage, and with some help from the WordPress Codex site, I made the move successfully, so here we are.  WordPress is now where I want it to on my hosting server.

Last Sunday night Lincoln Lewis (from Home and Away) and his professional dance partner Luda were assigned to do the West Coast Swing.

Things did not go well in the judging.  The judges said that Luda had not done the West Coast Swing.  She argued back and said she had done what WC Swing experts had told her what to do (choreograph and  teach Lincoln).  This was the start of an argument.  It got featured in Today Tonight, which had other local experts comment.  The argument is the feature of Ch 7 promos for the episode nest Sunday.

You can see the dance highlights from last Sunday at the following address:

http://au.tv.yahoo.com/dancing-with-the-stars/video/-/watch/14978062/episode-6-highlights/#fop

Lincoln and Luda are the 4th couple.  The blind guy is next.

You can see the judging and argument at this address:

http://au.tv.yahoo.com/dancing-with-the-stars/video/-/watch/14978068/luda-takes-on-helen/

I mention all this because I’ve sought the comments of a leading exponent of West Coast Swing in the West Coast of the USA – Sonny Watson.

Sonny Watson was instrumental in helping the “United States Swing Dance Council” (U.S.S.D.C.) pass a bill to make West Coast Swing the Official State Dance Of California. Sonny is a certified, trained judge. When he isn’t competing, he serves as a judge at many of the national events, including A.S.D.C. (New York), Atlanta Grand Nationals, Phoenix, Boston Tea Party, Virginia State Open, California SwingThing, Monterey Swing Fest, Jack and Jill O’Rama, Swing Diego, Dallas D.A.N.C.E., Dallas Classic, New Years Dance Championships (Dallas), Swing Worlds, US Open Swing Dance Championships and more. Sonny is also Chairman of the Board of the Dance History Department for the World Swing Dance Council.

If he replies, I’ll publish it for you to read.

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