In my post yesterday, Making a Popup Window in WordPress, I mentioned that my theme was rendering a little differently in some browswers and that in some of them the lines of code were too wide and were being cut off. How did I know this? I don’t have a bunch of PCs, Macs, and Linux machines sitting around running different versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.
WordPress
Making a Popup Window in WordPress
Looking at my site, I realized that some of my code snippets are a little wide for my theme and may be being cut off in some browsers. On top of that, WordPress seems to like to mangle code. In the Edit Post page, there is a specific code button when you use the HTML editor, but the button doesn’t appear on the Visual editing screen.
My solution is to put code into a Popup window that will allow the user to view it more clearly and in a window wide enough for even the widest lines of code. In addition, this will allow me to make a photo gallery pop up and probably all sorts of other uses I’ll eventually invent.
Add a Random Header Image To WordPress
My current blog template (Grid Focus by Derek Punsalan 5thirtyone.com) features an icon in the upper right corner that has no personal meaning to me.
I decided to replace it, and while I was at it I would also make the icon a random icon. WordPress has all sorts of random image plugins — some are too powerful and some are not powerful enough.
Since I was going to have to modify the theme’s code anyway, I figured I would just code the random image generator directly and make it do exactly what I wanted it to.
WordPress Fun – Displaying the Number of Database Queries
Today is just a quick little addition to the footer of the blog to show how many database queries it took to build the web page and how much time it took.
Adding a Dynamic Widget Footer to WordPress Using a Sidebar
So I’m now at the point where I’d like to be able to start putting in some advertising slots on this blog for affiliate links and for google adsense ads. That means I need a bit more control over the theme and a bit more “room” to put things. I’m also finding that a lot of widgets in the sidebar need more horizontal space than the two narrow sidebar columns allow.
Fortunately, there’s plenty of unused space in the footer of the blog — so I’m going to move some of the more wordy widgets down there — which should clear space for some 120×600 ads in the sidebars as well as other types of advertising. Also, it will make the Recent Posts and Recent Comments widgets more readable by putting them where they can spread out horizontally.
However, the theme I’m currently using doesn’t have any support for widgets in the footer!
I’m going to have to add those myself. Fortunately, it is very easy to add additional components in WordPress.
Working Outdoors on a Nice Day
Well, the weather is nice-er anyway. According to the weather site, it is 48°F outside. Warm enough to sit outside in a t-shirt for an hour and do some web reading and work on some websites.
That was my goal, and I’m hitting it finally.
Portable Blogging on a Linux Laptop
I am making this post wirelessly using Flock on my laptop.
Flock Browser – The Social Web Browser
This is my first test using my laptop to write a post. Long-term, it is my intention to write as much as possible on the laptop.