Extra! Extra! Check Out The New Theme!

Tagged as: Blog, Wordpress Nov 01

So after more time than I’d like to admit, I’ve finally finished enough of my theme to put it on goingthewongway! I’m excited that I’ve changed it. Check it out and let me know what you think!

And now I present to you: Soi-disant

I’ve only changed my theme once to (Not So) Fresh as I posted in New Look. That was 8 months ago and since then quite a bit has changed.

Why I wanted to make my own theme

1. Have a unique look to my blog

   I’ve come across other blogs that had the same theme, and that wasn’t too exciting for me. I want and like to be my own. So even though the last one did look nice, it was unfortunate because other people thought that it looked nice as well.

2. Learn much, much more web design

   CSS in particular, HTML and PHP to a lesser degree since I already knew a fair amount before doing the theme. Part of who I am wants to understand how things work and why. So learning new things can be very exciting to me. Not to mention the fact that it’s very pertinent to my profession of computer programming. (Although I must admit that I believe that I lack the creativity necessary to actually ever become a web designer. I know the nuts and bolts but lack the vision. )

3. Create a fluid display

   I wanted one that would show up well on the very popular 1024×768 and 1280×1024 screen resolutions in addition to any other screen resolutions. I’m sorry to say that it’s very likely that anything below 1024×768 won’t look all that great. A fluid display means that the text and page elements will expand according to how much space is available. My previous theme was fixed width so it didn’t look too great to me on higher resolution displays.

4. Speed things up

   The last theme used a fair amount of images to create all of the nice effects. And that’s nice for people on fast connections (which at this point is a very fair amount of people). However there still are people on slower connections, and I want my blog to be accessible to them as well, too.

Soi-disant

I got the name of this theme (Soi-disant) by looking up a word of the day online. Lame, huh? I thought it was cool because it means calling oneself thus, self-styled, or so-called. Seemed interesting to me so there it is.

So I did it all for this theme: header logo, PHP code, HTML, CSS. It was a learning experience, that is for sure.

WordPress theme designer: check

New WordPress Comment Plugins

Tagged as: Blog, Wordpress Oct 30

I like commenting on blogs, and I also very much enjoy receiving comments. So I added some new plugins that I thought would facilitate that process.

The plugins that I have added and am now using on this blog are:

1. Brian’s Threaded Comments which allows for comments to be in threads rather than just as a single list. This is nice because it can get confusing in the way that I used to just use an “@ user” type of response. The only drawback is that I’ll probably have to limit the number of levels that nesting will occur because it will make the comments unreadable as they get more and more narrow.

   This code looks stupid and ugly on my current theme, but I’m going to change it very soon so I’m still going to post it. Most people don’t care about this, but I figured that I’d put it out there if anyone did find it useful and didn’t know too much PHP.

   So is here is the change so that there will be no “Reply to this comment” link if the comments for a post are already closed:

   <div class='reply'><?php global $user_ID; global $post; if ( get_option("comment_registration") && !$user_ID )
echo '<a href="'.get_option('siteurl') .
'/wp-login.php?redirect_to=' . get_permalink() .
'">Log in to Reply';
elseif ('open' == $post->comment_status) {?>
<a href='#' onclick='moveAddCommentBelow("div-comment-<?php echo $c->comment_ID ?>", < ?php echo
$c->comment_ID ?>, true); return false;'>Reply to this comment</a>
< ?php } ?>
</div>

   I also added code from my original comments.php in my theme file so that if a user is logged in, it will not ask them for their information (name, e-mail, etc). Although I don’t think that there are too many people with accounts on my blog (go for it, it’s not so bad) I figured that it was at least a solution that I enjoyed more for my own sake. However the code change was too much for this so I’m not going to post it in this entry.
   Other than that it’s pretty super! I like the look, and I hope that others will appreciate it. And most of all I hope that it fosters more discussion!

2. Comment Timeout lets me fight another problem on my blog. And that problem is spam comments. Hateful, despicable spam comments. They take at least a little bit of time to go through sometimes when people’s comments get caught in moderation. So I’ve decided that since it rather makes sense to close the comments on old posts, I will. It’s not as if people particularly post comments on my old posts anyways.

   Additionally it has the ability to keep the comments active if the post is deemed “active.” The plugin is fairly full-featured with some customizable options such as the timeout period, etc. Not a bad plugin if I do say so myself. It was a better option for me than the very basic Close Old Posts plugin written by Matt Mullenweg and listed on the wordress.org site.

Let me know what you think of the new plugins! Does it make you want to leave more comments?

Yay For Frequent Commentators

Tagged as: Blog, Wordpress Sep 06

I think that commenting is one of the most interesting and enticing things about an online blog. It allows one to share their thoughts, but it also allows others to give feedback on those thoughts! I like to comment on other blogs, but I also like to respond to comments on my own blog.

So after participating a bit at One Man’s Blog (who is also having a great contest for becoming a “member” of his site right now where he gives away something to the winner of a random drawing), and enjoying it very much I decided that I would do something similar to what he does.

Instead of removing the nofollow on each and every commentator’s link, he instead creates a refreshed list of the top 10 commentators and provides them with a link back that way. I think that after seeing how I can sometimes be getting the single comments just to get a link, I think that this is a more prudent decision to minimize single-line “spammy” comments.

So therefore I am going to go for installing the Show Top Commentators plugin.

The way to get onto the list is as follows:

1. Use the same information (name, e-mail, website) when leaving comments. It might be easiest to simply register (which I have opened up) on my website. You’ll be able to log in and not have to enter your information each time you leave a comment.
2. Leave comments! It’s fun anyways, I think to get to give feedback to the author (and be assured that authors do enjoy feedback, especially this author).
3. The plugin will gather its data from the last 60 days, so be active else you fall and cease being the king of the mountain. Hm I always enjoyed that game (king of the mountain, not falling).

Oh an don’t worry, it will start immediately and retroactively use the comments that you’ve left. So we actually don’t start off with a clean slate, but I wouldn’t think that would be fair anyways to those that have graced me with their participation.

I’m going to remove myself from any sort of communities for adding dofollow. I don’t really get too much traffic from them, and the traffic that I do get is usually people just leaving a single comment to get the link back to their site. I like the idea of adding dofollow, I just don’t like how it’s worked out for me thus far.

Comments might not make the world go ’round, but they sure are more pleasant than the alternative.

Get Me Out Of Here

Tagged as: Blog Aug 30

Alright alright, that was a lame title considering what it’s about. This is just to note that I just hacked a couple of my plugins so that they don’t display me or my information anymore.

For example, in the recent comments in the sidebar, it was showing my comments, but I have removed that so that now it will only show comments by people other than me.

And then for the Stats page that is displayed, I have decided to only let it show information that is unrelated to me. Hopefully that will give some better statistics for you to see on what is actually popular with other people rather than just with me!

PPPPPPP

Tagged as: Blog Aug 23

Jos at NoDirectOn (that’s ‘no direct on’, not ‘no direction’) thought that I should do this. It’s a real short one in which you describe yourself using a template of 7 words that start with the letter ‘P’. All you do is fill it out, link back to whoever tagged you and then tag others. I don’t do these things all that often, but it’s nice to be thought of so I’ll give it a go.

Passion – God, family, friends, fun
Purpose – Much more than the average joe
Pursuit – A life that is in line with what I believe
Position – Sitting. Always sitting.
Pummeling – Rude drivers. Pummeling is a funny word to use here.
Progress – Doing alright, doing alright. Not doing so well on not repeating myself, though
Personality – Honest, realistic, slightly sarcastic

Usually you’re supposed to tag people, but I think that I’m just going to leave this open-ended. If you want to do it, go for it and let me know! I can add you later and we can pretend like I tagged you in the first place.