‘ Adventures in Coding ’ Posts

WordPress Lessons Learned

My Adobe CS4 Master Collection arrived on the 23rd… since it was my son’s birthday I didn’t do much with it beyond install… an install that seemed to take forever.. Before installing, I decided to uninstall the CS3 programs that aren’t in high use… Contribute was in that batch leaving only Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver on my system…. Only thing is for some reason my wordpress was being odd and wouldn’t let me connect with Contribute CS4 so decided to try reinstalling CS3. I thinks the re-install of that one program took as long as CS4 total as it kept making me switch between CS3 and CS4 disks. So lesson learned – make sure you really don’t want the CS3 items before uninstalling. Still not sure what was causing the issue as the same settings seem to work fine now on CS4… might have been something quarky with the server.

Friday I felt pretty miserable with a migraine so I didn’t do much of anything. Saturday morning I played around with the battles I had missed on the NAPP boards the past several weeks. See previous post.

Yesterday afternoon/evening I decided I was going to finally tackle the “Library” section and actually customize it a bit. Once I got the books lining up nicely (View the Library) I decided I had finally had enough of the “Currently Reading” showing up on the Library pages and the home-is() wasn’t really working. I found a great solution on Blue Mushroom which suggested modifying the functions.php page..

While that worked great, I also happened to add an absentminded extra return after the ending ?> which apparently causes problems with WordPress… My entire Dashboard disappeared until I found the offending carriage return and deleted it. So second lesson learned – don’t have extra carriage returns in your WordPress php files.

More Blog Updates

Watched the 2nd Contribute tutorial by Terry White and have now learned how to insert some custom html in contribute.. it is quite interesting… yet another Adobe program for me to figure out.

I’ve done some customization of the sidebar – still playing around with it. I think I’ve figured out what each of the php template files do – I haven’t customized them all yet but least I have an idea as to what is available.

I’m trying out a library plugin called now-reading which allows what books I’m currently reading to be displayed. I’ve only done a little customization to the ‘sidebar.php’ of its templates so even more php files to figure out and style.

I wanted one that would do a currently listen to however I couldn’t find a plug-in I liked so playing around with just a “CurrentMusic” div and links from amazon associates… Not sure how annoying that is going to be in keeping up…

Next project is to work some more on the library and do some customization in there and I also want to download and play around with Lightbox2 a bit…

More Style Edits

Spent some more time playing around with the php and css that runs the blog. I’ve now made it so the sidebar is visible on most pages (I think)… I’ve added a couple links to the header, changed the title structure a bit, and modified the background slightly… here is a new screen shot of the current state.

26Dec2007 Blog Screen shot

Next task is to work on the Sidebar a bit more…

Back in May I watched one of Terry White’s Podcasts on Contribute CS3 which showed how you can use Contribute CS3 to update your blog. So decided to sit down and figure out how that works…

The first attempt was interesting as I had a new blog entry all done up and posted and then noticed that the date was wrong on the entry – started playing around with that and somehow managed to delete the post… GRR… Even more interesting is a few hours later it showed up again…. very odd…

Some interesting little bugs I came across… there is a BlogHub.csi file in the App Data section of the users local settings that has to be edited to allow photos wider than a 150px photo (it has a height/width limiter in the file)… also had to set up a new directory on the server for uploads and adjust permissions so WordPress and Contribute can upload photos…

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