Jan

1

Sidetalkin’: WordPress Sideblog

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WordPress plugin: Sideblog
After trying out the Sideblog plugin for WordPress for two months on Fanmode, I’m reasonably comfortable with it so I added the plugin to create a sideblog on this site’s left sidebar.

Naturally, there were complications.
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Nov

2

Feeling blue

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I’ve changed the theme for the site. I was previously using Kubrick and I’ve switched to Brian Gardner’s Blue Zinfandel theme. I’m using Brian Gardner’s Vertigo theme on Fanmode and was quite happy with it so I decided to change this site as well.

There are a couple of problems here and there. The most notable has to do with the CSS styling.
WordPress theme: Blue Zinfandel
I’m certain that’s caused by the width of the centre column but I need to brush up on CSS before I try fixing that.

If you notice any other serious problems with the site, I’d appreciate a comment.

Oct

23

WordPress Related Posts

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In my quest to add functionality to Fanmode, I added a WordPress plugin that adds links to related posts for each entry.
WordPress Related Posts
Plugins that add this feature have been around for quite some time but the one I’m using leverages WordPress tagging features which were included in version 2.3. If you’ve updated to the latest version of WordPress, you would have noticed you can now add tags to each post in addition to categories. This should make it easier for readers to find related content on your site.
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Oct

20

Creating a favicon

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I’m generally very spartan when it comes to my browsing habits. I surf without Java or Javascript, turn off cookie-support unless I absolutely need them, filter out Flash objects … if it’s not strictly necessary for navigation, I turn it off.

I developed this habit back when I was surfing on a dial-up connection. I was paying for internet access by the second so speed was of the essence. Anything that bogged me down was out.

One of the things I usually disable whenever I install a browser on my system is favicons. These are icons that show up on the address bar or the bookmarks of a browser. They’re usually less than 1KB in size so they weren’t exactly system-hoggers but again, if I don’t need it, I don’t want it.

Thus, the sites I maintain did not have favicons. If I didn’t feel they were necessary, why should I foist them on others?

Still, some folks may actually like those icons and I will admit there are some cool examples to be found.

I was also tired of seeing 404s because visitors couldn’t find my site’s icon when they bookmarked the site.

So, I decided to try creating a favicon for fanmode.net.
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Oct

16

Sidetalking: WordPress asides

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WordPress Sideblog plugin
I really like the idea of having microposts that are one or two sentences in length as they would be a neat way of sharing links or making announcements about the site. I was looking for a way to incorporate microposts in a WordPress blog and discovered there are a couple of different approaches available.

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