Posts Tagged Wordpress

Well I had to lose the other theme as I finally found some of those incompatibilty issues with WordPress 2.6  I was worried aboutafter making the sidebar useable.  Mainly the gallery functions were not working, it would load the gallery images in the post, but no support for the individual image pages themselves, and I really can’t do without them. But I still was able to retain the image header that I so dearly love :) And I still have a very clean looking theme as well, and very well maintained in regards to WordPress upgrades by the designer Sadish Bala on his site WordPress Rocks. He has a number of very well desgined WP themes available for free and a very nice selection of premium themes as well. I am tempted to see if he can take on the job of getting the old theme up to date as it was just so eye pleasing to me, not that this one isn’t though! It’s called MistyLook, and I actually use it on my WordPress as well.  Its solid and very clean and works very well. I should just stay with his designs as they are some of the best out there and I wont have to worry with hacking all these other ones to just get them to function, just dont have the time for it.  well off now to change the feedjit codes and some of the ad codes to match the site… again :( I’m not changing this anymore… for a while ;)  LOL

And I pray the last~ lol First of all , apologies to anyone visiting the site the last couple or evenings and being suddenly lost in a  completely different layout from one page to another, or one visit to another! :o) if you’ve been here within the last few days you may have seen or read the post where I had some trouble with the original theme just having a few bits of trouble with the latest WordPress upgrade, nothing major but it threw off the look of the sidebar widgets just a little bit, well no one would probably have noticed but me, but its those little things get on my nerves, I dont mind if most of the posts I make are lacking any real depth or information, but I want the site to look right at least. Well I have had my eye on this template now for a long time, the link to the original is still in the footer as it is mostly their work still. The only trouble was that it wasn’t ‘widget ready’ as it was advertised to be. Well yes it had a sidebar that could be edited manually, but I wanted to be able to use the widget administration capabilities available with the last couple of versions of WordPress. Just makes it simpler IF I do change a theme, the widgets are carried over to he next template without a lot of work. anyway I confess to not having any grand knowledge of the workings of a wordPress template. Well some of it. I’m fairly adept, if I say so myself, at playing around with the CSS and even adding a few codes here and there. But when it came to understanding how to make the sidebar widgets ‘editable’ (if that’s the word) from the admin area I was clueless. Well I have had this template now a few moths I think, even had the image header set up and couldn’t wait to use it! it was only then after I uploaded and activated it I realised it wasn’t working 100%. Well i have looked and looked how to widgetize a sidebar and to be honest i was lost trying to understand what to do. So that’s the reason I had that other theme going and I made that header image that I thought was very artistic :) Well you can see where the inspiration of it came from, I had this header image already in my head and really wanted to use it. Anyway this evening I was sitting around just messing with the site and css and the thought struck me… what if I replace the sidebar php page of this theme with one from a theme that had a single simple working sidebar already in place. My first attempt was a bit disappointing though. the sidebar appeared at the top of the page and that wouldn’t do. Well i got to looking at a few of the sidebar php files of a few different themes and happened to notice that most all of them had a specific ‘id’ in the HTML division tag at the beginning… EUREKA! I changed the id to the original one called for, refreshed the page and I was ECSTATIC! :) Can it really be this simple?? Oh I love this theme, even more than the one I had up originally. Its everything I wanted, a prominent place to show my Alison Michelle and me together first, then the layout is clean and simple and, to me, very easy to navigate and view the content too. The color scheme is pleasing to me as well. I just like it period. this is the one I will keep, just pray I don’t run into any trouble by failing to fix something else I don’t know about yet. Well as always with these theme changes, if you notice anything out of whack anywhere or any errors you encounter, please let me know. I’ll see what I can do to straighten it out.

Visitors may have noticed the theme changes over the last few days. I upgraded Wordpress to the latest versiona week or two ago and something in it set off a few problems in the sidebars of the other template that I really wanted to keep. I guess its for thebest though as Ihave been looking into some that werent so heavily built by images and are faster loading. I did find one I really liked. but unfortunatley it isn’t “widget ready” as yet so I wll have to wait until its updated, if it ever is or do it my self, which I dont have the time to mess with at the moment. I was looking around the other night and found this theme I am using now, Sakura 3. It’s a really nice clean open theme, and easily editable with a minimum of html knowlege. I’ve been customising it just a bit, changing the CSS in some areas and of course the header image. I sort of like thmuted green and tan shades and like the cleaner less busy look, of course the content isnt readily visible as you eneter the page requiring a visitor to scroll down so I may have some quick exits if they dont bother to go gown a bit, but nevermind I like this. It will stay.. for now anyway :)  feel free to comment on any thing you see not dislaying correctly or any probless loading the page.

Pics taken from my iPhone on the way home from work when a bad storm came through. Numerous lightening strikes but I couldn’t time the camera just right. Well I’ll test out how this app posts photos ;)

The One App I have been waiting for is out this morning in the App Store, WordPress for iPhone!! Whoohoo!! :-) thanks guys!

Edited 5:00 pm – I posted that message early this morning via the app the minute I got the setup done. It works beautifully. Now that I’m off work for today I will play a bit more, including this edit being done right from the phone. Sweet!! I’ve already tested out posting photos as you see in the entry above. Works great and allows multiple photos as well. I could only post one pic at a time to blogger and I had to email that, then import the post to WordPress! :o) so this will save a lot of time and steps! Great app guys, awesome release! My FAVOURITE APP!!

Edit 2 6:14 pm from the PC -  OK I’ve played a bit with this wonderful app and give it rave reviews right out of the box all around. The one feature I have been looking for is being able to post a photo from my phone right straight to a blog post. I would have settled for posting even just one pic at a time, but the wonderful developers at Automattic have given us the ability to post several, either taken right from the camera or added from the photo library of the cell! Amazing, I have waited so long for this. Previously, in order to post a pic form the cell I would have to wait until I got home and then copied the image to my PC and posted it, or another way was to email the photo to a blogger email address that I previously set up to use with my blogger mobile site, it automatically made a post with it. then arriving home at some point I would import the post into my blog and go and delete the one on blogger. a lot of work and steps! :( but it worked ;)

I was/am using a nice little plug-in called Wphone that lets me access the admin section of my blog through a nice interface, but the one thing is was lacking was being able to post photos. There was another plug-in I used, cant remember the name of it now, but I could write a post by email and I set up a special email account just for that. one the mail was sent I could access a certain page on my site and it would import the email as a post, but I never had a lot of use for it, it was just a bit cumbersome in a way, sometimes it would import, sometimes not.. gone…

So anyway I was tickled to death to see WordPress developing this App, and I’m sure a lot of others are as well judging from the comments there at the Wordpress for iPhone blog.

As I said this is the first release of it and I am sure there will be a lot of updates and maybe some slick features added in the future as its an open source program and some of the best contributors working on it. But its still fantastic just like it is and as long as I can put a pic from my phone to my blog in just a couple of clicks I am set :)  not that I don’t have my wish list already for it though! ;)

here’s what I would like to see at some point

WordPress iPhone App wishlist

• Comments support – managing, viewing, approval/deletion
• more image display options – thumbnail size, alignment
• Tags-  displaying click tags, adding a default tag to any post from the phone (ie. mobile post, iPhone post, etc)
• Something else I’m sure will come to mind ;)

I see this as a really big step to mobile blogging, not only with Wordpress, but any of the other blogging apps available or in the works. The iPhone is an ideal mobile blogging computer and I think that apps like this are going to open up a whole new world of blogging, for better or for worse in a lot of cases, but definitely a welcome change :) Thanks again to the development team for a great application! Cheers!