HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

You can use all the WordPress Sandbox CSS designs with Movable Type now. The new system allows CSS only templates using the semantic XHTML structure of Sandbox. Check it out.

Video embeds like the ones from YouTube can be valuable to tell a story. Though the built-in options for such videos allow the user to resize the video, it is not dynamic and is more than often a manual (irreversible) process. Say you would like to keep the video at it’s full size in the single post page but display a thumbnail in your sidebar, you can. A simple CSS and Javascript fix for IE would do the trick, here’s how:

Earlier, we studied how we can easily display a continuous list in two columns using just CSS. Today, we will use a similar technique to present a continuous list in two rows within a finite width. A common usage of this technique can be found in galleries such as CSS Mania or wpSnap, where the post is replaced by a thumbnail image in the home page. We can tackle this need using simple CSS magic.

Let us assume you are using WordPress to power your site where your typical blog post is generated using WP Loop as shown below. This will usually render a simple list of posts as shown in this image, click the image to view a live demo.

<?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
<h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”<?php the_title(); ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>
<h5>//<?php the_time(‘m.d.Y’); ?> at <?php the_time(‘g:i a’) ?></h5>
<?php the_content(‘Read more…’); ?>
<?php edit_post_link(‘Edit’, ‘<p>’, ‘</p>’); ?>
<p class=”entry-meta”>
<span class=”cat-links”>Filed under: <?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?><?php if (function_exists(‘the_tags’)) { ?><?php the_tags(‘, ‘, ‘, ‘, ”); ?><?php } ?></span> // <span class=”comments-link”><?php comments_popup_link(‘Post a comment’, ’1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’); ?></span>
</p>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>

We then replace the tag that generates the post, in this case, it’s the “the_content” tag with a source to a image file that is labeled identical to the post ID, for example, post ID 11 will have a corresponding image called 11.jpg in a select.

If your site gets any traffic at all, chances are your RSS feed is scraped and misused by some one trying to score on SERP for the work you have toiled on. This very blog is constantly ripped by sploggers who have no regards to intellectual property rights or just plain simple dumb to realize they are stealing. Here are three sites where you can find the entire content of our blog scraped/ripped/stolen and posted as their own. Of course I did not link to them because I really don’t want you to visit them:

myblogmix.com (this m^*&*0 f$%*r even uses one of our themes on his splog!)
frenzygraphics.com
urlfan.com

How do you stop them?
Jonathan Bailey, a security expert (Plagiarism Today) who also writes on Blog Herald, lists 6 steps to identify and fight content theft. We religiously followed the suggestions for months now (that post on BH was from last November), but none worked thus far. Google is yet to acknowledged our letters (used his cease and desist letter templates, which is a good source, thanks!). I even took solace in thinking maybe they have a backlog or that they will eventually write back, but nothing really happened.

Here’s a quick and easy way to present a continuous list in two or more columns without having to hard code it. A recent project required a list of authors across two columns; the author names and links were auto generated using a WP tag so listing them in 2 columns required some simple CSS magic.

For good SEO, it is preferential to open your comment authors URI in a new page. Why you might ask? Google and other search engines track sites you visit, they can tell what that site contains (obviously), how long you stayed there and where you went next. The intended use of this information is to find if the sites you visited were relevant to your search keyword and/or if all the sites you visit are related. That could also work against you if your site get a lot of spammers commenting on it. Here’s how.

Let’s say you get a comment on your site that look legit, so you want …

The site is in transition to a simpler and visually engaging design, in the mean time, experience what a free theme and a sleepless weekend can do to your site! This mid-spring pre-reboot reboot is just an idea mash-up. The true reboot will be available on May 1st 2008 and will be built using hand tossed XHTML/CSS, a dash of PHP, some Javascript and home made grid.

As this tutorial runs longer than we initially anticipated, we will break section 3 further into three sub-sections.
In our ongoing exercise to learn the nuts and bolts of a magazine style WordPress theme, we examine what has become by far the most ignored part of a theme design, the navigation menu.

As important as they are, they are often found floating in the header or worse the sidebar and almost never used to its fullest as rightfully should. Today we will change that. We are dedicating three sections just to discuss navigation menus, its varied uses, and the various methods of using it. So why wait, let’s get started.
Why …

In continuing our efforts of slicing and dicing a Magazine style WordPress theme, we come to a very interesting juncture with Java interfaces. This probable is the most ubiquitous feature of most all magazine themes. If you think about it, it makes sense that magazine style themes use this non-obtrusive code to help manage content.

These sidebar tabbed interface gives you the most bang for you buck in terms of digital real-estate. Granted that it will not necessarily minimize bandwidth usage by loading the page any faster, but nonetheless provides an alternative to having the entire content load on each and every page (even where …

Let me say it for the millionth time “content is king” and we all know that, don’t we?

Since content is the most important part of a site, your WordPress powered theme must emphasis on its presentation. Most cookie cutter themes come with a post list that runs based on the time your posts were published, in other words a chronological list of posts irrespective of its importance. Let’s face it, not all posts are created equal. Some posts are special, some are important and then some not quite so. Why then should all posts get the same treatment?

Magazine styled themes do a fine job of addressing this by introducing the featured …