Seattle Website Designer - Kool Kat Web Designs

I finally have my #WordPress comments working as planned – with avatars and threads!

Having tried and then given up working a .mobi site, I decided to try WordPress Mobile Pack. So far, its working quite well although I see I need a few for tweaks and optimizations.

In order to augment my use of menus in #WordPress, I have been using the Page Lists Plus plugin. One of its features is to allow the anchor tag to be removed from the current page. This works fine except when the current page is the posts page. Since the plugin looks for the post ID ($post->ID), what gets returned is the id of the first post on the page and not the actual posts page! The solution to check and see if your current post is a page or a post. If its a post, then get the page ID for the posts:

if ($post->post_type == 'post') {
$currID = get_option('page_for_posts');
}
else {
$currID = $post->ID;
}

I know it seems simple but it took me awhile to figure it out.

I have been experimenting with #WordPress – learning how to create child themes and using “add_filter ” and “add_action” functions. I started with the thematic theme to see if I could take its very generic appearance and change it around. Although it did not bring my experiment to a complete theme creation, I now know how to proceed on any project requiring child themes.

It always is difficult for me to update older sites. I usually just want to rip the code out and start over. However, my clients usually just want their changes or updates implemented and not a re-do. So, I ignore the code I don’t like and just keep going.

Yahoo provides a shared SSL area on its hosting plans. This is very nice as you don’t have to get your own SSL certificate but it does give a strange URL like Yahoo secure site so its not for anyone concerned about having their own unique URL.
I also ran into a really annoying issue. Yahoo provides a convenient form to get directions that you can add to a site but don’t provide a secure site for any of the images. So, Internet Explorer gives out that warning message asking if you want to see only secure stuff! My work around was just to host the images myself on the shared SSL server. You would think that Yahoo would make all of its offerings work together properly – especially for something so simple.

I managed to tweak the events calendar plugin on #Wordpress to use “SidebarEventsList()” function to create a summary page of upcoming events via a link form the calendar. I just had to modify some PHP code and who’s afraid of a little PHP?

I just re-did my website on a WordPress platform. I had to move hosts since Yahoo would not allow .htaccess file or a static front page. I am now using Dreamhost and I am very happy with this solution.

I have been using Adobe BrowserLab for cross-browser testing for about 1 month now. I have found it amazing useful to see how website that I am working on look in many browsers. It really helped me pinpoint the issue in my previous post on overflow in Internet Explorer.

You would think that with all the CSS I have coded that I would not have fallen into this but while updating BookLover’s Travel I noticed that my left-floated divs containing pictures and captions were getting cut off in Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. After my initial panic, I realized the overflow from the non-floated text was obscuring parts of the div. So, “overoverflow:hidden” to the rescue!