The Wordress Snippets series of posts will give you some useful code snippets for use in your projects – just copy and paste (but try to understand how they work!).
This snippet will add a stylesheet to your login page so that you can style it fully, and also change the default Wordpress logo link (to wordpress.org) and title text to something of your choosing. Add it to functions.php in your template.
If you have ever tried to include code in a wordpress post you may have gone through hell trying to get it to output correctly; Wordpress’ built in functions for formatting text (autop and texturize) mangle your code making it non-functional.
I’ve tried many solutions in the past, such as disabling wordpress’ formatting functions, however, this is not ideal -especially if you rely on them to clean up your text and properly encode characters. On top of that its not even valid to include certain things such as CSS in the body of a xHTML document.
The solution? Custom fields. This post will show you how.
I’ve seen the ‘web 2.0′ layout (full width background, centred content) done in some pretty wacky and different ways, the worst being a background image and then fixed height sections laid on top (if the content wraps or the text is resized…bam..broken layout).
Because of this I am going to demonstrate the method I use – content strips. Hopefully this will be useful to CSS beginners who want to code this type of layout.
Search boxes: integral parts of many websites but often neglected in terms of markup and style. When considering both accessibility and semantics, marking up a a search box can be a little awkward depending on the look you are trying to achieve.
In this post I will suggest some methods of marking up your search boxes, and show a neat way of styling it using css and a few images.
Pull quotes, lift-out quotes, or call-outs are a handy method of drawing reader’s attention to a section of text. Recently, on a couple of client projects, I’ve seen the need to enhance large blocks of text so the user could skim read them without missing the really important parts. Pull quotes seemed perfect for this, so I created a small jQuery script to take care of them.
In this article I demonstrate an easy method of creating pull quotes from a block of text using jQuery (a JavaScript library), CSS, and the html span element. I hope you find this method useful.
Website coders often find themselves working on a variety of web sites, and when starting out, and learning new methods and techniques everyday, the mark-up used can often be messy, random, and inconsistent.
When working with someone else on a project the problem can be even larger, especially when you both have unique ways of doing things, which can cause confusion, drastically increasing project development time.
But how can this be avoided? This article focuses on setting you own standards, creating re-usable snippets of code and web documents, and the benefits of doing so.
It’s been about two weeks now since I made the transition from a shared reseller hosting account to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) account – impressions so far, excellent performance but fiddly to configure.
The reason I wanted to change from shared hosting was the fact the server was always being hacked (even though ALL my scripts were secure), there was frequent downtime, support blamed me for problems every time, and it was slow as hell.
Those used to a shared hosting environment would probably not know where to start when faced with configuring a VPS. Luckily, a lot of it was pre-configured when I received my account – certainly some of the major security holes were patched. I was not satisfied with those however. As a victim of hacking in the past (previous host swears it was not there fault, something I don’t believe) I took extra care to secure it as a much I could – configuring brute force detection, the firewall, installing mod security (excellent rules for that here: http://www.atomicorp.com/wiki/index.php/Atomic_ModSecurity_Rules) and going though multiple guides (like this one: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=468168) with a fine-tooth comb.
The result? My pages are loading at least 6 times faster, I have had no down time (or at least have not noticed any), and I feel in control and happy. No longer am I at the mercy of shared hosts 
If your interested, I chose ServInt as my provider as they offered a great deal, as well as being a managed service (so I’m not on my own if I screw things up). I was tempted by the bells and whistles of Media Temple, but felt the ServInt service was better value.
Download Monitor has received some more love and has been updated. Here’s the change log from the new version:
If you have edited capabilities for download monitor user permissions, you’ll have to again sorry! This is because I named them too long. Also, you should check your forced downloads still work because there was a logic error meaning they may not have been forced after-all…
Enjoy.
Today I completed the update for the Wordpress Download Monitor Plugin – many tweaks, fixes, and features added. There were no changes to the database structure so people upgrading should be fine. Here is the list from the change log:
And yes, those category link bugs are fixed at long last, and you can edit category names finally. Phew!
Spam stopper has been updated to v3.1 – and most of it has been recoded. Here’s the full list of changes:
You can get the plugin from wordpress.org: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/spam-stopper/
For support, please keep my comments clean and post on either the wordpress forums or my forum.
To help support spam-stopper you can make a donation (buy me a coffee, or several) or rate it on wordpress.org. Thanks!
