Jun 07, 2009
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Antti Kokkonen
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I started building my own theme. I got it done and I’ve been tweaking it for some time now. I did the whole thing from ground down, taking the bits from various themes freely available, like Sandbox. I created the CSS from zero and I’ve been adding more settings while I’ve been adding more features to my design.
I was inspired by CSS Zen Garden, and the designers there accomplished using just CSS for the design. Another design principle was using no images on the theme itself. Thus, fast loading, very flexible theme.
First Version of “ZemalfZen” is Ready!
It’s an early alpha or beta version right now, so no downloads for anyone just yet. At this stage, I’m not ready to publish the theme to the public, as I have to tweak and debug it first, but perhaps one day, if I see interest to the theme, I will put it out there.
Today I started putting the pieces together and I got a version done I’m quite happy about, after many hours of setting the CSS layout and coloring settings just right. It can be a pain to get those correctly, so I had to refactor the whole css-file, as it was a bit cluttered from all the tests I’ve been doing..
But when I got this done, I started wondering, is it cool to duplicate the designs of other blogs?
Click to read
Jun 01, 2009
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Antti Kokkonen
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I admit it, I’m a junkie for quality plugins and I’m testing all kinds of plugins to see if I could make something out of it. And in the end I keep the best and go with that.
I’ve been especially fond of the plugins found at the Yoast.com by Joost de Valk. The plugins are super quality and do exactly what they are meant to do and they do it efficiently. With that said, for Social Bookmarking, I use the Sociable -plugin (also from Yoast), which does a great job at adding those little social network and other useful icons (like “make a pdf”, “email” or “print”) at the end of the post and is very versatile and configurable.
In the recent update of the plugin, “RSS” was added to the available sites list, but that used the default feed of the WordPress. As I use feedburner to manage my feeds, I wanted the RSS link to take the reader to feedburner feed, so I edited the sociable.php and added the site – if you want to do the same, I’ll show how you can do the same (it’s quite easy, if you just dare to go and edit the sociable.php)
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May 28, 2009
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Antti Kokkonen
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Want to display certain ads only on certain categories or tags? This quick guide will show you how to do that, for example show banner ads based on category.
If you have blog with different categories, you might consider customizing the advertising shown on posts in spesific category or categories or posts with certain tags. And it doesn’t have to be advertising, you can show different links on different categories and tags.
For example you can:
- Show links to different themes and plugins on your “WordPress” tagged posts, and
- Amazon.com Associates cookbook links on your “Cooking” category.
- Or just display your best posts in the “Fishing” category.
- etc.
The possibilites are endless, so you can do whatever you can show anything you want and need to show, based on the tags or categories of the posts.
I wanted to do this, because many of the readers who come in and check some of my World of Warcraft material, or EVE Online posts, are not necessary interested in the WordPress content. And if I write about advertising on a blog and how to utilize a plugin to do it, that gamer just wanting to know how to powerlevel mining on the new alt character, most likely does not want info on latest WordPress Premium Themes or such. So I wanted to customize the advertising, extra content and links I show on different posts.
First, I utilized the “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” to show the related links, so that was easy and does superb job at providing the related post links.
But getting spesific advertising in those posts wasn’t hard either..
If you have the same kind of situation, and want to display advertising or special links based on the categories or tags of your posts, I’ll show you a quick way to achieve that. You do have to dig into your WordPress theme php-files, or find a plugin to insert the code, but it’s really simple…
Click to read
May 24, 2009
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Antti Kokkonen
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Google Custom search is a powerful tool to give your readers a chance to search for content from your blog, web or whatever sites you define for the search. Wordpress comes with default search which presents blog posts and/or pages with the search terms you used.
Remember to check Google’s Terms & Conditions when adding the Google Custom Search. You are not allowed to hide the fact that you’re using Google Custom Search. Reworked instructions are here How To Add Google Custom Search to Your Blog.
I wanted to combine these two. I like the default as the Wordpress search gives clear blog post links and integrates automatically into the Wordpress Theme and templates. On the other hand, Google Custom Search is more accurate in a sense and is “automatically” monatized through Google Adsense.
This article shows you how to get the best of both words, custom search results from Google, along with Adsense ads and the Wordpress search results that display the most relevant posts from your blog.
Note that the most simple way to add Google Custom Search Engine (GCSE) to your blog, is to use a plugin and corresponding widget, but I rarely say no to a chance to mess with javascript and php, so here we go!
Click to read
