Blog Archive

Subversion on Windows: A TortoiseSVN Workflow

Although I like Macs and I love Ubuntu, I spend most of my time in a Windows environment, because most of the people I work with use Windows. I need to see what they see and see it how they see it. So, Windows it is. Windows is not a bad place to do web …read more…

Message Blocks WordPress Plugin

I have just submitted a new plugin to the WordPress plugin repository. It allows you to quickly and easily add message blocks to highlight important information for your readers. It does so by way of two drop-down menus in the TinyMCE toolbar: Since the best way to see how this works is to see the …read more…

Print Folder Contents in Windows

One of the things I enjoyed about the Macintosh OS was that you could print the contents of a folder.* This was handy when I was editing a series of images or uploading files to a web site. Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t have an obvious way of doing this. However, you can do it easily via …read more…

How Many WordPress Plugin Combinations are Possible?

I answered a question on the Graphene Neo Mobile theme about WordPress plugins, which then made me think about math, which then made me do math. Here’s the silly thing: I tweeted about it, forgetting that the forum is a private one. So it’s not very useful. But here’s the original query: Does anyone know …read more…

Using WinMerge

In an earlier post on creating child themes for WordPress, I said that if you had already made changes to your theme, you could use a program like WinMerge to find the differences between a clean copy of your theme and the copy you’ve been editing. The time has come to show just how that …read more…

CSS – A Very Basic Introduction

This is a very basic introduction to Cascading Style Sheets. The intended audience is people who know a little bit about HTML and absolutely nothing about CSS. If you are foggy on HTML, you should read “HTML—A Very Basic Introduction” first. Basics CSS stands for “Cascading Style Sheets”. It’s a language for controlling the appearance …read more…

Create WordPress Shortcodes

In my earlier post about template parameters in MediaWiki, I lamented that WordPress doesn’t have a similar mechanism. Actually it sort of does: it has shortcodes. Shortcodes pretty much do what a MediaWiki template does, in that they allow you to easily add content to a post or page. You can even pass variables, which …read more…

Add Post Navigation Links in the Graphene Theme for WordPress

Earlier today, somebody in the Graphene Theme support forum asked about changing the location of the “Next Post” and “Previous Post” links: I’d like to put the pointers to prev/next posts below a post as well as at the top, preferably between the post and any comments. Is that possible please and, if so, how? …read more…

Create a Static Front Page in WordPress — A Visual Guide

Creating a static front page in WordPress is easy, but I often encounter people who have trouble doing it. Perhaps the instructions in the Codex aren’t very visual, or all the talk about theme development on the same page puts them off. In any case, here is a quick, visual guide to creating a static …read more…

Add CSS Classes to Images in WordPress

Not many people realize how easy it is to control the appearance of selected images in WordPress by adding a CSS class to the image, but this is a very powerful tool to control the appearance of your website. For example, WordPress automatically adds a border around all images. Here’s an example: If you want …read more…