10 WordPress Hacks to Make your Life Easy
Written by Jai on August 27, 2008 – 5:29 pm - 292 viewsDisplaying Gravatars in comments
To refresh your memory, Gravatars are little user images from Gravatar.com that are displayed against your comments in the theme (if the theme is built to support Gravatars). A lot of WordPress themes are built without the support of Gravatars. So, here is some help for you to add Gravatars in your theme. Open up your comments.php file from the theme folder. Find this piece of code :-
<?php comment_text() ?>
Replace the above code with the following code :-
<div class="gravs">
<?php if (get_bloginfo('version')>=2.5)
echo get_avatar( $comment->comment_author_email, $size = '50', $comment->comment_author_link);?>
<?php comment_text() ?>
</div>
<br clear="all" />
The above code will display the Gravatars. Now let us add some CSS to the style.css file for your theme.
.gravs {margin-top:20px;}
.avatar {float:left; margin-right:5px; margin-bottom:5px; padding:3px; border:1px solid #999999;}
When you check your theme again, you will see the Gravatar images against your comments.
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Written by Jai on August 20, 2008 – 1:31 pm - 2,555 views
Scan all of your theme files for potentially malicious or unwanted code. Be aware of advertisements or dangerous JavaScript inserted into legitimate themes by third party theme download sites.
List Category Posts is a simple WordPress plugin which allows you to list some posts from a category into a post/page using [catlist=ID], where ID stands for the Category Id.
This WordPress plugin allows you to create sections of text in your post or page which expand/collapse when clicked on. You simply wrap the special tags around your text, and set the ‘expand link’ (the link visitors click on to show the text).
Actionable allows the creation of a categroized list of action items for users to check off and track. It was originally developed for Share 350.0 - a plan for regional sustainability to help people track their actions and efforts to create a sustainable community. Read more
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!Submit your Themes to Blog Oh! Blog
Written by Jai on August 11, 2008 – 12:55 pm - 3,084 views
A lot of WordPress theme designers have asked me if they can submit their own wordpress themes to Blog Oh! Blog for free distribution. From now on, I have decided to accept public submissions. If you are a theme designer, you can contact me and tell me about your theme. If the theme is really good and I like it, it will be announced on Blog Oh! Blog. Here are some requirements which your themes need to incorporate to be eligible for selection.
- The theme should be CSS/XHTML validated (I will accept exceptions if there is a proper reason).
- The theme should be original and unique.
- You can only have your own website’s link in the footer. No sponsor links.
- The theme should include all the required files as per the WordPress theme format.
- You cannot sell the theme once its uploaded for free download.
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Written by Jai on July 31, 2008 – 12:33 pm - 2,931 views
Many of you may already know all about RSS but a lot of Internet surfers and newly established bloggers are still not familiar with the three-letter acronym. In order to make life easier for them, here is a detailed article that explains the word. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website.
RSS is a means of publicizing updates about websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries (thus Rich Site Summary) allow users to skim through the article so that they could decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website. It is also usually the link to the website source.
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Written by Jai on July 23, 2008 – 7:06 am - 11,366 viewsDo you publish daily on your blog? Here is a new WordPress theme from Blog Oh! Blog to help you in your blogging adventures. The new theme is called “DailyPress” and comes with widget-ready sidebars, tabbed content, banner ads, minimalistic color scheme and social bookmarking options. The theme is compatible with all versions of WordPress including the latest 2.6 version and has been tested with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera.
I have included the logo.psd file with this theme so that you can edit it and make your own logo instead of the default one. The 125×125 banner ads are controlled separately through a php file called :- ad250×250.php
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Written by Jai on July 15, 2008 – 11:12 am - 3,144 views
I am sure that everyone has come across WordPress themes which use alternative stylesheets (CSS) to switch between different sets of style information. For example, you can have a look at the following themes that have this functionality :-
Here is how these themes do it :-
Default Stylesheet
Ideally, every WordPress theme has a style.css file associated with it that contains all the style information for the theme. This default stylesheet is usually called in the header.php file of your WordPress theme by something like this :-
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
Rel=”stylesheet” is what defines the active stylesheet as the default one. Read more
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Written by Jai on July 7, 2008 – 3:11 pm - 5,173 views
Today, I will list some very cool JavaScript hacks and tricks that you can use creatively or just have plain fun. To make each one of these codes work, all you have to do is copy and paste it into the address bar of your browser window and hit “Enter”. So here they are :-
Play the “Lord of the Web”
This code lets you edit any page/website in real-time 
. With Firefox, you can even edit and save the modified pages to your computer. Very nifty code!
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0
The Big Wheel
This piece of code pulls off all the images from your web page and rotates them in a circle. Really makes any page go naked (without its images). The best place to test is a website with many images. (Google Images for an example)
javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName("img"); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+"px"; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+"px"}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);
If you look carefully in the above code, its rotating the HTML “img” tag. Just replace it with “a” or “p” and watch some links or text rotate instead of images. Read more
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Written by Jai on July 3, 2008 – 5:22 pm - 4,953 views
“Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.”
Breaking that silence, I present to you a refreshingly new Premium WordPress theme called “Expression“. This is a soft-colored WordPress theme with a minimalistic but feature packed approach. Here are some features of this premium theme :-
- Full Screen-width to fit all resolutions
- Tabbed menu
- Advertisement space for 125×125 & 468×60 banner ads
- A unique Ticker to display custom news & information to your users
- Social Bookmarking options under every post
- Excerpt Boxes for older posts
- Widget-ready sidebar
- CSS/XHTML validated
- Theme Options
This is the first time that I am releasing a Premium theme with “Theme Options” that let you change elements of your theme directly through the WordPress Administration panel. Read more
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Written by Jai on June 30, 2008 – 1:11 pm - 4,588 views
Before you start reading this article, let me inform you that my Adsense account was banned recently. Yes, it was banned a while ago due to my sheer negligence . A while back, I had put adsense code in some of the free WordPress themes that are available here on Blog Oh! Blog. This was not a problem until some of the free themes got picked up and started getting used by porn blogs and other such XXX sites. Though Google did warn me that my code is being used by XXX sites, I hardly paid attention because I was sure that I don’t own any such sites ( I totally forgot that my code was present in the free themes and neither did I feel the need to open those sites - which could have given me a clue). Anyway, my ass got banned after some time… I will share with all of you how Google let me create a new Adsense account (which is almost rare) at the end of this article, so read on!
Google, being the indisputable leader in search engines from then until now, is placing a high importance on the quality and relevancy of its search engines. Most especially now that the company is public property. In order to keep the shareholders and users of its engines happy, the quality of the returned results are given extreme importance. Read more
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