My design was selected among the top 10 Retro and Vintage designs submitted to the Best WordPress Design Award sponsored by WP Webhost. Now the polls are open, and the voting can begin.
If you like my blog design, I’d love your vote! You can see the a list of the designs that were submitted, and vote on your favorite here.
WPWebHost is a web hosting company that specializes in WordPress web sites. They are hosting a WordPress design contest with five categories: Clean&Minimalist, Retro&Vintage, Grunge, Hand-Drawing, and Modern&Elegent.
I’ve decided to enter the contest in the Retro&Vintage category. Why did I decide to enter? My design certainly isn’t the most beautiful out there, so I’m not “expecting” to win, but this might give me a chance to get some constructive critisism about design choices I’ve made. Besides, it can’t hurt, and there’s a prize 
Do you have a WordPress blog that you’ve designed? Enter it in the contest.
Good Luck!
Anyone who’s installed WordPress knows that the default theme has the “powered by WordPress” link in the footer. I’ve added a couple of other items to my footer besides just WordPress, and I’ve been noticing that other people have done the same thing. Ma.tt is powered by ramen noodles, WP Tavern is powered by Mt. Dew. I’m personally powered by Dr. Pepper. Have you added an interesting “powered by” item to your footer, or seen sites that do? What’s the most interesting or entertaining one you’ve seen?
Who doesn’t hate email spam? Those messages telling you to how to refinance your house, please your mate, or lose unwanted weight are nothing but a waste of time. Placing your email address online can increase the number of spam emails in your inbox even higher. Email spiders, programs designed to crawl the web looking for email addresses, can find your contact information online and use it to spam you. While you could not post your email online, sometimes you might need a way for people to contact you.
Many people fight the spam bots by obfuscating their emails (for example “joe [at] example [dot] com” or “joe@REMOVETHISexample.com”). This does an OK job, but it’s also a royal pain for the visitor, who has to type in, or fix your email address if they want to send you an email. The ultimate spam fighting question arises: “How do you keep bots out while letting real users in”. GMail’s plus-addressing feature and jQuery might be able to bring us one step closer to an answer.
When creating WordPress themes, one problem I’ve faced is using template tags and other functions which aren’t implemented in older versions of WordPress. Of course the best solution is for people to upgrade their version of WordPress, but you can’t exactly force people to do this. If you want to use new functions, but want to support people with older versions of WordPress, there’s something you can do. As an example, let’s look at wp_page_menu().
Almost every WordPress theme has a 404 template. Some are better than others, and a few are quite impressive, but on problem that pervades all of them is the fact that editing them requires opening finding and opening the correct template file. This is OK for people who know about HTML and PHP and are familiar with WordPress, but what about technically challenged people (like your Grandma)? They’re not likely to be able to edit a WordPress template, so they will be stuck with whatever you give them. If you create a good template, this may be sufficient, but there will still be people who want to change something.
Thankfully you can provide a much simpler solution for people who don’t want to edit your templates. With this solution, users can edit the 404 page contents just like it were any other page. Here’s how it works.
I’ve been catching up on the WordPress Weekly Podcasts lately and while I was listening to one of the first shows I came across a nice security tip. Place empty index.php files in all directories that don’t already have an index file. Directories like the /wp-content/plugins folder could be dangerous in the hands of hackers if one of the plugins you use has a security flaw. By obscuring the folder’s contents you make it just a little harder for hackers to cause you problems.
I went about creating these empty index files on my site, but soon discovered that there are hosts of folders that could use them (think about the date structure in /wp-content/uploads ). Then I remembered another tool. .htaccess. Add this line of code to your .htaccess file to keep file in any directory from being listed (this works on any site who’s server supports .htaccess by the way, not just WordPress blogs).
IndexIgnore *
Really simple, I know, but I thought I’d share it all the same.
I just released my first WordPress plugin. It’s not the fist plugin I’ve written, but it’s the first one that’s good enough to release to the community.
Check out the info and download it here.
If you have comments or suggestions, by all means let me know (either by email or by commenting here)!
The WordPress development blog just posted a link to a survey about what features should be in WordPress 2.8. If you use WordPress, you should take the survey and let your opinion be known.
Bread Crumbs are something that’s been around for quite some time. I first remember seeing them in ANGEL when my dad was working for the company in 2005. Similar things can be found in File Browsers, and browser history is really a kind of bread crumb.