I installed a “who’s online” plugin it’s also “widget” enabled so it’s a simple plugin to install, just a case of uploading it to the “plugins” directory on my server and then activating it in the dashboard. This plugin came with a handy feature so that when you click on the “user online” logo at the bottom of my side bar, I have set up a page where it shows anyone who’s interested, who’s online on my blog, the most people I’ve had online all at once to date is 6 – which is pretty good!

To create the page it was part of the plugin, I just headed over to “write page” in the dashboard and then posted a page with the code: [pollarchive] and it set it up for me.

I ran into a slight problem. As my pages are displayed across my top bar (header) of my page adding the page to the published pages added a line of “tabs” and put the spacing out. Rather than change the CSS to make the page tab fonts smaller (which I could do) I decided to try to create the page with no title, as I love the way it looks and don’t want to change it. With no title it displayed a small blank tab, but kept the spacing on the page, ok but not perfect, then I tried re creating the page but not publishing it so it’s solely accessed via the click from the plugin. Sure enough it works perfectly. On clicking the “Who’s Online” button at the bottom of my sidebar it shows the page, it also doesn’t show up on the tabs at the top at all, I’ve also checked it on all browsers and it’s fine… perfect

I got the plugin from here

I recommend it, it also shows you when search bots are on your page which is quite often

Good plugin!

Popularity: 1%

I wondered how long it’d take for me to start receiving SPAM posts in my comments. I’m pretty chuffed as it shows my blog is actually getting hits and I guess is then worth advertising things on so it’s kinda good in a round about way.

On the other hand I’m not sure the readers of my blog want to get info on how to get Viagra at knock down prices or penile extensions?

I activated the WordPress Akismet plugin and got my API key in my 1st day of setting up my blog, for those of you who don’t know how to do this or want to know it’s simple visit this WordPress site and it gives you simple step by step instructions on how to set it up Akismet or click the picture above to take you there.

You need to get an API key by signing up with www.WordPress.com and they will issue you with your API key when you sign up, just enter that into your Akismet plugin in your WordPress dash board and then thats all there is to it…

Popularity: 1%

The Pursuit of Happiness. (will Smith)

I saw this film yesterday, thought that it looked just “ok” from the trailers, and it turned out to be what I thought was a great film.

I think that it was a well made film but it was a classic simple story, “rags to riches” but very inspiring all the same. There were some nice quotes in the film and the acting was good. I’ll rate it 3.5 out of 5 because although it was a good the story it was not totally original and the whole rags to riches is easily done in any type of scenario, it seemed to drag out the ending even though it was obvious what was going to happen.

All in all a good and inspiring film, but you won’t miss anything new by not seeing this.

Popularity: 2%

Right I have really got into the CSS editing and have got the bug so have stayed working on this blog pretty much all day! Sure enough I have customised my blog completely.

In my previous blog I had a “Flash Fade” mod which embeds a image you upload and converts it to a “adobe flash” file it then scrolls through the images smoothly. Nice effect, in my previous blog theme I had it sitting on top of the sidebar as it’s not a widget enabled theme I put the code into the sidebar like so:

< ?php
include (ABSPATH."wp-content/flashfader/flashfaderhtml.txt");
?>

In this theme I realised I could easily understand and edit the CSS and saw that an image would fit perfectly just above the “Search Box” on this theme.

So I got to work on creating this effect.

I started off by putting the “Flash Fade” code into the CSS and/or HTML within the header, sidebar and the body of the code. I found the best place and to create the affect I wanted was in the header.

I had to extend a top bar .PNG file as I was extending the header. I then overwrote the existing .PNG file on the blog on my server and it didn’t display or seem to make a difference, so I then found the attribute to extend the header so it would bring the header spacing down and would display the extended .PNG file:

IN THE CSS:

/* header area */
#header {
background: #0C72A2 url(images/head-bg.gif) repeat-x;
height: 110px;
border-top: 5px solid #222D2D;
position: relative;
color: #D16683;


Sure enough it worked and left a perfect amount of room for where I had placed the “flash fader” which was already fitting very well, I then tweaked the flash fader to make it the same width as the search box and then created the images, used adobe Photoshop and got the exact hex colour of the top bar and used that as the background colour of my blogs image, and there you have it.

My truly one of a kind, custom blog.

I’m very happy with the end result.

Popularity: 1%

Today I added a “how much is my blog worth” logo onto the bottom of my “about me” page. As you can see my current blog value is $2.822.70 apparently.

I found the HTML source on the Technorati page all you do is enter your web address and the page creates it for you then you just insert it into where you like on your page. I put mine in my about page.

I tweaked the html so that on clicking on the button it opens the “Technorati” page into another browser window. Well you wouldn’t want to leave this blog now would you!?

Anyone want to by a “1st graded” blog for two thousand dollars – Essays included.

Hint hint Nick & Mez

Popularity: 1%

Right, after using the Jimisola “Freshy 1.0” updated theme for a few hours and taking a serious look at the CSS I decided to compare it to other themes, it was pretty complex. So even this late into the module I decided to go for a total theme change, possibly risky, but I wanted to display CSS editing within my blog, so I saw it as a challenge, not a problem. I also noticed a few other Freshy 1.0 themes popping up elsewhere amongst fellow students anyway and I’d prefer my blog to be original….

So it was bye, bye to my custom header but that’s ok… I’ll make something better.

It only took me 2 minutes and I saw a new looking “Web 2.0″ style theme which had less than 200 downloads from the WordPress site. Perfect. Instantly I though, this is the one.

The best thing of all I was starting to understand CSS a lot better and on this theme I was able to edit it! I messed about with a few other themes but settled on this on and am now very pleased with the result!

So here I am!

Popularity: 1%

I have compiled more and more 1st hand research and have decided in my head a theme for the site, I have not looked at it for a while as I had a “SPEED” presentation for a course I wanted to get onto at the university and I created a video for that, fortunately as you will have read if you’re following my blog I got onto the programme much to my delight!

The research I have done in the mean time for this site has returned some fairly similar designs and is making me more confident towards the style of site I want to create, although with this blogging I am nervous about the database aspect of the site and am still looking for hints on this as my programming levels on PHP and SQL are zero.

Popularity: 1%

Ok, so I was really getting into the “Freshy 1.0″ theme I was using before and started to edit the CSS, I was using the CSS to try to edit the fonts mainly because if you read through my previous posts you’ll see that the Events Calendar V2, which I was very impressed by wasn’t working very well, it was displaying the font at a huge level on various other browsers.

I found this new “freshy theme” mod which I found works with the calendar v2! This guy has edited the “Freshy Theme” so it looks slightly smoother and also works with the calendar upgrades.

Jimi Sola’s Freshy Mod

I’m voting my newer theme:

Popularity: 1%

I spent a while at university the other day editing my footer only to then get home, edit the .CSS and then have to change it back before I got out of my depth with editing my theme.

Unfortunately I lost my funky new footer. Not to worry, practice makes perfect, I’ll do it again now, and I remember my problems the 1st time so I’ll hopefully whizz through it now.

**UPDATE** – Later on…

As you can see I’ve updated my footer and included a nice little touch, with the translation tool I wasn’t keen with the little flags, they looked too bland and in my opinion, too big so…

I found some smooth looking smaller flags and all the countries for my translation tool, uploaded them to my server, edited the HTML to direct the img tags to my flag pics and sure enough it works and looks great! Even if I say so myself!

Popularity: 1%

You may have noticed over the past couple of days my blog has been taking AGES to load, that was due to when I did loads and loads of editing to my blog at university the screen shots I took of some of the plugins I saved in MS Paint. This was all well and good as it’s nice and simple, but it saved the images as 30mb files?! So it was killing my page load time, I’ve corrected this now from the beauty of Adobe CS3 in the comfort of my home

Popularity: 1%