Almost past us, I think it is time to take a look back and take stock of 2010, and see what the year brought.
Category: Blog
-
Adding a personal message for commenters
If you have left a comment, you might have noticed that there is a message for you before the comment field, that looks like this:
It’s pretty simple to implement, though you do need to muck about a very little bit in php. Here’s how: (more…) -
The most useful WordPress plugin ever
Like most bloggers, I see a fair share of comment spam. This used to be a problem, as I didn’t have a good way of filtering them out, meaning I set the comment option to Approve all. After I moved from Blogger to WordPress, I was tipped off about a plugin called Akismet.
The lovely thing about it is that it checks incoming comments against a blacklist created by the entire community of people using Akismet, meaning that, whenever someone marks something as spam, the central blacklist is updated. Having run on WordPress for three months, the current tally is 668 spam comments caught, six false positives, and one spam comment not caught.
Akismet is simple, quick to set up, and, most importantly, it just works. -
STFU && RTFM on mobile devices
After reading this post at NRKBeta (link in Norwegian), I decided to follow suit, and install a theme to help speed up access to my blog from mobile devices. -
WordPress and the Mystery of the Disappearing Line Breaks
I’ve been running my blog on Wordpres for over a month now, and I am mostly happy with what I’m seeing. It does most of what I want it to do natively. As for what it doesn’t do natively, there is usually a plugin to do that for you.
The only thing I’ve as yet been unable to make it do satisfactorily, is line breaks. TinyMCE, the text editor in WordPress, executes a back-end filtering process every time you switch from Visual to HTML and back, as well as whenever you save your posts. This filtering process, for some reason, filters out both<br>,<p>and</p>.
I originally tried to resolve this by installing a plugin called TinyMCE Advanced, which worked pretty nicely, except that, when I was typing up this post, it filtered so that my code examples above were converted so that they became actual HTML tags.
I then installed another plugin called TinyMCE Valid Elements, in which I defined<br>as a valid element. Sure enough, TinyMCE no longer filtered out the tag, but it wasn’t parsed either.
I will continue to try to fix the problem. In the meantime, I have a workaround. By adding wherever I want a break, I get my line breaks.
Note: Comments disabled due to massive amounts of comment spam -
Migrating from Blogger to WordPress
I have been thinking of migrating my blog from Blogger to a WordPress-solution hosted on my own domain. After doing some research, I decided “what the heck”, and downloaded and installed the package. The installation went without a hitch, and I went on to find a decent theme for the blog. Having downloaded and installed a few themes, I then went on to migrate my posts from Blogger to the WordPress blog. WordPress has a built-in tool to do this, which imports both posts, tags and comments. The only snag was that tags are not imported as tags, but rather as categories. Luckily; WordPress has a tool to convert tags to categories, and categories to tags. -
Automatically tweeting your blog posts
I’ve been using twitter for a while now, and lately, I’ve been posting my blog posts as tweets. However, I don’t do it manually. Rather, I’ve set it up to be posted automagically. Setting it up is as simple as it could possibly be. Here’s how: (more…) -
Adding a Twitter feed to Blogspot
One of the big things of today is micro-blogging. If you don’t know what it is, think of Facebook, and then think of the status field in Facebook. Strip most of the other functionality away. That’s microblogging. In other words; microblogging is responding to the question “What are you doing right now?”
I’ve got an account at Twitter (my nick there is @razumny), and wanted the last two entries to be displayed in the sidebar of my personal blog. Here’s how I did it:
First, you’ll want to find the RSS-feed address for your twitter feed. If you go to your twitter feed page, you’ll see a link at the bottom of the sidebar on the right side, like so:
(more…) -
Adding a label cloud to your BlogSpot blog
I like to apply all the relevant labels or tags to my blog posts, so that they are easily found through search. I was getting annoyed that my list of tags was getting longer than my actual blog, and decided to do something about it. There are many ways of doing it, from adding javascript code to editing the actual HTML of the blog setup.
The best explained way of doing it is the one I found at blogger Phydeaux3’s blog. If you’re unsure whether you want to risk it, you can either not do it, or back your design up before you go mucking about with changing it. Frankly, you’ll want to back up your design anyway, so go ahead and do that. That way, if you muck it up too badly, you’ll just need to upload the backup, and you’re back on your feet.
Find the instructions here. -
Adding a favicon to a Blogger or BlogSpot blog
As you might notice, I’ve got a favicon, a small picture, on my blog. Here’s what it looks like in Firefox:
It’s actually pretty simple to implement in Blogger. To do it, you’ll need to have somewhere to store the favicon file. Favicons are imagefiles (dimensions 16 by 16 pixels) ending in .ico. Apparently, Tripod offer free hosting, and they support .ico files. Once you’ve got your favicon ready, and uploaded, you need to open the administration page for your blog, and then go to the “Layout” tab, opening the “Edit HTML” subtab. You’ll then see a page looking something like this:
Find the <head> tag, and insert the following snippet of code immediately below it: (more…)