King  Gary 

My latest post over at Blog Herald is entitled Quick tip: How to make the ‘Categories’ box bigger when writing WordPress posts.

Excerpt:

I’ve written at a couple blogs, including my own and Blog Herald (here), and quite often, I see that there are quite a number of post categories to choose from in order to tag my posts appropriately.

Below, you can see a typical listing of available post categories that you can use on a WordPress blog. As you can see, though, there are so many categories that the box requires a scroll bar.

I’ve made yet another post over at Blog Herald entitled How to use widgets with more than one sidebar on your WordPress blog. Go check it out!

Here’s an excerpt:

In continuation of my last post, Enabling sidebar widgets for your WordPress theme, I am now going to show you how you can use these newfound widgets with more than one sidebar on your WordPress blog.

Most blogs have only one sidebar, but some, such as Blog Herald, have two (or more!) After reading my last post, you learned how you can use widgets on your blog’s theme, so now, I will show you how you can use widgets on two or more sidebars. This post assumes that you’ve either read my last post, or you already know how to widgetize a theme but would like to know how to widgetize more than one sidebar.

I’m also going to show you how you can customize your sidebars by choosing how you want each widget to be formatted on a per-sidebar basis, and I’ll also show you how you can name your sidebars to more easily identify each one.

This tutorial will focus on using widgets on two sidebars, but the steps can be easily reproduced to adapt to more than two sidebars.

For all you bloggers out there, if you’re using the Visual method of creating posts in WordPress, how many of you have copied text from somewhere (most likely a webpage) to the Visual editor in your WordPress blog, only to find that all of the formatting along with it has also come along? This is because your browser tries to help you by keeping the formatting intact, but, unbeknown to your browser, you usually DON’T want the gigantic font that the text is in, or the bold and italic formatting that has been applied to it.

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I’ve made a post entitled “Enabling sidebar widgets for your WordPress theme” over at the popular blog, The Blog Herald. Go check it out and let me know what you think! I don’t usually write tutorials so I’d like some feedback on it so I can make it better the next time around. Here’s an excerpt from the post:

So, you’ve got that brand-spanking-new (or kind-of-new) WordPress theme, and you’re strutting your stuff like it’s no one’s business. What next? Well, with WordPress 2.2 being released yesterday, major changes come along with it. One of the most important changes to take place involve sidebar widgets; these were once provided as a plugin, but are now built right into the application.

In this post, I am going to walk you through on what you need to know to ‘widgetize’ your blog’s theme, meaning we first have to allow your blog’s theme to use widgets. If you haven’t yet installed WordPress 2.2, then don’t worry, because you can install sidebar widgets as a separate plugin and still follow along.

Okay, now that you’ve got WordPress widgets installed, we first have to widgetize your theme.

Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger blog concluded its latest “Group Writing Project” today, an exercise that he runs on his blog every once in a while which involves his faithful readers submitting blog post links to him so that he can compile them all and publish a nicely formatted list of all the links, including post titles and blogger names. He used to compile the posts by hand, after receiving emails that he gets from his contact form, and this process used to take him days to do.

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I quickly whipped up a WordPress plugin to do something that I wanted, which was to display stars in a post’s comments next to the comment’s author. Each star represented 10 comments that the author had made on the blog so far; I find it interesting to see how many people in the, say, top 10 people that comment on a blog make up a large percentage of the total comments on a blog. (For those who are wondering, the top 10 commenters on my blog make up 67% of all the comments.)

Screenshot

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Running a blog network with nearly 200 blogs is no easy task, and when you’ve got the same item being downloaded a few thousand times every second, it can put quite the strain on a server. That’s why the b5media blogroll (an example is shown to the right of this post) can pretty much kill a server if people love our blogs too much, and if the blogroll isn’t as optimized as it could have been. We needed to fix the blogroll so that we could use it without straining our servers nearly as much as it once did, so I jumped in and optimized it so that it would be nice and speedy.

The good thing was that whenever the blogroll was requested by a website, the same data would always be sent (in XML format – what else?). The reason that the blogroll may look different on several websites is because each website parses the XML file differently. This enabled us to cache the blogroll XML data that is returned, since it is not dynamic; it only changes if we add/modify/remove a channel or a blog.

Average load times

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