NeutralAxis

Lightboxed images on a website are those where when you click on a thumbnail image, they expand into a larger image, usually with a semi-transparent background so you can still see the page behind it.  The Lightbox 2 plugins work well and are popular, but don’t have the ability to scale or resize the image if it’s larger than the available screen size, which means that high res digital photos may require scrolling to get to their close or navigation buttons. (continue reading…)

The Daily Top 10 Posts plugin (v0.7) for Wordpress has a bug in it where it ignores its timezone setting, thus it starts counting a new day at the wrong time.  Its a simple fix that requires editing one line. (continue reading…)

I found a fix to a Wordpress error on the site that’s been happening periodically for the last week or so. (continue reading…)

The Let It Snow plugin for Wordpress is a nice little plugin to add a snowfall effect.  The snow falls just a tad faster than I’d like, even on its slowest setting, but what they heck.  I thought it would be nice if it was triggered by date, so its not necessary to remember to turn it off.  Snowfall in June would look weird, at least in this part of the world.  Adding a date trigger wasn’t hard.  [Update: Added another mod so that on New Years Eve, the snow flakes are colored like confetti.  And also discovered that snowfall still shows on the simplified WPTouch formatted site on iPhone.] (continue reading…)

Since installing the Daily Top 10 Posts (DTTP) plugin, I’d been trying to figure out a way to keep it from counting my own visits.  A few hours of thinking on it, and a few aborted attempts over the last week yielded nothing.  Then I learned of a wordpress function that made it pretty easy. (continue reading…)

I wanted to try to put a “tweet this” icon after each post, but didn’t really want to bother with another plugin to do it, so after a little research I came up with my own.  Adding a Facebook icon was similar. (continue reading…)

If you don’t want to depend on an external short URL service like bit.ly or tinyurl.com and you have access to your MySQL database, you can install and run your own with YOURLS.  I managed to get it up and running in about an hour in Linux.  The instructions at yourls.org mentions that an installation alongside Wordpress is a bit different than the one described for a standard site.  I found that to be true, and have described what I found worked after the break. (continue reading…)

With any web page displaying on your iPhone or iTouch you can tap the + sign and either make a bookmark, or add an icon to the home screen as a web clip.  When you make a web clip it ordinarily takes a square screen capture of the top portion of the page and uses that image for the icon.  Its just come to my attention that Apple has made a way for website administrators to create a custom image for that icon to be used instead.  [Updated after the break] (continue reading…)

Just for my own entertainment, I’ve added a Top 10 Posts feature here that keeps track of the daily top 10 and overall top 10.  Naturally, the totals don’t include the prior 8 months of the site’s operation.

Here’s a problem I’ve run into recently and wish I had known about this solution.  I needed to move a Wordpress site from one server to another using a different URL.  I copied the wordpress folders to the new site but found I couldn’t log in because the login attempted to use the old URL.  I went through all kind of gyrations trying to get everything working before finally succeeding.  It looks like there was an easier way. (continue reading…)