2005-07-26 23:31
I’ve been seriously banging my head against WordPress and the Connection theme the last few days, but I think I’m finally starting to get things into a solid form that I can comfortably move over to axodys.com. I’m definitely getting a better feel for the way WordPress templates work and I’ve been picking up some more PHP along the way too. I’ve had to delve into a couple different plugins to tweak a few things and make them work the way I wanted, but that wasn’t too painful. While the WordPress themes and their multiple template files can get a little hairy to deal with at times, I definitely like the plugin system because it’s really quite elegant.
The Technorati Tags plugin broke when I changed themes and it took me a while to figure out what I needed to do to repair it. Getting that plugin to work (and then work the way I preferred) ended up leading me into an investigation on automatic excerpts and replacement plugins. I ended up going with one called the_excerpt_reloaded because it had quite a few features I liked, but it did have one bug that I had to fix. I also switched the automatic more link from a div tag to a span tag because I wanted the link to be inline and that seemed to be the easiest way to go about it.
I have Google AdSense ads working on individual posts now, but I wouldn’t call it completely finalized yet. I stil may add a row of the new ad links along the top of the posts or make some further adjustments to the sidebar. Speaking of the sidebar, I want to get away from the long list of month archives that’s currently dominating it. There’s a really cool javascript-based archive plugin that I’ve found, but I haven’t managed to get it working quite yet.
Update: I’ve now moved everything over to Axodys and it seems to be working fine. There are still a lot of little fixes to be done in the navbar and sidebar, but I think they can wait until tomorrow. Now that I think about it I will also need to place messages the old feeds alerting any subscribers to the changes. In the meantime everything is working well enough to go live. Let me know if you come across any major errors or problems. I’m planning on using comments a lot more than I have in the pas .
Update: 2 Looks like something about the way I have comments configured is breaking my single post layout. I just turned comments off for this post to see if I can confirm my suspicions. If they are the problem I’ll wait until tomorrow to debug he issue.
Update: 3 It wasn’t the comments code. It was the way I was trying to refer to div and span tags above. I haven’t quite figured out a way to get WordPress to display html code with greater than and less than symbols showing without choking.