Monthly Archive for March, 2005

HTML character entities cause RSS/syndication readers to fail reading WordPress comment RSS feeds

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 23/3/2005
in Blogging, Technology and WordPress
. 1 Comment

HTML character entities can cause RSS/syndication readers to fail when trying to read WordPress comment RSS feeds. This was a problem I was unaware of until reading of it on MacManX’s most recent blogroll dive and on Bryan’s post about this plugin

Fortunately, Kafkaesqui has written a plugin to resolve this issue.

I have installed and activated the plugin on this site so it shouldn’t be an issue here any more.

Using WordPress as a CMS - More problems sorted

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/3/2005
in .htaccess, Blogging and WordPress
. 6 Comments

WordPress is the Content Manangement System (CMS) used to produce this site but shoehorning it to produce a complete site can cause unforseen problems. For example, my Permalink structure was denying me access to my awstats folder!

Why? - this is because I’m publishing the site using WordPress 1.5 and it’s mod_rewrite (created by the permalink’s structure) incorrectly assumes that the Awstats folder is part of the WordPress site (because the Rewritebase is set to /) and when it can’t find Awstats within WordPress, I get dropped into a 404 page.

I tried accessing the folder using the ip address instead of the domain but couldn’t get in - my ISP subsequently told me this wouldn’t work - that I need to come in under my domain for awstats to function.

To sort this out, I inserted the following code above the code WordPress inserted in my .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/awstats/
RewriteRule .* - [L]

Hat tip to Niall for helping out with this.

WordPress 1.5 theme Rubric updated

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/3/2005
in Blogging, Open Source and WordPress
. 9 Comments

I received an email through the Contact form on this site from a Jean Mahserjian. Unfortunately Jean forgot to give me his/her email address so I couldn’t reply - Jean’s mail was as follows:

Tom, I downloaded your rubric theme to use with wordpress v. 1.5. But, I must be missing something basic on the setup. After I un zip the file, what do I do next? I simply created a directory called in the themes directory in my blog directory and copied those files. Didn’t work. Then I created a directory called rubric, copied all of the files from the default theme, and overwrote the ones you provided for rubric. Didn’t work. What do I do??

Obviously Jean wouldn’t have had this problem if I had included a simple ReadMe file with the theme - so I have updated the downloadable zipped Rubric theme with a ReadMe - apologies to anyone who had problems with their install and I hope this will answer most people’s questions.

If you don’t want to download it again, the text of the ReadMe is as follows:

Thanks for taking the trouble to download Rubric.

The first thing you need to ensure is that you are running WordPRess 1.5 - this version of Rubric has been created for WP 1.5.

Then take the folder you unzipped and copy it to your wordpress/wp-content/themes/ folder so you should now have wordpress/wp-content/themes/rubric

Next, through the WordPress administration interface, go to Options -> Presentation and you should see Rubric listed as one of the themes. On the right hand side of this screen, click on the activate button to make the theme active.

That’s it.

It should now be working for you

Happy St. Patrick’s day

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/3/2005
in Technology
. 0 Comments

A very happy St. Patrick’s day to everyone who reads this blog.

Tom

Showing the sidebar in Kubrick’s single.php

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 16/3/2005
in Blogging and WordPress
. 8 Comments

I like the Kubrick theme which is currently in use on this site.

One thing that I wanted to change on it, though, was that I wanted the right hand navigation sidebar to display when viewing single posts - single posts are governed by the single.php page. I am aware that there are probably very good ui reasons not to have the sidebar display in single posts but I prefer to have it on for consistency.

I tried simply adding the 

< ?php get_sidebar(); ?>

to single.php but this didn’t work as expected. The sidebar displayed but you had to scroll way down to see it at the bottom of the right hand side.

Looking into it further, I realised that in single.php the content div has a class widecolumn as below:

 id="content" class="widecolumn"

Whereas in page.php this same line read 

id="content" class="narrowcolumn"

As soon as I changed the class to narrowcolumn in single.php, the sidebar jumped up to the right place.

Problems using WordPress as a CMS

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 16/3/2005
in Blogging, Open Source and WordPress
. 0 Comments

I have started using WordPress as a CMS for this site and it has presented some challenges which I hadn’t forseen. Some of those I have resolved and some I am still working on.

One issue I have resolved is that the title of this blog “Tom Raftery’s I.T. views” - is not the same as the title of the site. WordPress doesn’t allow for this in its db structure, so in order to get it to display the correct site title on the site and blog title on the blog, I had to shoehorn it a bit.

What I did was, I opened header.php in my theme folder, and copied its contents. Then I opened the pages where I wanted to change the title, found the bit of code 

< ?php get_header(); ?>

and replaced it with the full code from header.php.

Finally, I found the bit of code from header.php which codes for the title 

 < ?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>">< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

and I replaced it with 

 http://www.tomrafteryit.net/views">Tom Raftery I.T.

By saving this code into template pages and associating those templates with the corresponding Pages on the site I now have the site title on the site pages, and the blog title on the blog pages.

Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!