Maria’s Guides

Information from Software Update.

Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 Release 4 delivers improved reliability and compatibility for Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 on Mac OS X v10.4.5 and later. This release includes J2SE version 1.5.0_06. With this update J2SE 5.0 becomes the preferred Java version, superseding Java 1.4.2. Java 1.4.2 is still installed on your machine, but applications will run with J2SE 5.0 unless they specifically request Java 1.4.2.

For more details on this Update, please visit this website: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302983

I’m having second thoughts about that gravatar feature.

Last Saturday, I added a gravatar feature to this site. As I discussed in this article, the gravatar image for anyone who had one would automatically appear when they wrote a comment on this site. Just a kind of cool and funky way to add more personality to the site. Not that we get so many comments here.

On Saturday, I also submitted my own gravatar for rating and approval. And I’m still waiting for it to be approved.

Now in this day and age, we’re all pretty accustomed to immediate gratification. You apply for something online — a new account to access a Web site, etc. — and you get an e-mail message with approval within minutes. This is commonplace. So the fact that I’ve been waiting five days for a perfectly acceptable photo (G rated, I assure you) to get approved makes me wonder how serious the folks at gravatar.com are about this system they set up.

I was over on the site and it appears to be the work of a single very talented but very busy person. He’s working on Gravatar 2.0 (whatever that is) and asked for volunteers to help him rate and approve new submissions. Over 100 people volunteered, including me. I offered up to an hour a week until he was caught up. I didn’t get any reply.

The forums are a mess of extremely frustrated new users (like me) who have been waiting to use the feature. Some of them claim they’re embarrassed because they set up the feature on their sites and they’re one of the few people who don’t yet have a gravatar. I don’t feel that way. I don’t expect most of the visitors here to have one. But I am anxious to see if I implemented it correctly and the only way to do that is to see a comment from someone — like me — who has a gravatar.

Part of me urges those of you who are interested to go to gravatar.com, apply for a free account, and submit an image. Then kindly remind the management there, in the forums, that you’re waiting. Maybe that’ll put a fire under their butts and they’ll use some of those volunteers to rate and approve all the gravatars in the queue.

The other part of me says forget about it. Maybe it was just a bad idea.

I’ve always had a problem with patience. Maybe this is a test.

In any case, I’ll let you know when my gravatar appears so you can see how it’s implemented on this site. I’ll probably write an article about it for WordPress users, too. But first I need to make sure I got it right.

Time, apparently, may tell.

A how-to piece that goes beyond the scope of our upcoming WordPress book.

WordPress User Level: Intermediate to Advanced

WordPress has a powerful and flexible Pages feature that enables you to create Web pages that are part of your blog yet exist outside the blog chronology. You can find examples of the Pages feature on this site by clicking the links at the very top of the page; all of them except FAQ point to WordPress Pages on this site.

Note that I’m using an uppercase P when discussing this Pages feature. That’s so you don’t get confused between the generic use of page (as in Web page) and WordPress Page feature Page.

This site has a bunch of categories that can be broken down into two groups: book support categories and Maria’s WebLog categories. You can see them listed in their groups in the sidebar, with a bunch of links between them.

Although I’d like to believe that Maria’s WebLog is so incredibly fascinating that most people come here just to read it, I know that’s not true. Many people come here to get additional information and support for my books. There are a bunch of these books (61 or 62 at last count) and a handful still in print at any time. This site’s Book Support categories provide support for those books.

Why Bother with a Custom Page?

On my old support site (www.langerbooks.com), each book had its own RSS feed. I didn’t realize it until recently, but many readers were using that feed to keep apprised of new content via RSS feed reader software. As I have stated elsewhere, although I know what a newsreader is for, I don’t personally use one on a regular basis. So it wasn’t until I realized that people were looking for those old feeds that I decided to provide new feeds to replace them.

There was an easy way to do this: simply include the feed=RSS parameter in the wp_list_cats template tag I use in the sidebar. So, for example, my current use of this tag:

<?php wp_list_cats('sort_comµçVÖãÖæÖRr“²óà

would be changed to:

<?php wp_list_cats('sort_comµçVÖãÖæÖRffVVCÕ%52r“²óà

If you’ve got sharp eyes and know WordPress, you may realize that something’s missing from that tag: the exclude parameter that enables me to break your category list into two groups without using parent and child categories. I’ll cover that in a future article.

Using that second bit of code would display (RSS) after each category name in the sidebar. RSS would be a link to the RSS feed for that category.

The trouble is, I didn’t like the way it looked. After all, who really wants to see (RSS) after every single category name in the list? It looks goofy. I didn’t like it, so I didn’t want to do it that way.

Instead, I decided to tap into the Pages feature and create my own custom Page template for listing RSS feeds.

Creating the File

To do this, start with one of the existing Pages templates. The one I picked was archives.php, which can be found with your other theme files in its theme folder.

If your theme does not include archives.php (not to be confused with archive.php), you’ll have a bit more work to do. You’ll have to get the archives.php file from the Default theme and the index.php file from your chosen theme and create a sort of hybrid with header information from archives.php inserted in index.php that has The Loop removed. If you know what I’m talking about, go for it. If you don’t, stop reading and wait for a future article about creating a Pages template when one doesn’t exist for your theme. (You may have to wait a while; comments requesting such an article might help push me to write it.)

Now with the achives.php file open in your favorite text editor (hopefully something that’s a real text editor and not a word processor), start by saving the file with the name rssfeeds.php (or something like that) in your theme’s folder — that’s the folder where your other theme files reside. Now edit the contents of the file as follows:

1. Replace Template Name: Archives with Template Name: RSS Feeds
2. Delete everything that’s in the “content” of the page. In my theme, for example, that’s everything between <div id="content"> and </div>, not including those two lines.
3. Insert (where the lines were deleted) the codes to display the category names with the links. That can be something as simple as what’s noted above: <?php wp_list_cats('sort_comµçVÖãÖæÖRffVVCÕ%52r“²óà. Or it can be kinda fancy, like what I’ve got in my version of the file:

   <h1>RSS Feed Links</h1>
   
   <p>Click the icon or use the RSS link to subscribe to an RSS feed for the entire site or a specific site topic.</p>
   
   <h2>Entire Site</h2>
   
   <ul>
   
   <li><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/marialanger" title="Subscribe to Maria's WebLog" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"><img src="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/feed-icon16x16.png" alt="" style="border:0"/></a></li>
   
   <li><a href="http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/marialanger" title="Maria's WebLog"><img src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/my/addtomyyahoo4.gif" alt="" style="border:0"/></a></li>
   
   <li><a href="http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=
   
   http://feeds.feedburner.com/marialanger" title="Maria's WebLog"><img src="http://www.newsgator.com/images/ngsub1.gif" alt="Subscribe in NewsGator Online" style="border:0"/></a></li>
   
   <li><a href="http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/marialanger">
   
   <img src="http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif" width="104" height="17" style="border:0" title="Maria's WebLog" alt="Add to Google"/></a></li>
   
   <li><a href="http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://feeds.feedburner.com/marialanger" title="Maria's WebLog" type="application/rss+xml"><img src="http://www.bloglines.com/images/sub_modern1.gif" alt="Subscribe in Bloglines" style="border:0"/></a></li>
   
   <li><a href="http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/marialanger">
   
   <img src="http://myfeeds.aolcdn.com/vis/myaol_cta1.gif" title="Maria's WebLog" alt="Add to My AOL" style="border:0"/></a></li>
   
   </ul>
   
   <table width="100%">
   
   <tr>
   
   <td width="50%" valign="top">
   
   <!-- BLOG CATEGORIES -->
   
   <h2>Maria's WebLog</h2>
   
   <ul><?php wp_list_cats('exclude=1,24,25,26,27,29,30,31,32&sort_comµçVÖãÖæÖRffVVCÕ%52r“²óãÂ÷VÃà £Â÷FCà £ÇFBv–GFƒÒ#SR"fÆ–vãÒ'F÷#à £ÂÒÒ$ôô²5Uõ%B4DTtõ$”U2ÒÓࠣƃ#ä&öö²7W÷'CÂöƒ#à £ÇVÃãÃ÷‡wöÆ—7Eö6G2‚vW†6Û^ude=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,33&
   
   sort_column=name&feed=RSS'); ?></ul>
   
   </td>
   
   </tr>
   
   </table>

4. Save the file’s changes.

Creating the Page

Once the file has been created and saved to the appropriate folder in your themes folder, you’re all ready to use it.

1. Log into your WordPress blog and use the navigation at the top of the page to get to the Write Pages administration panel.
2. In the right column, choose RSS Feeds from the Page Template drop-down list.
3. Click Publish beneath the Page Content box.

Sure, you can enter a page title and content in the boxes. But they’ll be completely ignored so you’ll be wasting your time. Only the tags you included in the template will appear in the page.

Using the Page

The last step is to link the page to your site. If you already use the get_links or wp_get_links tag in your sidebar, you’re done; the page will appear with the other pages that are listed. But if you don’t (I don’t) you’ll have to modify the sidebar.php or, in my case, the header.php file to add the link. I call the link RSS and you can see it at the top of every page.

That’s All There Is To It

Of course, if you’re like me you won’t be happy with the first version of the Page. But fixing it is easy. Just use your text editor to modify the rssfeeds.php file you created. You can reload the Page on your blog to see the results of your changes. No need to edit the Page. After all, there’s nothing in the Page, is there?

What do you think of all this? Use the Comments link to let me know. You can also use the Comments link for this post to submit questions about it; please don’t ask questions about topics not covered in this article.

For more great information about going beyond the basics with WordPress, be sure to visit the WordPress Codex and the WordPress Support Forums.

I create a Page template that lists RSS feeds by category.

As you can probably tell by the number of WordPress-related posts I’ve written today, I spent most of the day tweaking WordPress.

My last tweak of the day was to create a Page template for RSS feeds. You can view it by clicking the RSS link at the top of any page.

It’s late and I’m tired, so I’m not going to explain right now how I created this template. Hopefully, I’ll get to it in the morning. It was easy to do and I think it’s a good exercise for WordPress users interested in giving site visitors access to RSS feeds by category.

More tomorrow.

I make it possible to subscribe to the RSS feed for a specific book support site.

I use a WordPress plugin (of course) called UsersOnline to monitor site visitors. The plugin identifies what page the user is visiting. When I see a visitor on the “Oops! Page Not Found” page, I can point to a link to see the URL that took him or her there. I noticed that an awful lot of site visitors were attempting to access the RSS feeds for the old versions of the book support sites. The same sites that don’t exist anymore.

Figuring that it must be pretty frustrating to try to access a feed that no longer exists, I added new links to the new feeds. You can find them in the sidebar for each of the book support sites. The “Get New Content Automatically” section also includes a link to more information about RSS for those people who aren’t familiar with it. The link goes to the NewsGator Web site, which makes newsreader software for Windows and Macintosh users.

I’ll probably create a custom RSS feed page for the site shortly and replace the link with a link to that. That’ll enable site visitors to access the entire blog or individual categories (books or blog topics) by RSS feed.

Comments? Use the link below.

Or at least I think I did.

I should get my head examined. I just added another WordPress plugin. That’s two in about two hours.

This one adds gravatars to comments. A gravatar, in case you don’t know, is a globally recognized avatar or image associated with a person. Or, in this case, a person’s e-mail address.

To get a gravatar, sign up for a free account at gravatar.com, complete the registration process for your e-mail address, and upload an 80×80 pixel JPEG or PNG image you want to appear as your gravatar. The staff at gravatar.com will rate your image so if it’s not appropriate for some sites, it won’t appear there. Then, when you enter a comment on a gravatar-enabled blog or site, your image will appear with your comment.

I say I think I set it up properly because although I installed the Gravatar plugin for WordPress and inserted the code in the comment loop, I don’t have any comments from people with gravatars. (Mine hasn’t been approved yet.) So I can’t see if it’s working.

If you have a gravatar rated R or lower and want to show it off (and help me determine whether the plugin is working), add a comment to this post.

Otherwise, I’ll just have to wait until I’m rated and see if I appear.