Maria’s Guides

• The Trainspotters of Google Earth
  What happens when the Internet and geography collide. By Michael Agge, Slate Magazine. A slide show with commentary about Google Earth.
  (tags: Google earth satellite images photography geography)

Information from Apple’s Web site.

Apple has determined that certain lithium-ion batteries containing cells manufactured by Sony Corporation of Japan pose a safety risk that may result in overheating under rare circumstances.

The affected batteries were sold worldwide from October 2003 through August 2006 for use with the following notebook computers: 12-inch iBook G4, 12-inch PowerBook G4 and 15-inch PowerBook G4.

Learn more on the battery recall page of Apple’s Web site.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macintosh, recall

Informit.com puts another chapter on its site.

I just stopped by the Informit.com Web site to check their listings for my work. (They list all of my in print books for Peachpit Press, as well as articles I’ve written for them and excerpts from my books.) I found that they’d put another excerpt from my Mac OS X 10.4 book on their site: “File Management in Mac OS X 1.4 Tiger.”

If you don’t have the book and want to check out this sample chapter, please do. Frankly, I think it’s easier to read in the book, without the links and tiny pictures. Maybe this excerpt will convince you to buy a copy; if so, you can get it at a discount by clicking a link on their site.

Technorati Tags: book, excerpt, howto, MacOS, free

I tweak some settings to support more blog links without using up too much sidebar space.

This site doesn’t include a lot of links to blogs. One of the reasons for that is that I’m extremely particular about the sites I link to. I don’t link indiscriminately. I only link to sites I think are worth visiting.

And as we all know, there are just too many sites out there that just aren’t worth visiting.

The other reason I don’t have a lot of blog links is that I just don’t want my Home page sidebar to get too long. It’s already very long — if I wrote shorter entries, it would easily exceed the length of my entries as it often does on wickenburg-az.com.

So today, in preparation for supporting more blog links, I converted my WebLogs link category to a true blogroll, with a limited number of links. If I have more than the number of links I specified (5), WordPress will randomly choose which links to display each time the Home page is opened.

Setting this up in WordPress is easy. Here are the instructions for a server installation of WordPress:

1. Log into WordPress and go to the Dashboard.
2. Click the Links button to view the Manage Links administration panel.
3. Click the Link Categories button to view the Link Categories Administration panel.
4. Click the Edit button for the category you want to limit entries for. You’ll see the Edit Category administration panel for that category.
5. In the Category Options area, enter a value in the Limit box and choose Random from the Sort Order drop-down list.
   
6. Make other settings as desired in the administration panel.
7. Click the Save Category Settings button. WordPress saves your settings and brings you back to the Link Categories administration panel.

From that point forward, the links in the category you modified will be limited to the number you specified, randomly selected and displayed. To display more or fewer links, just repeat these steps and change the value in the Limit box.

WordPress.com handles links and categories a bit differently. If you need instructions for doing this on a WordPress.com blog, use the Comments link for this post to ask and I’ll whip them up.

Technorati Tags: blog, howto, links, blogroll, WordPress

Two ways to get the job done.

One of the features I included in my personal WordPress-based site (www.marialanger.com) is a listing of the 20 most recent posts. You can find this list in the sidebar of the Home page.

I created this list with the following code in the sidebar.php template file:

<?php wp_get_archives('type=postbypost&limit=20'); ?>

The type parameter tells WordPress to show individual posts. The limit parameter tells WordPress how many posts to display. You can set this number to anything you like.

I wanted to include this same feature on wickenburg-az.com, a site I maintain with information about the town I live in, Wickenburg, AZ. Unfortunately, that site makes full use of the Event Calendar plugin to display a list of upcoming events in the sidebar. Although the plugin is configured so events to not display on the Home page, it’s impossible to prevent recent event titles from being included when using the wp_get_archives tag — there’s no exclude parameter. And since clicking one of those titles would display a very boring two-line description of the event, I didn’t want those titles included in the list of recent posts.

What’s the solution? Well, I already had the Customizable Post Listings plugin installed on wickenburg-az.com. This plugin offers flexible ways to list posts in the sidebar. All I had to do was figure out the parameters to include all categories except the one set aside for Event Calendar.

I fiddled around with it a bit and came up with this:

<?php c2c_get_recent_posts (15,"<li>%post_URL%</li>",'1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24','date','DESC'); ?>

The numbers in the code is a space-separated list of all the categories I wanted to include. I was lazy and just listed all category numbers between the first value (1) and the last (24) even though other values in between are skipped in my category list. Notice that 11 is missing. That’s the category number for the Upcoming Events category used by Event Calendar.

The result was the list I wanted. You can see it in the sidebar of the Home page at wickenburg-az.com.

Technorati Tags: category, howto, list, plugin, blog, WordPress

Creating a Title-less Home Page

(If you’re just tuning in, this is the seventh installment of my series of articles about using WordPress as a CMS to build an informational Web site. Throughout this series, I’m talking about a specific site I developed: Flying M Air, a helicopter tour and charter company I operate when I’m not writing and tweaking my Web sites.)

I decided early on that I wanted my site to have a static home page that provided basic information about my company. Visitors could then use the links along the top of the page to view more information in other static pages or the links in the right column to learn more about specific tours and other services.

The Andreas theme I’d modified included page links along the top of the page. As I mentioned in Part 3 of this series, I created the pages and used the Page Order option to assign numbers to the pages that would determine their order. The theme automatically listed the pages by name as a row of buttons at the bottom of the header, using the following code:

Remember, the CSS code in style.css is what determines the appearance of the links on the site.

I created a home page, gave it a title of Home, and assigned a Page Order value of 0. That put it at the beginning of the list, right where a Home page button should appear. My Home page included random images (covered in Part 5 of this series) and text with links.

Now I needed to make that page be the page that appeared automatically when someone went to the default page of the root directory — in other words, www.flyingmair.com. I used the Static Front Page plugin by Denis de Barnardy. Miraz covered this plugin in our WordPress book, so I don’t want to go into a lot of detail about it here. I simply installed and activated the plugin, then confirmed that the Post Slug for the Home page was home. My Home page was the static Home page.

This may have satisfied a lot of people, but not me. The problem was, the page title (Home) appeared at the top of the Home page. I didn’t want it to appear at all. So I had one more thing to do.

Like all other Pages on a WordPress-based site, my Home page was displayed with the page.php file. I opened the file and inserted some conditional code (shown in bold type) around the instruction to display the title near the beginning of The Loop:

<strong><?php if (is_home()) { ?><?php } else { ?></strong><h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> <?php edit_post_link('<img src="'.get_bloginfo(template_directory).'/images/pencil.png" alt="Edit Link" />','<span class="editlink">','</span>'); ?></h2><strong><?php } ?></strong>

Here’s how it works.

• <?php if (is_home()) { ?> says that if this is the home Page, display what comes next. But that’s followed immediately by <?php } else { ?>, so nothing is displayed.
• <?php } else { ?> says that if this is any other Page, display what comes next. That’s the title as a H2 heading and link, as well as the icon I’m using for displaying an Edit link.
• <?php } ?> says to stop acting on the is_home conditional statement; the rest of the content should appear for all Pages.

The result: for any Page except the Home Page, the Page title appears at the top of the page.

I think that just about covers all of the special features I included in Flying M Air’s new WordPress-based Web site. Did I leave something out? Use the Comments link if you think there’s another topic I could cover in this series. Otherwise, I’ll call it quits for now.

But don’t worry; there are plenty of other WordPress-related tips and topics I can share. Keep checking in for more.

And now, can I interest anyone in a helicopter tour?

Previous Entries in this Series:

• Part 1: I Discover that WordPress Makes an Excellent Content Managment System
• Part 2: Finding and Modifying Just the Right Theme
• Part 3: Planning the Site’s Organization and Creating the Pages
• Part 4: Adding Category-Specific Post Links to the Sidebar
• Part 5: Adding Random Images
• Part 6: Adding Print and E-Mail Features