Rough Groove

The new look of Binary Silver, my photoblog

If not for a surprise email that I got this weekend, two in fact, I woudn’t have redesigned my photoblog, Binary Silver in a huff! My second blog to be redesigned in three days. Well, I will just announce the surprise when the time is ripe.

Anyway, I was so busy the whole day today making a very big change to the way my photoblog looks, a major overhaul that seems to be a big leap forward. My idea was to have a clean and simple design. A minimalist approach that will highlight more the images with the overall layout not stealing the thunder from the photos. All styling is done in cascading style sheets or CSS.

First and foremost, it has lots of white space. Text is uncluttered and revolves around the images. I did away with the sidebar and opted instead to subdivide the 960px width into two with about 2/3 devoted to the content while a third is reserved for the post title and details. A 300px wide Google Adsense ad will also be placed here.

The color scheme is limited to two gradations of grays, orange and light yellow for a fresh feel to it. If you will notice, there are no other images other than the main photo and the rest is text. Horizontal lines are also predominant and the only other design element with a shape is the header menu which is a rectangle (of course, other than the photos).

The header got me some problems earlier. At first I opted for a left float so that the header title and the header menu will be at the same level but when I placed a clear below the header, there was just a very wide space underneath. I wasn’t able to resolve this problem that I opted to do away with it. To remedy the disconnect, I placed a border below the title. I think it was a good decision. However, when I get to solve this technical problem, I might change the way the header look.

As for the footer, I was at a bind on how to do it. At first, I had this dark gray block with lighter yellow links but it just doesn’t jive. Later, I replaced the dark block and opted for a white background. To separate this from the main content area, a gray line, 5px in width is used as a divider. The three columns are all widget ready.

Now, its more unified.

The new face of langyaw.com, my travel blog

For the past few months, I’ve been thinking of utilizing a magazine style theme for one of my blogs and after much search, I’ve come upon Michael Jubel’s Arthemia2 Wordpress theme via Gladita’s informative blog. She commented in one of my posts in langyaw.com and when I checked her site, I just fell in love with the theme.

Michael did a wonderful design. It is beautiful. I like it’s simplicity, the color scheme and how the different sections are arranged:

• The Headline allows me to highlight a new post
• The Featured section lets me drive readers to past posts that are interesting. Its an effective way of making them explore the blog more.
• The Categories bar is located below the two sections. Its a clever design and the number of items that can be placed here is just five. It would be difficult if you have more than that but it forced me to really do some category “cleaning” and narrowed it down to 5!

These top three sections are all above the fold and its usage is very commendable.

• The rest of the posts are located below the fold showing five at a time (but this can be customized). Much older items can be accessed through the pagination (WP-PageNavi is built in).
• The Sidebar is widget ready and can be configured through four sections
• Lastly, the Footer is dark, a contrast to the upper parts. This is divided in three columns with two widget ready. The last column seems to be fixed. I also like the placement of the admin links which is located at the bottom of the footer.

There’s a caveat, however. If you notice, there are thumbnail photos for the Headline, Featured and all other posts. This was achieved through the use of Wordpress’ custom fields. Fortunately, the designer provided a script that will automatically generate these images but you still need to place an entry in the said fields. Another thing, this theme needs some configuration and to do that will involve editing the index.php file and adding some category names. Instructions on these can be found at Michael’s blog.

I made slight customizations of the theme to suit my needs:

• I changed the header logo, unless you want one named with arthemia. You can readily replace the png file with your own but making it as text is possible and will need some styling
• got rid of the categories located at the top of post title

One of the biggest work that I did was that I manually generated the thumbnails. I did away with the script for two reasons:

• I can’t make it work at localhost where I test my posts, and
• I want to control the composition of the thumbnail images. For me, I want to pique the reader’s curiosity so that they will check the post

With just around 70 plus entries, it’s still manageable. However, to make this work, I made some changes to the theme files especially those governing the custom fields. I made three different key names for the following thumbnail images: Headline, Featured and all other posts. For upcoming posts, I need to input these three values.

With the initial changes implemented, the next few days will be spent fine tuning the theme like arranging the widgets, adding Google Adsense and work out some other customizations. After that, I will redesign the rest of my blogs, especially this one!

How to adjust the number of comments displayed in Wordpress 2.6 admin panel

I got a particular post that is quite popular that at one time, it reached 4,000 comments but due to heavy server transactions, my host provider blocked this blog until I do something about it. From time to time, I need to delete months old comment entries and because of the limited 25 items displayed at the editor, it surely was a very tedious process. I was searching for a solution and found one. However, due to changes under Wordpress 2.6, John’s instructions need to be updated:

• | Open the file edit-comments.php located inside the wp-admin folder with your favorite editor
• | Search (or press ctrl-F) for the number 20 as this is the default setting of Wordpress. You should get to the following code (20 is intentionally highlighted):

$comments_per_page = apply_filters(’comments_per_page’, 20, $comment_status);

• | Change the number 20 to your desired number of comments to be displayed at the editor. Note that Wordpress adds (+5) to the set number
• | Save the file and upload

Now, when you go to the comments list at the admin panel the number of items displayed corresponds to what you edited. However, you need to do this everytime you upgrade to a new version of Wordpress. But its quite easy. Agree?

Wordcamp Philippines 2008!

I’m an avid Wordpress user for the past years now and in fact, this is my blogging platform of choice powering my five blogs: Langyaw (my primary blog), Rough Groove, Binary Silver, Salagubang and Simbahan. Thanx to nina, I got to know of the Wordcamp Philippines 2008, considered to be the first in Southeast Asia.

I’m very much interested to know more about Wordpress, especially making it as a simple and easy to design and administer content management system (CMS) of which I’ve been thinking of making one of my blogs as one.

This blogging event is organized by Mindanao Bloggers of which I’m a part of.

Sponsors:

• i.PH: the Domain for Individuals
• Free Online Flash Games
• Wazzup Manila Philippines
• Real Estate CRM
• Real Estate Website Designers
• Orange County Real Estate
• Auto Insurance Quotes
• Lane Systems Inc.
• RedMedia

Wordpress 2.5’s wow gallery feature

I have installed Wordpress 2.5 a few days after it was made available and I was impressed with the changes especially the layout done to the dashboard and administrator’s interface. Equally amazing was how the images and other media were handled. Just lately, while doing a post on the aftermath of the fire in Oslob, I tried the gallery feature and, wow, I was blown away!

I’ve made a sample below and just see for yourself what the latest version of Wordpress can do! You can add captions into the images and opt for a square crop or proportional resize for the thumbnails by adjusting the settings. Photos below were taken from my www.salagubang.net website.