by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Robbie Paplin has a new weblog and he writes there and at Rain City Guide about the Deep Geek thinking underlying his decision-making process in selecting his new blogging platform. Very interesting reading.

I spent my junk time yesterday doing fussy CSS tweaks on Teri Lussier’s weblog, TheBrickRanch.com. This is a hugely frustrating iterative process: Make one minor edit, FTP it to the file server, refresh the page, discover that the change was a mistake, undo, redo, repeat, express frustration in a way that does not exacerbate male pattern baldness.

HTML is hugely forgiving, which is not really a good thing. Web developers have worked for years with multiple computing platforms, each one home to multiple versions of multiple web browsers, all so they could see how their code would be interpreted in an array of hardware and software environments. Not cool.

But: CSS is hugely unforgiving, as crotchety and irascible as a compiled computer language — without the error messages. I was starting with a style sheet created by someone else and trying to torque it into doing what I wanted done. The worst part about making a change in CSS is not seeing that the change you made is wrong, but that the change you made changed nothing. If the original CSS was improperly formatted, the results you’re seeing on the screen are actually inherited from somewhere else. Nice.

I don’t do this for a living, not alone because there are laws against homicide. But I do have good tools, and it’s worthwhile to talk about what good tools can do to make work like this work easier if not actually easy. I live in the Mac world, so, if you’re stuck with Windows, you’ll have to translate. We’re talking about categories of tools, so this stuff exists on both platforms.

For editing, I use TextWrangler, a free programmer’s editor from BareBones Software. I use this for everything, writing, editing, coding — everything. I’ve been using BareBones editors since 1991 or so. Someday I’ll pop for the for-pay product. There is so little HTML in a weblog post, you might as well learn to Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you click on an individual post in BloodhoundBlog, you’ll see something like this above the headline:

The code for doing this is built into some themes, but not in the theme we’re using. The PHP code for making it happen is actually pretty simple, you just have to plug it in in the right place. And all of this presumes you are working on a WordPress.org weblog on a host you can access by FTP. I know nothing about WordPress.com-hosted weblogs or other weblogging systems.

Where is the right place to insert the code? In the folder for the theme you are using (inside the wp-content/themes folder), you may find a file named “single.php”. If so, that’s the file you want to edit. If “single.php” is not there, you want to edit “index.php”.

Before you change anything, save a back-up copy of the file you are going to edit. That way, you can back out and try again if things don’t work out.

You are looking for this line of code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Immediately after that line, paste in this code:

<div class="navigation">
<div align="center"><?php previous_post_link('&laquo; %link') ?></div>
<div align="center"><?php next_post_link('%link &raquo;') ?></div><br>
</div>

Once you have edited the file, FTP it back up to the host and see what happens. If it worked, you should be able to navigate your weblog post-by-post. If it didn’t, go back and try to figure out what went wrong.

I’m going to do some more of this stuff over the weekend, but not too much. The truth is, if your mind runs this way, you’re probably better at it than I am. And if not, your eyes are already glazed over. If you’re somewhere in the middle, a little bit of simple PHP can give you a whole lot of custom control over your weblog’s behavior. To that extent, it’s worth talking about.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact of weblogging: Sometimes you decide you want to do something that requires you to go back and edit 30 or 40 posts. As an example, imagine that you decided you wanted to add a new category. You would have to go back and re-categorize all the posts that should be shoved into that mental drawer.

I did something like this when I created the Weblogging 101 category. I went back and added that category designation where it was appropriate.

Tonight I decided to go that one better, by highlighting the more important posts in that category in such a way that I could reference them repeatedly from other posts. You’ll see me do this from time to time, where we have multiple posts on one important topic. I’ll link back to all the others from each post so that no one misses anything.

There are two ways of doing this. One is manual coding, pasted in to the affected posts again and again. The other is to use PHP, the web-based programming language WordPress itself is written in. I can write my links into a separate file, then include that file when I want to reference the links. The advantage is that I have one canonical version of the links. Moreover, the list of links is dynamic; every time I edit the list, all the posts referencing that file of links are changed accordingly.

WordPress will run PHP unaided in many places on a weblog, and BloodhoundBlog runs on a lot of PHP. But within what WordPress calls “The Loop,” the software that displays weblog entries, running PHP requires a plug-in. I use the runPHP WordPress plug-in by James Van Lommel.

So, what happens? At the end of a post like this one, I append this code inside angle brackets:

?php include ("REWL101.php"); ?

The file named REWL101.php, my file full of links, is opened and inserted at that point. When I make a change in that file, the change is instantly reflected in every post that “includes” it. I can add my set of links to dozens of posts — even making them Read more