Posts Tagged ‘Zip File’

Coming Soon! WordPress Theme

comingsoon Coming Soon! WordPress Theme imageThis theme may go down in history as my lamest theme ever but it’s a utilitarian theme designed with a simple purpose, to display a Coming Soon! message on the homepage as a notice to new comers while the website is under construction.

To install the theme, simply download the ZIP file and uncompress it before uploading the resulting /coming-soon/ directory to your web server.

Why build it?

Actually it’s a funny thing, I’ve written before that sometimes when you write a blog you need to review your Analytics (The Vomitorium and Data Mining) and looking over my numbers today, I’ve seen a steep climb in the number of people searching for a template like this.

The Coming Soon! theme offers users the ability to quickly add a page while still allowing you to track the vital statistics and add plugins such as Google Analytics or keyword tools. The theme makes full use of the header and footer functions, without displaying any actual website content. 

Customizing the Theme

This theme is a bare bones WordPress theme. In fact it doesn’t even make use of the Loop so if you’d like to customize it by adding a graphic or changing the text, simply open the index.php file and add basic HTML within the <div> tags.

download file Easy Technorati Tags for WordPress

WordPress.com Stats Smiley Remover Plugin

When you install the WordPress.com Stats plugin from WordPress it adds a small, simple graphic to your posts which looks like a small smiley face. Generally it’s located in the footer of your theme but no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to find it (or remove it) from the code.

Why? 

The smiley face is actually being loaded through a series of JavaScript calls from a remote server, the graphic isn’t actually located on your website at all! It’s part of the WordPress.com Stats plugin and is designed to help track visitors to your website but … it’s kinda ugly and a pain in the ass so to get rid of it all you need to do is add some code to your header.php file. Specifically, open your style.css file and add the following CSS:

[source lang="css"]img#wpstats{display:none;}[/source]

If you’re absolutely petrified of opening and editing your CSS files directly you can either pay a WordPress expert to do it for you (that’s the choice that my wife always prefers) or you can download my simple plugin which can be uploaded to your website and activated, automatically adding the code to the proper place.

How to Install

  1. Download the plugin
  2. Log into your WordPress Admin (http://[yourwebsite]/wp-admin
  3. Surf to Plugins -> Add New
  4. Select the ZIP file and Install Now
  5. Activate the Plugin

For those of you who would like to know more about the Smiley Face frustrustration, Ryan Imel wrote a great piece on it a while back and there’s also a great piece on My Digital Life.

 download file WordPress.com Stats Smiley Remover Plugin image

How You Can Help

I love developing plugins for WordPress and do my best to always keep them free but of course it take a lot of time and effort to build these plugins so if you’d like to say thanks, the best way is to take a few moments and write about the plugin on your own website, include a link to my website from your posts or download and rate the plugin on the official plugin directory.

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

Adding a Favorites Icon to Your Website is Fast and Easy, So Why Don’t You Have One?

Adding a Favorites Icon to Your Web site is Fast and Easy, So Why Don’t You Have One?

OK, first thing’s first … for those of you who don’t know what a FavIcon is, it’s the little picture that appears beside your URL in the address bar of your website. It also appears when people bookmark your website or download a page offline. It’s a great branding opportunity that only takes a couple of minutes to put together so why are you not using it?

Step One is to select a photo or image you want to use for an icon. It can literally be anything but remember that it’s going to be really small so you don’t want anything too complicated. I use a photo of myself, but you can use a logo or an illustration depending how you want your site branded.

Step Two is to use whatever photo editing software you have to make it square. If you don’t already have anything, download GIMP (it’s free) or it you’re really lazy, upload the photo to your FaceBook profile as a profile photo, crop it square using their tool and download it again to your desktop before moving onto the next step (yes, I really am that lazy).

Step Three, head on over to FavIcon Generator and upload your image. Once you’re done click Generate and download the resulting ZIP file.

Finally, all you have to do is upload the .ico file to the root folder of your website using an FTP program. Some servers have a hard time with this so I like to add the following piece of code to the <head> section of my websites but it’s optional:

 

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”http://www.thisismyurl.com/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon” /> 

That’s it!