Ed's Big Plans

Brief: For those of you who use WordPress, a handy plug-in to see who’s been viewing your site is Visitor Maps and Who’s Online. You’ll notice that there isn’t a way to change the number of entries (rows) displayed in the Who’s Online and the Who’s Been Online pages in the plugin managing pages. In order to change that, you’re going to dive a little deeper. Here are step by step instructions on how to increase the number of displayed visitors for version 1.5.2..

Requirements: Must have “WordPress” 3.x installed with the “Visitor Maps and Who’s Online” 1.x plugin installed.

(1) Log into your dashboard (wp-admin).
(2) Click on the Plugins administration page — it’s in the far left column.
(3) Scroll down the page and look for Visitor Maps and Who’s Online.
(4) Click on Edit (near Deactivate and Settings).
(5) In the far right column named Plugin Files, click on “visitor-maps/class-wo-been.php“.

(6) In the text area named “Editing visitor-maps/class-wo-been.php (inactive)” Search for the string “$rows_per_page = 25;“.

(7) Change the integer “25” to any whole number you want. I chose “100“.
(8) Click on the button below labelled Update File.

And you’re done! To see the results, click on “Who’s Been Online” and checkout the extended list of visitors per page.

Still Unsolved: There’s still one item I haven’t really looked into. The display that you get back is not actually the number of rows defined by $rows_per_page — instead, this variable only tells the plugin the number of entries to load. What this means is that turning on a filter like “Show Bots: No” in “Who’s Been Online” counts the total number of entries with bots included, then removes them from the display — you end up $rows_per_page minus the number of bots displayed instead of a total of $rows_per_page non-bot rows. I’ll wait till the next version, perhaps the author is already working on it. For now, this quick fix should help.

Brief: I’ve switched to “The Journalist” by Lucian E. Marin to combat the nagging page weight of more decorative WordPress themes. This should make loading my page far quicker. Ideally, I’d like to have it load as quickly as SnOwy, my wiki notebook. When I get some spare time, I’ll add my logo to the title region of this page– don’t worry (he says to himself), I’ll optimize the file size for that as well.

Update: I’ve made the modifications I always do — Inline comments now appear on both the main and archive-like pages, and search results are trimmed as excerpts.

Inline comments

Added the following div after the the div class=”main” and before the div class=”meta group” — changes made to index.php and archive.php.

<div class="recent-comment">
<?php $comment_array = get_approved_comments($wp_query->post->ID); ?>
<?php if ($comment_array) {  ?>
    <?php foreach($comment_array as $comment){ ?>
        <div style="background-color: #f6f6f6; border-top: 1px #bbb solid;">
        <strong><?php comment_author_link(); ?> says...</strong>
        </div><div style="padding: 10px 0px 10px 0px;">
        <?php comment_text(); ?>
        </div>
    <?php } ?>
<?php } ?>
</div>

Excerpts in search results

Changed a call to “the_content()” to a call to “the_excerpt()” — changes made to search.php.

Brief: The Arclite WordPress Theme is great, but the default CSS for the submenu causes the text to be almost completely invisible when moused over. The fix is an easy edit in style.css.

ul#nav ul a:hover, ul#nav ul a:hover span,
ul#nav a.active ul a:hover span,
ul#nav li.current_page_item ul a:hover span,
ul#nav li.current_page_ancestor ul a:hover span,
ul#nav ul li.current_page_parent a:hover span,
ul#nav ul li.current_page_item a:hover span,
ul#nav ul li.current_page_parent li.current_page_item a:hover span{
  //color: #fff;
  color: #2d83d5;
  background: #CCCCFF;
}

To make the text look like a deep blue on light blue, I changed the default white colour for a:hover in the sub-menus section to match the text colour of the blue in the rest of the theme plus a lighter blue as its background.

This is an update to this post.

It’s even easier in this version of Arclite 2.02 to throw up both a logo and title.

Edit header.php as follows…

Before:

<?php
      // logo image?
      $logo = (get_arclite_option('logo'));
if($logo): ?>
      <h1 class="logo"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/"><img src="<?php echo $logo; ?>
      "title="<?php bloginfo('name');  ?>" alt="<?php bloginfo('name');  ?>" /></a></h1>
<?php else: ?>
      <h1 class="logo"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<?php endif;  ?>

After:

<?php
      // logo image?
      $logo = (get_arclite_option('logo'));
if($logo): ?>
      <h1 class="logo"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/"><img src="<?php echo $logo; ?>"
      title="<?php bloginfo('name');  ?>" alt="<?php bloginfo('name');  ?>"
      style="vertical-align:text-bottom;" /><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<?php else: ?>
      <h1 class="logo"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<?php endif;  ?>

That’s it!

• style="vertical-align:text-bottom;"

  • This chunk is used to keep the logo in line with the title text as last time.

• <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

  • This chunk produces the title text.

Update: See this post if you have Arclite 2.02.

Arclite is still by far my favourite theme available on WordPress. At some point in time I wanted to have both my snazzy Sigma/E logo up along with the logotype “Ed’s Big Plans”. Arclite doesn’t allow this (at least there is no such setting in this version), so after some more digging in header.php, I found this chunk of code.

<?php
  // logo image?
  if(get_option('arclite_logo')=='yes' && get_option('arclite_logoimage')) { ?>
  <h1><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/">
    <img
      src="<?php print get_option('arclite_logoimage'); ?>"
      title="<?php bloginfo('name');  ?>"
      alt="<?php bloginfo('name');  ?>" /></a></h1>
<?php } ?>

The above is code that checks if the user has selected to use an image logo– when this logo is available, Arclite displays the image and moves on down the page. Alternatively…

<?php else { ?>
  <h1><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<?php } ?>

…when the user has selected not to use an image, Arclite handily prints out logotype.

Since I want Arclite to render both the image logo and logotype when they’re available, I’ve simply slapped the logotype printing in with the former snippet of code to make this…

<?php
  // logo image?
  if(get_option('arclite_logo')=='yes' && get_option('arclite_logoimage')) { ?>
  <h1><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/">
    <img
      src="<?php print get_option('arclite_logoimage'); ?>"
      title="<?php bloginfo('name');  ?>"
      alt="<?php bloginfo('name');  ?>"
      style="vertical-align:text-bottom;" />
    <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
  </a></h1>
<?php }

Quick and painless

Some inline CSS was used to get the logo and the text to sit inline with one another; by default, the logo goes out of line up high and the text goes down low.

Note that when one chooses not to use an image logo in Arclite’s settings, it just goes back to the default logotype behaviour– exactly as you’d expect.

Brief: I’ve added a favicon to this blog. I’m unsure of whether or not modern versions of IE support specifying favicons the XHTML header way, so I’ll have to check it out some time. All browsers however allow the URL squatting method (which should have gone away before 2000 really). The latter doesn’t allow one to specify icons on a per page basis, rather the entire domain ends up with the same icon.

For any webpage, just add code similar to the below to specify a favicon…

<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/edfavicon.png" />

For WordPress, I’ve inserted that line into header.php inside the head tag.