New Updates & Photos
Yes, my site is not up to date… I appologize for letting time get the best of me! As some of you may know, we’ve been a bit busy. The most recent post, appears to be from Christmas 2009, so yeah, I’m pretty far behind. Luckily, I have drafts of at least a couple dozen posts that will be going up in the near future… In the meantime, I have also been backfilling in old posts, so feel free to go back and check out the archives, you may spot something new!
It’s All Small Stuff
In an effort to learn more about web services, I’ve decided to startup another website. Http://www.ItsAllSmallStuff.com The purpose of the site, or the “experiment” really, Is to see if I can power a site 100% from free RSS content, and still have that site be relevant itself. RSS content is a dynamic content from a website that can then be exported (RSS feeds power my sidebar over on the right hand side). The site itself is not going to be anything too over the top as far as design, and the only thing that will be static on the site are advertisements. The two main things I want to accomplish are to get the site high on Google rankings, and see the true possiblility of web advertisement revenue.
I have done fairly well in the past with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but that was purely on a local level. So this time I will be trying to get a high ranking, in a globalmarket. I think I’ll do alright though, but probably not in the top 100 sites if someone were to search “news”. However I could see a possibility in specific sectors, subjects, and individual people (I might get a high ranking if someone searched specifically for “US Senator” or “Iran Nuclear Attack Weapons” or “Bono Charity Work”. Really who knows how well it’ll do though, I mean, I am getting into one of the largest markets on the web… news.
WordPress How-To: Full Width Pictures
In the past with using a photo for the full width of a article in that it either won’t center or isn’t the true full width or messes with the sidebars. The purpose of this post is to show the code to use (and width for this speific (Vertigo) style) to resolve those issues.
Here is a sample code that seems to work pretty well on my site:
<div><a href=”http://www.CampJonkoi.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.bryanshumaker.com/wp-content/uploads/campjonkoi.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Camp Jonkoi” width=”510″ height=”210″ /></a></div>
The main difference is that it’s an entire <div> which fixes the sidebar issues I was having. Also the width here is 510, but the other problem was there were borders in the CSS that were making my pictures a bit wider than 510, so I added the border=”0″. Nothing fancy, it just took me a few tries to get it right, so I figured I’d share, and write it down for my future self!
WordPress How-To: Permalinks
I’ve had a tough time getting wordpress setup exactly how it should be, so I’m putting a bit of helpful info up just in case you (or I) need it in the future.
So this is how to get “pretty” permalinks (no index.php before your postname) if you’re using FP like me.
- First, Create a temp.htaccess file in Notepad
- Fill it with this:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
- Upload to the root directory
- Make Sure index.php & .htaccess have full write permissions
Do this via a FTP editor or your site’s main control panel:
The _VTI_BIN (http://BRYANSHUMAKER.COM:80/_vti_bin/) folder is very hidden… So I can’t access it via FP or even IE’s built in FTP browser, I have to use an FTP standalone like Cute FTP.
Unfortunately I still haven’t figured out how to access this file and change it. It seems like this might be near the limit of what I have control over since I’m not the administrator on the box (the server running my site). I’ll try to figure out how to get at this and update this post when i have the info.
WordPress How-To: Database Installation
After quite a few problems, this site is back up. Just a brief overview of why it was down for so long… I was updating the site from http://www.bryanshumaker.com/blog to http://www.bryanshumaker.com and my computer died. Turned out it was a faulty hardware problem on the motherboard, which I fixed, but it also required a rebuild of XP. After that was fixed, I got back to my host company to finish the migration and the permissions for the WordPress Database had gotten messed up. It took about 2 weeks with them to get everything corrected. Then… Since I was already going through all this, I decided to go ahead and upgrade wordpress to the new version. Turns out that the new version had to access the database differently than the previous in the wp-config.php file… here is the corrected line (for my own future reference):
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘db720int.dotsterhost.com:3306′);
In a nutshell, three complicated problems kept me down for about 5 weeks. But it’s all fixed now (hopefully) and everything that was up before will be reposted and then I’ll continue from there.
Also, make sure index.php is a default document in your website configuration, and all index files have full write permissions.