Creating a search page on WordPress

You all know i had a theme change about a week ago. This theme is great and i really love it. As it seems you guys love it too. Anyways, since day one i noticed there is no search field nowhere in the theme. That was a pretty strange fact i hadn’t seen in any theme i’ve seen and tried out before. I didn’t really care much in the beginning since i can search from the admin area and i really thought that you guys, my readers, wouldn’t really need the search function. I was mistaken. My friend and loyal reader Giwrgos (George) came back to me with a comment about the missing search functionality. As he is a techy guy himself, he was able to pull out a search the hard way, but, i was troubled about how any other non techish guy could do it. So i started considering my various options.

For starters i could add a search field somewhere in the theme. That was not really an option since i am not that good on designing and i could really mess up the look and feel of the site (something i’d hate to do since i really like this look). And here is what i came up with.

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The 200th post!

Yay! This is all i can say… It’s been over a year now, since i started this blog, and almost eight months since the 100th post.  This is another milestone reached. It all started back in February 2008 as a “what if” and then i just installed WordPress and started writing. Since then a lot have happened. I moved from a shared hosting to a VPS, i changed about five themes till now, i made a lot of friends, and generaly, i had a lot of fun. To be honest i am having as much fun as i had back in day one. When i don’t feel like it i don’t blog. I rest a while and come back with more inspiration. In this year or so this is the 200th post and a bit over a thousand comments! I know that half of them must be mine in reply to others’ but i like replying to me readers. This is what i want when i comment on another blog and this is the way to connect with my readers, you guys. I just seized the opportunity to post this and tell everybody a big, fat thanks for coming back here, reading and commenting. It’s been a blast and i am sure the ride will be even better in the days to come… Thank you all!

Easily create paragraph sidenotes

When i talk about WordPress you all know that i prefer doing something by hand rather install a plugin to do it – provided that the task at hand is easy to do. I have already shown you how to get rid of the various sociable plugins and do it yourself easily through some php and css tweaking. Here i am about to show you how to easily add paragraph sidenotes. I first saw the usage of sidenotes on WordPress on the blog of my dear friend Mike Nichols. I have no idea if he does it by hand or has a plugin do it for him. In general, sidenotes make a large text much more easier to read and grab the concept. When going through large chunks of text with so much info on them it’s a good thing to have a phrase that summarizes what will be discussed in the next few lines. The process we will follow is pretty simple. We will tweak a little our theme’s CSS and that’s about it. Then adding a sidenote will be as easy as wrapping it with a div. Here is an example output:

Let’s get down to business. We are going to have every sidenote appear floating left of our paragraph. Here is the CSS block that will do  just that:

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Google’s dangerous monopoly

Eleven years ago the internet was like the world back in the dark ages. Wonderful things where happening all over it but no one would find out about it. It was growing so quickly though that a way of finding out the information you are looking for easily was a must and waiting to be filled. That huge need was covered by Google. Since then, this company has turned around to be a multi-million company with millions of dollars of profits each year and one of the most powerful companies on earth. It’s power comes from the responsibility of controlling information. When a king was once asked what he would like to have as a weapon to conquer the world he replied:

Information! Give me all the information i want and i can conquer the world!

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The new theme

I think it’s quite obvious for my readers that the site has, once more, changed a theme! It’s been quite some time since the last one (June 2008) so i started getting bored of the old one. Also, i decided i needed more from my theme. And when i say more i mean being it simpler, cleaner and more professional looking. I think this theme achieves all these goals. The major change, besides the theme i mean, is that i added the lifestream thingy on the top. It kinda came with the theme but i could have disabled it. Though, i think it’s not that heavy for the server so i decided to keep it. It’s a bit glitchy for now but i will figure out why soon.

So, how do you like the change guys? Did you find any problems? Do you see something you don’t like or, in your opinnion, needs to be changed? I’d love to get your feedback!