Feed problems when editing .htaccess on WordPress

Coding BloggerBuddy a couple of months back let me find out about some stuff that are common as a practice but i had no idea of. One example is the complete redirect of a blog’s feed to FeedBurner. According to some marketing and SEO masters out there one shouldn’t provide multiple ways to subscribe to one’s blog as this somehow is not good for business. I am not sure why, except for the fact that through FeedBurher you can track many stats about your readers. This being said i have seen this around the blogosphere, many blogs completely redirect their “/feed” that WordPress provides to FeedBurner using the .htaccess file. If that is not done the proper way it may damage your feed syndication.

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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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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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Small hiccup on the “Featured” post

A few days back i posted on how to create a small place on top of your posts in your theme to keep a featured post there (just like the one running here, as you can see on top of the posts). Validating my blog today against different browsers i stumbled on a serious mistake i did. On that tutorial there is a line of code saying:

That has a serious bug that’s lurking around not ready to be found at all. This line shortens the post to the first 500 characters so it will appear like an excerpt. But here is the problem. When using a “more” tag to cut your posts the following text is inserted in the post:

The problem is when the cutting of the text stops just after the:

There is the problem. The above character sequence is the markup for HTML indicating that the text following is comments! There, the parsing stops. So, after that point your page will not render. That is a major problem as you can imagine. I have a fix for it though. Please replace the above line of code with this one:

This code makes an extra callto the str_replace function replacing the more tag with the empty string. This way, there is no way a problem like that can occur. Hope it didn’t happen to you guys because it’s scary! If you encounter any more problems please report them back to me!

Adding a “featured” post on your theme

Here i am with another coding tweak for your WordPress blog. I don’t want to repeat my self on how you should try to avoid using a plugin when something can be done by hand. This task, adding a featured post on your frontpage, i must admit is a bit more complicated than the others so please only follow if you are comfortable with php and the WordPress framework. If not, then the WordPress plugin directory is what you probably need. Still with me? Ok, here is what we are going to do. We are going to add a block on top of your homepage that holds a featured post. This way, the post you think deserves more attention than others won’t sink down, and it will be up there for as long as you want, plus, it will be rendered a bit specially to darg some more attention to it.

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