…in some weird postmodern way…

Once you begin developing web content, it doesn’t take you long to figure out that how your web site appears to people is, to a lesser or greater degree, a matter of which browser they are using.

It’s to a lesser degree if your readers are using a browser that supports current web standards, such …

If you like the spirit of Matt’s “Hello Dolly” plugin, which adds a line from Louis Armstrong’s song “Hello, Dolly” to the top of your WordPress backend, but feel that it doesn’t do much for your inner geek, I give you the “He’s Dead, Jim” plugin for WordPress.

“He’s Dead, Jim” works like “Hello Dolly,” …

I’ve wanted to create a plugin for WordPress for some time now. I have plenty of ideas for them (mostly scholarly or academic uses). The only problem is I don’t have enough knowledge of how WordPress operates to really accomplish that. What I know about PHP is not much.

However, I was a biology major …

When publishing images to the web, you should usually use either .png or .jpg formats. The major difference between the two is that .jpg employs a lossy compression method, meaning that you can create smaller files by using a larger amount of compression, but you image quality will suffer. On the other hand, .png employs …

Custom menus in WordPress give you a lot of control over the arrangement of your menus. One issue that comes up every once in a while is how to include a word that is not a link, a page, or a category. In other words, how can you include a word that describes the child …

Like children, plugins don’t always play nicely together.  Plugins can conflict with one another, with your theme, or even with WordPress, and those conflicts are often the result of an upgrade. A lot of the issues I see with WordPress can be traced back to plugin conflicts.

Most people don’t even think of plugins when …

WordPress’s Screen Options feature is relatively unknown to a lot of people. I suppose it’s one of those things that you already know about if you need it, and once you find out about it, it’s fairly self-explanatory. It does not, however, function the way the rest of WordPress functions, so a brief tutorial is …

I recently migrated over to a different laptop (a Toshiba C655), and was faced with the prospect of moving several hundred bookmarks and passwords over from my ancient Dell—a task I was not looking forward to, as I am really pressed for time right now, but can’t be without that information.

Fortunately, I found a …

Someone over on the WordPress forums asked for a way to display the category description when using Graphene‘s front page category option. This is actually easy to do using Graphene’s action hook widget areas. If you’re not familiar with this feature, you should first read my tutorial on Graphene’s action hook widget areas before attempting …

In my earlier post about using Graphene action hook widgets, I neglected to mention how to target each widget in the style sheet. In much the way that WordPress gives each widget its own unique ID, which you can then target with some specific CSS, Graphene also provides each of these action hook widget areas …

I started blogging with WordPress long before I knew anything about how WordPress actually works. If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because that’s the typical learning curve: you don’t bother learning something until you actually need to know it. This runs counter to the Chinese proverb about digging the well before you are thirsty, …

A while ago, I asked on the support forum for Graphene if it would be possible to include the permalink for each comment. That will be an option with the next version (1.7) of the theme (thanks, Syahir!), but it’s possible to do that even before then. In fact, thanks to the wide number of …

Now with 1.6, the Graphene theme for WordPress offers a quick and easy way to change the width of your blog. However, changing the size of the header image still requires a little tweaking.

Graphene 1.5 and below

You really should upgrade. But if you don’t want to or can’t, this will get you off …