Wordpress
Blue J Weblog

I set up the Image Gallery at my photography website at http://photography.bluejweblog.com.  It is not exactly how I want it, but it is functional, and most importantly I got the individual image pages formatted the way that I want, to properly showcase the images.  Next week I will try to find some time to describe how I set it up in a post.

Last week I wrote a post about how to insert an e-mail post link into your Wordpress weblog posts, using FeedBurner’s FeedFlare service. The link that is inserted can be formatted, and FeedBurner helpfully gives you the tags so that you can format the link with CSS. However, FeedBurner only explains how to change the formatting, not the actual text. The text reads “Email this”. To fully customize the link, instead of using the code supplied by FeedBurner, insert the following where you want the link to appear:


<a href="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=%3C?php%20
the_title%28%29;%20?%3E&uri=%3C?php%20the_permalink%28%29;%20?%3E">
Email post
</a>


This code will place an unformatted link into your code which says “Email post”. To change the link text, change the “Email post” in the code to whatever you want. Now to format the link, you can do so using whatever CSS formatting you want.

Phew, that took a little longer than I expected, but now I have set up a photography weblog at photography.bluejweblog.com. I plan to move it to a completely different domain eventually, but for now it is set up and working.

There are other more complicated methods to let your users e-mail your individual blog posts to themselves or friends. The solution that I suggest, and am currently employing on this site is the service provided by FeedBurner.com. FeedBurner’s main feature is that it burns your feed for you. If you are using WordPress, your installation can already publish your RSS feeds for your blog. FeedBurner has other advantages, and even if you don’t use it to publish your feed, you can use there “FeedFlare” feature, which adds functionality to your posts. Some of the readily available FeedFlare’s include Stumble, Digg, and other social bookmark links for your post. But the FeedFlare’s are not limited to social bookmarks, one of the Flare’s is for e-mail. The service is free, you just have to sign up for an account and fill out some preliminary information about your site and submit an e-mail address. This way you don’t have to know any html or code.

How It Works
After you insert the link into your site, the viewer clicks on the link which tjem navigates to a FeedBurner page which requests the sender’s address, recipient’s address, and allows a short message. After clicking send, the browser is directed to an “e-mail successful” page, with a link back to the original site, your site.

What To Do
After signing up for your account at www.feedburner.com, burn your feed. You don’t need to use the feed, i.e., don’t display the FeedBurner feed link on your website. After burning the feed, navigate to your feed page. Initially, the feed page is set to the Analyze tab, located at the top of the page. Click on the Optimize tab, located next to the Analyze tab. On the left hand side, click on FeedFlare.

From here it is pretty easy to figure out. There are two columns of check boxes. The first column represents the Flares which will be included in your FeedBurner feed. The second column represents the Flares which will be included underneath your posts. Select the boxes which you would like. To add the e-mail functionality, click on the check box next to it, in the second column.

Scroll to the bottom of the page. You can view and arrange the order of the links which you have chosen for both your FeedBurner feed and your site.

Add the bottom there is a Save button and a Deactivate button. Select the Save button, than select the Activate button.

To add the e-mail link to your posts, underneath the preview box for the website Flares on the right side, click on the drop down box. Choose your blog engine and a window will open with code which you need to insert into the pages you want to include the FeedFlares.

Open up your web editor of choice and insert the code by copying and pasting. The FeedBurner code should be inserted within the portion of your weblog code which repeats to display your blog post content. In WordPress this is referred to as “The Loop”.

Formatting
FeedBurner conveniently inserted tags so you can format them with CSS. The window that popped with the FeedFlare code also includes the CSS information. Mainly, the entire Flare is with p tags, with the class of feedburnerFlareBlock. There are a couple more details you should check out when you download your code. You can always recall that menu by selecting your blog engine from that drop down list under Optimize tab - FeedFlare.

I was looking around at other Wordpress Themes and I noticed that having a “recent posts” section in the sidebar was fairly popular. So, I went ahead and added a recent posts section to the sidebars in the two column and three column formats of the BlackSky Wordpress Theme. So the new version is now ready for download at the BlackSky Theme Download Page.

It was a busy weekend, I wasn’t able to get much work done on the blog.

This morning, I finished reformatting the theme download page template which displays the individual theme formats. I hope I made the theme download page a little neater and easier to read.

Also, now that the theme viewer is set up, I realize I have to update the theme viewer with content so that it shows how it will look when there are posts and pages and such. Then, soon I will be able to post the additions to the BlackSky Theme and then of course the next theme.

It’s been a couple of weeks now since I started thinking about how to install a Wordpress Theme Demo so that people browsing the Wordpress Theme Gallery could experience the themes first hand.  Well I happy to announce that it is finally up.  It actually didn’t take very long to set up.  I used a theme switcher plug-in and set-up an entirely new Wordpress installation in a directory of the main weblog.  As always, there are a couple of things that need smoothing out, but it is functioning.  Take a look for yourself!

I just used the “Silk” icons from FamFamFam this past week to spruce up the site. I am really pleased with how the icons have changed the look of the site.

The icons are released under the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0. They are free to use, all they ask for is a link back to their site. If you download their icons, check out their readme.txt file for all the details.

In addition to the Silk icons FamFamFam has a set of Flags and a Mini set of Icons. The website also states that a “Bitsy” set of icons will be coming sometime.

I’m still not done with the BlackSky Theme. Expect to see at least two more additions to the theme. Specifically, I plan to release an accompanying icon and stylesheet package to be downloaded and added to either the two or the three column version. I was also thinking of releasing an alternate footer which contains more informational elements. The alternate footer would of course be usable on either of the two versions as well.

I just uploaded the 3 column format for the BlackSky Wordpress Theme.  It was not as difficult as I initially figured.  All it entailed was altering a one line function in the function.php template file; and adding a second sidebar unordered list to the sidebar.php tenmplate file; edited two lines in the stylesheet.  A total of 3 files.  Adding the second sidebar was a matter of cutting and pasting.  Since the theme is widget ready, the administrator can customize the sidebars in the Wordpress administration panel.