This solution uses custom fields. Here’s a tutorial on custom fields in case you need it.

First, I took the code from Google Maps and put it into a custom field in my contact page.

Then I edited my theme by adding a bit of code into page.php, just after where the line which outputs my title. Yours would look something like this:
<h1>the title();</h1>

So after the title I inserted the following to get my custom field which I had called “floatright”:

$customField = get_post_custom_values("floatright");
if (isset($customField[0])) {
      echo '<div class="alignright">'.$customField[0].'</div>';
}

So basically that checks if I’ve set a value for that custom field in the current page, and if so it inserts the field wrapped in a div which is floated right.

Of course I could have just hard-coded the map into page.php when the page is “contact us”. But this is a flexible solution that could be used on other pages and for any item that we want to float over to the right. And, the client can update that map area if they want to later without breaking that wrapper HTML. If you’re savvy enough to do this on your own site you might just put the div into your custom field for even more flexibility.

In my case, to some degree, “Why should I blog?” is a rhetorical question. As someone who pretty much lives and breathes WordPress development & design these days, I shouldn’t even be uttering this question aloud.

“It’s good promotion.” “It’s good for SEO.” “It allows potential clients to become more comfortable with you.” All of these things are true. But.

I admit it, I’ve been stuck. I’ve been self-editing before I speak, to the point of not speaking (both here and on twitter). I’ve been having conversations in my head about where to take this blog, “finding my voice”, beating myself up about how sadly neglected my websites are in content, design, structure, the whole shebang. (What does shebang mean anyway?)

This blog was started in 2003, before blogging was cool, before there were 10 million sites telling you to “define your niche” and “create a publishing schedule” and “have a commenting strategy”. Before most people knew what a blog even was. I started it because I could, and because it was a way to learn (Movable Type at the time), and because I was inspired by the blog of a brilliant programmer I worked with. At that point I could talk about whatever randomness inspired me in whatever way I felt because pretty much nobody read blogs. Essentially blogging was just for me.

Fast forward some years and I’m fumbling my way through a new life of being a full-time freelance designer, and becoming more self conscious about what I publish in the blogosphere. Not that I was ever raunchy or overly personal, despite the porn-worthy words of my first post, but I began to feel like I have to present myself as An Expert. That I have to be writing for My Audience (which one?).  That I should be writing more and more for my clients. Trouble is, that’s not what this site is about.

In the beginning of my freelance adventures I threw together a quick portfolio site. It does the job, barely, but enough that I’ve hobbled along for far too long. I don’t much like it so I rarely update it and cringe when I hear new clients say they’ve been reading my site. Of course they have. And to them, it’s probably fine – they contact me, after all. But to me, it’s a sorely dissatisfying representation of what I can do. It runs on WordPress too, but I blog over here. The silliness of this does not escape me.

And here is where I often find myself when I write: wondering how I can get to the end of the post with a nice ribbon tied up around it. *sigh*

Before I wrap up I will say that there’s some clarity at the end of the tunnel. I’ll be relaunching with a new webdesign portfolio soon. Then I will be able to blog with my different hats in different places and feel so much more comfortable in them. Maybe I’ll wear a silly hat here more often. Maybe I’ll get over my self-editing a bit more. We’ll see.

Wondering why YOU should blog, and how not to make an ass of yourself in the process?

…she says, putting her Expert Hat on.

You’re not alone. Here are some links I recommend on the subject.

• Blogging Therapy series by Havi Brooks (see bottom of the post for links to topics like mean comments, what if nobody reads my blog, etc.)
• Why you blogging? and Why you hiding? by Karen J Lloyd
• Sonia Simone’s Remarkable Communication – perhaps Slow Blogging or The Sweeney Todd Guide to Blogging.
• Skellie. Especially this recent a-niche-isn’t-required post… there’s hope for me yet.

If you have any thoughts or related links to share on this, I’d love to hear them in the comments. Fire away!

WordPress Developer’s Blog

The official blog of the WordPress development team. Features announcements, requests for input from the community about future WP developments, etc.

The dust hasn’t even settled on the exciting release of WordPress 2.7 yet they’re asking us to vote on the features for version 2.8. The most exciting one on the list for me was the addition of post types, which I took to mean something like a custom write panel. I’ve achieved that with the Flutter plugin before, but something core to the system would be so great. You might want to look at the ideas forum before voting — I didn’t feel like I knew enough about some of the features in the list. There’s also an anonymous place to kvetch if you just need to vent a pet peeve or two.

WordPress Publisher’s Blog

This blog aims to help publishers get the most out of WordPress, such as tips for optimizing self-hosted WordPress.

My favourite part of this site is the publisher’s spotlight which features some amazing and high profile things built with WordPress. Like these:

• The official site of the UK Prime Minister’s Office
• WordPress user comments integrated into live streaming of the US Presidential debates
• Kineda, a fashion “lookbook” and blog running on WP and customized bbPress
• With examples like that, it’s no wonder that even Martha Stewart says WordPress is a good thing.

There’s such a breadth of how WordPress can look and be used in that spotlight, it’s very inspiring!

WPCandy

Finally, WPCandy is a mixed bag of all things WordPress. There are articles, reviews of themes and plugins, and a gallery of WP-driven sites — another great source of inspiration.

1. Multicolr photo search – choose a few colours, and it’ll show y a grid of photos containing those colours. Just discovered this via DFCKR. Beautiful!
2. Flickrvision – a map of the world constantly displaying recently posted photos from around the world, by David Troy. Troy’s Twittervision is also a very cool way to see the flotsam, jetsam and zeitgeist of the world.
3. PictoBrowser – Builds a little Flash gallery using your Flickr photos, generating HTML that you can paste into your website.
4. FlickrFolio – it’s not yet launched, but this looks like it will be a nice minimalist way for an artist to build a portfolio out of their Flickr photo sets.
5. Photosets for inspiration: from business cards to a neon graveyard. There is a fantastic array of interesting photo sets and groups on Flickr.

Bonus WordPress Plugins for you WP lovers:

1. FlickrRSS – I’ve used this to pull in photos on a few sites, like Joanne Probyn‘s home page, and it works quite well.
2. PictoBrowser plugin – haven’t tried it myself. Have you?
3. Photo Dropper – for easily finding creative commons-licensed photos to include in your posts.
4. I know there’s a ton more which I haven’t tried, so here’s Specky Boy’s 10 Amazing WordPress plugins for Flickr. Looks like his site is ful of other great round-ups too. Oh, the Internet, it just never ends!

The symptoms:

• Trouble getting to any page in the admin at times, unable to login, display the edit pages, etc.
• Once logged in, when you do some kind of edit and hit save, the resulting page is blank. Nothing in view source, no error, nada.
• Nothing useful in the log files. The blank-loading pages that were returning status code 200 (“successful”).
• PHP was running fine. I tested this by adding an echo statement to the admin’s index.php (in the phase where *nothing* was loading, ever).

Possible Solutions:

I searched high and low for a way to solve this, and (have I mentioned lately Google is my best friend?) there are many posts about the issue. I tried a bunch of things that worked for other people:

• Disabling all plugins by renaming the plugin folder to something else. This appears to be the solution for many, but not for me. In desperation I even created a blank plugins folder as well, as one post suggested. Not sure if that step is needed. (Note, when you revert the folder name back, you’ll have to re-activate your plugins as all will have been de-activated.)
• Various changes to the .htaccess file such as increasing the memory limit
• Updated the wp-config to increase memory limit with this at the top: @ini_set('memory_limit','64M'); (not even sure if these would work, if the host could override them or not. I have been dreaming of a vulcan mind meld with a sys-admin these past few days…)
• Re-uploaded the WP files, to ensure none are corrupt.

What worked for me

None of the above worked. Finally, in desperation, I tried renaming the theme to disable it. Aha. We may have something here… Why on earth a theme that controls the public front end breaks the admin pages I have no idea. (Anyone?) But so far, it seems to be the case for me.

Trouble is of course, this is the theme we need to use, so how to find the culprit? I re-enabled the theme, and one by one moved files from their location in the theme folder to a sub-folder. (If you’re playing along at home, don’t start with index.php. That just breaks the theme because it’s required.)

Finally I think I narrowed it down to functions.php. Mine had two things in it. First, the typical register_sidebar() bit, which I didn’t need anyway since we won’t be using widgets. The second function was something I added to the file:

function the_slug() {
$post_data = get_post($post->ID, ARRAY_A);
$slug = $post_data['post_name'];
return $slug;
}

Turns out I only ended up using it in a few places, so rather than try to figure out the issue in functions.php I just replaced those places with

echo $post->post_name;

I removed the functions.php file altogether since it’s not required. And so far, so good. The admin panel appears to be stable.

If you have any experience with this issue, what was it for you?

1. click on Settings in your WordPress admin
2. click on Reading
3. change the option “For each article in a feed, show:” to Full text.

You know, I Googled this to high heaven, including my usual lurking around the WordPress codex, I read the help pages at Feedburner, looked at my Feedsmith plugin, and could not find this option. Somehow I have completely overlooked this setting in all the blogs I’ve built. Doh! So at least I can give some fodder to the search engines in case anyone else is having the same mind melt.

Thankfully Christine had the answer to this mind melt, and my whopping subscriber base should now have full feeds.

As a side note, I’ve finally given in to the urge for a WordPress category on my site. I keep wanting to writing about things I’ve discovered, and feeling that maybe it’s a bit too technical for people that read my blog, but what the heck. It’s good to share what you’re learning and maybe someone will find it useful.

Upgrading WordPress

I just upgraded and it was pretty painless. I used the WordPress automatic upgrade plugin which backs up your files and database, deactivates plugins, etc. I found a little snag in it though. I always install WordPress in a subfolder of my site and then hide the subfolder in my URLs. So as I was going through the install, the plugin would links to download the backup-zips would be 404s/not found. I simply added the missing part of the URL and away I went.

My webhost has a 1-click upgrader for WordPress, but I don’t think it does as much in the back up department so I was a little hesitant to go that route.

A Bug in wp_list_pages

Christine upgraded DougFabian.com today, a site I helped her build, and she found a little bug after the upgrade. We had used the wp_list_pages function to build the navigation on the left, and excluded one group of pages by excluding their parent page. Well, all the children pages were being listed. Turns out others are having the same problem: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164951

I tried the suggestion in that support page to comment out one line, which broke the site, so I changed it from
$r['hierarchical'] = 0;
to
$r['hierarchical'] = 1;

And that seems to have done the trick. Other subpages are still displaying.

I would have posted an update to that in the forum, but I’m having trouble logging in. It’s a bit confusing; the codex and the forum look the same but seem to have different usernames, and I gave up eventually after chasing password resets and registration processes for a bit.

So far I’m pretty impressed with 2.5, though I agree with Christine that hidden post IDs is an unfortunate choice for us blog developers. Of course Happy Cog did a fabulous job overall. I don’t think they could do a non-fabulous redesign unless they set out to

Problem adding video in WordPress 2.5

Oh, and another snag… I was just editing this post in one tab, and opened an older post in another tab to edit it. I wanted to see if I could easily embed a YouTube video. It didn’t seem to work, but when I came back to the tab for this post, the insertion had happened in this tab and all the paragraphs in my post had disappeared :-/