Tag: troubleshooting

Ok, as posted yesterday, I upgraded some parts of the blog. In fact I installed plaintxtBlog version 3.0.2 by Scott Allan Wallick. The previous one, version 2.3, was really outdated, as Scott himself pointed out in a comment on this very pages. Sorry, Scott, if I did not upgrade earlier, and thanks a lot for the theme you developed.

This version runs really smooth and, as before, it’s widgets ready. So I finally managed to install some widgets on the sidebar. Especially, the CD covers you can admire on the said sidebar are brought to you by a nice widget developed by a guy called Dog Of Dirk. The widget is Run for Cover. I just modified some parts of the php code of the widget to make it valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional code. I tried to contact the author, but found no useful address on his page. The mod is really easy, and concerns adding a alt attribute to the img tag that is generate to display the pictures. The substitution is as follows:

The lines

$rfc_imgHTML = "<img src='" . $rfc_AMZimg['image'] . "' "
. "title='" . $rfc_safe_title . ": " . $rfc_safe_artist . "' ";


must become

$rfc_imgHTML = "<img src='" . $rfc_AMZimg['image'] . "' "
. "title='" . $rfc_safe_title . ": " . $rfc_safe_artist . "' " . "alt='" . $rfc_safe_title . ": " . $rfc_safe_artist . "' ";


And the XHTML validates.

Another new entry is a category cloud loaded as a widget. The former one was taken from a piece of code I found somewhere (I really can’t remember where exactly) that looked like this:


< ?php
// Recupero le informazioni sulle categorie dal database
$qrystr = "SELECT cat_ID, cat_name, category_count from $wpdb->categories ORDER BY cat_name";
$cats = $wpdb->get_results($qrystr);
//Recupero il numero massimo di post per una singola categoria
$max_value = 0;
foreach ($cats as $cat)
{
if ($max_value < $cat->category_count) {
$max_value = $cat->category_count;
}
}
//Considero 15 scalini , a partire da 60% a 200%
//Per modificare questi due valori basta modificare i valori delle variabili
$percentuale_minima = 80;
$percentuale_massima = 190;
$percentuale_scalino = 10;
$numero_scalini = ($percentuale_massima-$percentuale_minima)/$percentuale_scalino;
$post_per_scalino = $max_value / $numero_scalini;
// Stampo tutte le categoria all'interno di un div (id=cloud)
// assegno una classe alla categoria (o alle categorie) più grandi
echo '<div id="cloud">';
foreach ($cats as $cat)
{
$catname = $cat->cat_name;
$catlink = get_category_link($cat->cat_ID);
$postcnt = $cat->category_count;
if ($postcnt != 0) {
$percentuale_fontsize = $percentuale_minima+(Round($postcnt/$post_per_scalino)*$percentuale_scalino);
echo '<a href="',$catlink,'"';
if ($percentuale_fontsize==$percentuale_massima) {
echo ' style="font-size: ', $percentuale_fontsize,'%" class="top_category" title="',$postcnt,' post">';
}
else {
echo ' style="font-size: ', $percentuale_fontsize,'%" title="',$postcnt,' post">';
}
echo $catname,"\r";
}
}
echo "";
?>


In fact it worked perfectly. But I found a way to better integrate the theme, and in fact this is a widget named Category Cloud Widget developed by Lee Kelleher.

I just needed to differentiate the most used category with some visual effect, so i added


if ($count == $max_num) { $max_class="class=\"top_category\""; } else { $max_class=""; }


after these lines


foreach ($counts as $catname => $count)
{
$catlink = $catlinks{$catname};


and defined a top_category css class for the cloud div. In the original widget the cloud is a <p> but I prefered to have a div.

I still have to fix some minor problems with the page templates and finally I need to solve the permalink problem with mod_rewrite that prevents galleryo (an old plugin) from working properly.

Mitakuye Oyasin!