CodeProfessor

Determining The Author Of The Current Post April 12, 2006

This post is the precursor to the post I’ve promised that shows how you can tweak your WordPress blog platform to share Google AdSense or Chitika (or what have you). Instead of writing a single, long, complicated post, I thought I’d split the instructions up into two posts. This post shows you how to determine the author of a specific blog entry. If you are going to test the code, you’ll need to create a couple of test users on your WordPress blog, then post at least one entry each.

While researching the WordPress documentation, I was surprised to find that …

Building A Tag Cloud in WordPress March 15, 2006

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Some weblogs display a feature known as a tag cloud. This consists of the blog’s categories shown in varying font sizes. (See the bottom of the navigation sidebar.) The larger the font used for a specific category, the more posts that category has. Each category in the tag cloud links to a page containing all of the posts falling into the category. [MINOR REVISION: Mar 28/06]

The idea behind the tag cloud is that it gives visitors a visual cue as to the focus of the weblog. It’s much easier to tell, compared to a list of categories and their post …

Getting To Know Your Blog Platform Database

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Having surfed the blogosphere regularly, I ‘ve come across a fair number of bloggers who are non-programmers but have either written a plugin or otherwise modified their blog platform. Since many of the most popular blogging platforms are built on the PHP web programming/ scripting language, that’s actually not surprising.

PHP is a friendly language, relatively easy to use, and widely available for domains hosted by most Internet hosting providers. PHP is OpenSource, and is often paired with the equally OpenSource mySQL RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) package, especially for blogging platforms. MySQL is used to store information about a blog, …