Custom fields in WordPress (meta-data) can be extremely handy for controlling how you display your blog posts. In this article, I describe how I used custom fields — together with modifying the WordPress loop for the site’s front page — to solve a not uncommon problem: When blog posts about events from the far past show up in the “Recent Posts” section of a site’s home page, visitors might react negatively. It’s a little like letting newspapers pile up in your driveway when you’re on vacation: people might think you’re lazy or not home. Deleting such posts isn’t the answer.
Techniques
Short How-To articles, similar to Case Studies but on a smaller scale.
Are Your iPhone Photos Upside-Down or Sideways?
Are Your iPhone Photos Upside-Down or Sideways? If so, I have a solution. (I even have a partial explanation. Emphasis on “partial”.)
Read Blogs More Efficiently (and Enhance your Blog Reading Experience) Using Categories and Tags
Boy, if there isn’t a whole lot of junk out there on the Web! But there’s also a lot of good stuff. Unfortunately, finding the good stuff can be difficult. So much of that junk just gets in the way. Even if you’ve found a blog (or blogs) you like to read, you might be spending too much time sifting through articles that are of no real interest to you. At some point, you probably give up. This article is written for people who read blogs. If you’re one of them, the tips herein might make your blog-surfing time more efficient and rewarding.
Which Categories and Tags Should I Use?
For people who are new to blogging, the concepts of Categories and Tags can be confusing. The first challenge is understanding what they are and how they differ. The next challenge is using them effectively. The purpose of this article is to offer guidance in addressing that second challenge.
How to use Advanced Custom Fields with Genesis
I can’t explain why I’ve waited so long to try out the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. All I can say is I’m glad I finally did. Today. This article will show you one simple method for displaying the values of those custom fields in your Genesis child theme.
CSS Descendant Selectors
CSS descendant selectors (also known as contextual selectors) allow you to write lean, clean, semantic html and CSS markup with a minimum number of class and ID names, making your code easier to understand and maintain, and maybe even giving you a sense of harmonious calm. In this article, I explain this claim with an example.
Sort Multidimensional Arrays with PHP array_multisort
Without question, the most common operation in the Web applications I build is retrieving gobs of structured data and displaying that data in some order. In most cases, the data comes from database tables. But not always. In this article, I share what I’ve found out about how one can use the array_multisort function to sort multidimensional arrays.
Customizing WordPress Using Vendor-Built Child Themes
While the child theme method works well for many WordPress Web-site builds, sites based on vendor-built child themes require a different strategy. This article describes my current favorite approach and invites discussion on the topic.
How to add an About Us blurb to every WordPress blog post
While WordPress has functions and template tags for displaying “About the Author” information on single blog post pages (in fact, many themes innately support this), there’s nothing similar for displaying “About Us” information. This article offers a simple method for adding an “About Us” blurb after the main text of every single blog post. And I hope it gets your wheels turning about ways to add customized content to your WordPress Web site.
Underlining for Emphasis: How to un-underline text on a Web page with CSS
No matter how loudly and often we tell our clients who maintain their own Web sites (via WordPress and other CMS-driven platforms) that using underlining for emphasis on the Web is a very bad idea, many of them do it anyway. This article explains, first of all, why this practice is a bad idea, and then it offers a simple CSS solution for removing underlines that shouldn’t appear on Web pages.