manstraw

Interesting. I guess their method of making money is from the google ads on their forum. If the forum is active, more traffic to it, and more google revenue. For this, they are willing to give away a modest free account. I’d rather just pay for it than waste my time pimping their forum. But this might be a good option for those who have more time than money.

I haven’t looked at the page in IE, but I really don’t need to. The box model in IE doesn’t conform to standards, and it bites a lot of people in the butt. I suspect this is your problem. However …

If you remove the login requirement, you can use http://validator.w3.org/ to make sure you don’t have coding errors. Best rule that out first.

An other thing you can do is install this > http://ie7.sf.net. It’s basically javascript that fixes all the errors Internet Explorer has with it’s rendering. The only penalty is speed, in that Firefox renders faster than IE with javascript assist.

It could be incorrect permissions, or incorrect owner/group. Look at what a working plugin has, and copy that. Do it for both the files and folder it’s in.

If you don’t want it to be public, you could sign up with performancing.com. You basically stick a bit of code in your footer, and performancing will track all sort of stats for you. Find out what the screen resolution of your visitors for example. It will track views for each post as well.

There’s one problem with that though. Some people just read the list, they never click on a post, or even a category. They come, they read the list, skip over some items, read others. There’s no real way to know which posts they actually read. Tracking post reads is more meaningful when they are old, and people are finding the archive through google etc. When it’s fresh content, it’s hard to be sure.

Yes. PHP pages always return html, and contain recognizable chunks of html. The whole point of php is to create html, but to do it dynamically. In simple terms, php customizes the page for each view. It finds the very latest info, and formats it to proper html. It typically gets the data from a mysql database, and this is how wordpress works as well.

In the old days, we used to write 20 pages of code if we needed twenty pages of html. When we need to change the navigation on every page, we had to change the code on all pages. Quite a task, when the page count increases. PHP let’s you bust the page up into pieces, so if you need to change the navigation for all 20 pages, you really just change a bit of code in one place one time, and it will instantly be shown on all pages. Because we build the page each time it’s viewed, we always have up to the minute html code.

Did that make sense? It’s all about being dynamic instead of static.

You could temporarily change the moderation settings for the whole blog. And then just switch it back after the heat has died down. That’s what a lot of people do.

I’ll just explain that a little further.

Inside each theme is the html for how the page looks. There is an initial page, index.php (inside your theme dir as explained in the previous post), which is basically a page that calls up the entries from every category and makes a list. The index.php page will call header.php, sidebar.php, and footer.php. Header is all the html until just past the body tag, sidebar is the side navigation html, and footer closes off the page with the closing body and html tags.

There are other pages that have slightly different tasks, like single.php, archives.php etc. They all want to do different things on the page, like display a single post, or display all posts from a single category, but they will all generally call the header and footer into the page, and often the sidebar.

By having common header, footer, and sidebar files, each page will built pretty much the same. A lot of what you want to customize will be in the header, footer, and sidebar files. These files frame the page. To get specific in the middle of the page with the meat of the content, look to index.php, single.php, archive.php, archives.php, etc.

The is an over simplificaion, but I hope it gives you the general picture. Each theme has it’s own unique header, footer, etc., and of course, a unique style.css file. Most of the colour stuff, and a LOT of the layout is actually in the style.css file. In short, if you want to change how it looks, edit the style.css file. If you want to change what appears, look to the php files, and look for the html within then.

ah, you want free. well. I don’t know of any free hosting that will run wp, other than the wordpress.com type thing. it costs money to run those servers. pretty much gotta pay something. http://wordpress.org/hosting/