rustindy

The latest version of Ryan’s WP-ContactForm places the options include in the /wp-content/plugins/ folder now and not in the /wp-admin/ folder, so if you’ve been keeping up-to-date with it, you won’t need to worry about accidentally deleting the file from /wp-admin/ 🙂

Ever since I got my little Zire72 I’ve been working towards more accessible sites. Even if it’s as little as source-ordering the content above the sidebars, it’s still good. Ideally, of course, there’s a seperate stylesheet for non-desktop browsers, but I can’t expect everyone to do that. Hell, I haven’t done that yet either (my current project will, however, be fully PDA accessible – both site and blog).

I still haven’t managed to get a copy of Zeldman’s book 🙁

My res is 1280 as well, but I keep my browser at 1024×768 most of the time. I rarely full-screen it unless I’m looking at pictures that don’t fit a 1024 window.

Personally though, if a fluid layout is designed well (meaning plenty of whitespace and percentage-based margins and em-based line-heights, etc.), I have no problem reading it. It annoys me more when someone forgets that the scroll bar takes up a few pixels and I end up with a horizontal scroll bar on a site that is only 3 pixels too wide for 800×600 or 1024×768.

So FWIW, a fluid layout can be done if it is done well. If the text becomes hard to read beyond a certain width, then use the CSS max-width selector and a little Javascript for browsers that don’t support it.

A 1000-pixel wide table will create a horizontal scrollbar at 800×600 resolution, even if it is empty.

It’s not a WP specific thing – 3 column layouts with semantic source ordering (as it’s called) is a bugger-hard thing to do. Fortunately, there are a few places I’ve seen that show exactly how to do it – all the hacks needed for different browsers, all the caveats related to it’s use, etc.

The benefit is, natch, backwards compatibility – or “graceful degradation”. Old browsers should see the content before the sidebar menus 🙂

denis: i wasn’t caching originally, nope. now there’s a cron job on my server that runs every 5 minutes and pulls the info directly from the WP databases to store the necessities in another database. Realistically, I could just read all the databases whenever the page is read (it only takes about a second to get the info from 20 blogs), but this way seriously reduces the load on the server 🙂 And it’s a hell of a lot easier to work with the database data than the XML data 🙂

Yup. Either use a different database or change the “prefix” option in the new blog’s wp-config.php file to something other than “wp_”.

Well according to the Apache documentation, a server-side include is not going to work for you – an included file must exist in the same website as the file that called it.

And I *did* say that the example I gave should work on IIS – it wasn’t meant to work on Apache.

Your friends will need to find some other method of including your RSS feed on their pages. iframe is probably the best way overall, but if you want search engines to be able to see your links, you’re limited to having them use a CGI script. Sorry.

Ahhh kay, gotcha. http://www.innereyes.com/ is an ASP page that just pulls blog information straight from the MySQL databases. You’ll need to go to the MySQL site and download MyODBC 3.51 and install it if you want to access the MySQL database(s) directly from ASP.

Your other option would be to grab the RSS feed from the blog using ASP and parse it into useful variables or arrays for display on your ASP page. The problem with that is speed, however. It’s a lot slower than simply selecting data from the databases directly.