Month: March 2008

Your WordPress theme code is out of date

Theme code not fit for WordPress 2.3.3 can be dangerous. I found this out the hard way.

Yes, it matters. You cannot simply upgrade the core files,you must also make sure tags and hooks in your theme are compatible as well. I’m afraid you are sort of on your own there,though.The WordPress Codex is not the most up to date batch of articles and it is from there that I have been gathering my little bits of theme info.

Which makes me wish there was a comprehensive list of tags and hooks and etc that have been definitively depreciated so that I can be sure not to use them ever again.Well of course they tell you what’s been out since 1.5 and 2.1 but not much else…
The best I could tell you is to grab a copy of an approved for 2.3.3 theme and explore its guts, comparing the code you tend to reuse with their’s and try to get up to date.
Or just keep triggering errors and wondering why, God, WHY?
I was able to find an answer in the WordPress forums despite the fact that it seem as though 98% of the questions go unresolved. But this is only because no one ever bothers to search the forum threads so the same questions get asked over and over and it tires the experts out to keep answering it.
I’m not absolutely sure that this is right but I’m pretty sure the theme code in the 2 default themes that come with every WordPress download are up to date. I hope so because I usually rely on Default for help.

New site (almost) completed

trisha mcbride dance
Trisha McBride Dance
Still not validating on the shop page,there’s one error caused by one of those lovely wandering paragraph tags right before a div tag placed by the WP-Shopping-Cart…darn it.
I may be able to get rid of it by rewriting a product description so there isn’t any whitespace(that’s usually what causes a misplaced p tag in WP).
You are not allowed to wrap a div in a p tag! So there is that error.Pesky.
All nerdy moaning aside the site looks swell if I say so myself.
We didn’t know what to do with the home page for ages.
You know it’s getting tough when you can’t decide what to do with the home page.
But it came together in a snap when the owner sent me a gorgeous photograph that, once placed, made everything else seem just about right.
The reason the home page caused trouble as far as deciding what should go there is that it’s not a blog site– although the owner is not deadset against having a blog–it’s a website for a dancer who teaches classes and leads workshops. Most websites I have seen in this genre have been less than inspirational,although a few have been pretty good(the ones who stayed away from font-family:Papyrus).

I still need to find an elegant solution to showing an excerpt from the events page(we’re using this instead of a blog for now) on the home page. I’m thinking of setting up a post category called homepage news and using a query to include it on the home page…But the rest of the site is done.
I don’t really love the turquoise color for the menu links but the site owner wanted them that colour and I want to dim the white of the floral pattern in the bg image…it’s a little too bright and it distracts the eye. Style is all very nice to have but you want site visitors to click links not stare at your bg image.
We also kind of want to stay away from the bulletin-board effect and leave the home page spare yet elegant.But most important is having keywords in that intro paragraph in case folks do searches for dance teachers and dance instruction,whatever,they may find her website…

I’ve used the Add Meta Tags plugin but woe:it doesn’t add them anywhere there aren’t posts..again yet another reason to use a custom query!

I got banned from Youtube

I’d opened an account for my client and every week I would upload more samples of clips with the hopes of teasing potential customers to come to the website and buy the full length versions.
I think we lasted about a month before they banned us.We had 202 subscribers and each clip generated about five links incoming links or outgoing( I never did figure out what the links thing meant).We were in the top 50 subscribed to channels.We had zillions of viewers.It was a good ride.
Google Analytics told me we had about 400 unique site visitors–all from Youtube. It may not sound like much but if you can get 400 people into your online store in the period of 3 weeks and 20 percent of thosse folks buy something well, that’s all good. I’ve got a Zen Cart and PayPal powered shop set up to sell the clips and we also sell memberships to the sites. I should divulge that this is a fetish website devoted to lovers of Tickling. I know– I never heard of it either until I answered this ad on Craigslist to be the webmaster/designer/developer of a non XXX yet Adult website. I needed some steady income and my new boss was going to pay me once a month ongoingly to update his websites and keep em fresh.
He wished I knew more about affiliate programs and reseller blah blah and la de da stuff like that that I’ve never thought did anything but empty your pockets a little and return zilch.
We may not be marketing geniuses but we have what the people want.We’ve got the content.
They can’t take that from you.In the end it’s all about the content.Content is king. I don’t care if you paid 25,000 for your fancy BS Flash website–if you don’t have anything in it that people want who cares? If you just use it to showcase your enourmous ego –so what? What is the point?

Well I WAS concerned that folks wouldn’t know where to look for us after YT booted us–but memberships are steady and people are still buying…That isn’t to say that we haven’t experienced a slight drop in site traffic since the account was closed–oh yeah,why was it closed?
Well there were one or two “nipple slips” in the clips samples I put on YT.
Apparently tickling is a vigorous physical activity and some of the women’s upper body endowments could not stay inside their clothing 100 percent while they were tickling someone.