Sephy’s Platzish

As some of you may remember, I wasn’t too impressed with Firefox 2 when it first came out, mostly to do with a single change to the structure of the search box. However, I finally broke down and upgraded to it and I’ve liked it, especially with the addition of a few extensions like tab mix plus to make my browsing experience my own.

Strangely, though, when I went to my home page, Firefox Central, and saw the redesign of the page the other day, it was a sign to me that the new version of the browser was out. Now, you’d think that with my prior history with a new version of software and not liking it too much, I decided that I’d be back on the cutting edge of technology and download the new version. So I did, and I have to say that I’m impressed overall, but there are a few qualms that I have.

New Location Bar

The most talked about feature by far of the new version is the redesigned location bar - dubbed as the "Magic Bar". It’s not a lie - it is quite magical. For example, if I know I saw a page about something, but can’t exactly remember the address (which for me is highly unlikely, but that’s me ), I can just type in a word that was in the title, like "Gruen" and that will bring up a list of sites that I’ve visited or bookmarked that has Gruen either in the title or in the address -

Something that you don’t see is that when a site is bookmarked, it’s got a little gold star next to it, which brings me to my next feature - one-click bookmarking. I didn’t buy into it before, but in practice, it’s devilishly simple. To bookmark a site, I usually drag it to my folder called Sites on the toolbar, but now all I have to do is click on the star in the toolbar (it shows where the go arrow is in the screenshot above) and it’s saved. Then, another click brings up a menu, which lets you file the bookmark where you want it. This even works for sites you’ve already bookmarked, such as my local radar -

Other neat features

One of the things I have a lot of are links to different RSS feeds in my Bookmarks Toolbar, and from time to time they don’t work. Usually it’s because of an error, but one thing that they’ve added to the menu that comes up when you click on a "livemark" is something deadly simple - a menu item that says "Open "Site name"" - which does just that - open the main site for the livemark so that you can view that page directly.

Also, they’ve added some other useful menus, such as the Most Visited under the bookmark toolbar, where you have a list of the ten sites you’ve visited the most over the last few days, along with the option to save your session without having to tweak your homepage every time you want to use that feature. Of course, you can still just exit the browser, but this way you have the flexibility to do that if you want.

One caveat

And it’s not even Firefox’s fault. Whenever you upgrade to a new version of Firefox (or any browser for that matter), some things tend to break. It’s no different in this case where some of my most favourite add-ons have proven to be incompatible with 3.0, but I think that’s more of a simple coding change that needs to be done.

At first, Adblock (I have regular adblock, not adblock plus) was incompatible, but just as I went to check for updates, it looks like it has been updated.

However, Firebug, Fasterfox, Tab Mix Plus, and All-in-One Gestures are not compatible yet. I would suspect that it won’t be too long before that’s sorted out though.

Overall impression

Overall, I have to say that I’m glad I’ve upgraded to the new version of the browser - it adds quite a few features that are really neat (including being able to resize the search box), and it uses quite a bit less memory - I’ve had it open for quite a while now and it’s only using 117MB of Virtual Memory and 108MB of RAM. Also, and to be honest, I haven’t noticed this too much since I have relatively fast Internet, it’s apparently much faster at loading pages.

If you’re someone who waits for software to be stable before it’s released, that’s alright, but I don’t think you’d be going wrong to take a chance and upgrade to Firefox 3.

One of the neatest programs to take the blogging world by storm (somewhat) has been Windows Live Writer, a program from Microsoft that allows you to create drafts, and publish to your blog from just about anywhere, no browser needed. I almost got to the point of downloading it, but then I thought of a program that was already on the computer.

The program is one that had laid dormant for quite a while, but is now again in part-time development - w.bloggar, a piece of freeware developed by a guy in Brazil, who has had this around for quite a few years now. It was the first offline editor that I had used (mostly because it worked with Blogger, and allowed me to quickly edit posts without having to deal with Blogger’s old system of constantly having to republish the blog every time you made a post.

There are obviously other offline editors out there (most notably WLW, which I have not used, but almost downloaded before digging this program out of the archives), but w.bloggar is the one that I’ve used almost exclusively, unless you want to count EditPad as an offline editor (which is just as valid) .

Getting started

When you download the program (if you want to use a portable version, that is available as well as a full version that can work with either Internet Explorer or Mozilla with an installer), you can go ahead and install it, or just run if if you downloaded the portable or zip versions. Now, since I’ve already got it installed and set up, I will just jump to getting your blog set up on here.

The program works as an extension of your blog; when you first start up the program, you may be shown this screen -

If you do start with that screen, then you’ll need to click on the little button next to the drop-down box and select new. This will bring up the new account wizard -

As you can see, you don’t even need to have a blog to get started with w.bloggar, but for the case of this tutorial, I’ll show you how to go about making a new account for a blog you already have (it’s fairly self-explanatory, so the screenshots will just be a guide).

The first screen you’ll see after selecting that you want to add your current blog as a new account is one where you can select which blogging platform you’re using (the program supports a whole host of them), along with setting an alias for the blog you’re setting up. For this tutorial, I’ll use my testing blog and aptly call the account Sephy Test.

In the next screen, this is where you put in the information about your blog - since I like to keep my test blog’s address somewhat quiet, I’ll leave the sample stuff in there for the shot. Anyway, simply put in the address of your blog (only the domain name, i.e. www.sephyroth.net), and then in the Path box, put the directory that you have WP installed on, followed by xmlrpc.php (so, if your blog is in the /blog/ subfolder, then you’d put /blog/xmlrpc.php; if it’s in the root, then /xmlrpc.php). You can also adjust the port you use, turn on encryption, and choose if you want to use UTF-8 encoding.

The next screen is quite simple - just put in your username and password for your blog - if you want to save it, go ahead, otherwise you can leave the box unchecked.

And, that’s it - you’ll now be in the editor window, ready to make a post to your blog! (well, of course, now I have this post in there as a draft, but you know what I mean.

Touring the editor window

Now, let’s take a quick tour of the editing window. The first few buttons on the first toolbar are fairly obvious, through to the spellcheck.

After that is one of the features that I didn’t even know about until starting to write this (in fact, there’s a lot of hidden stuff in here - so if you decide to get it, do some exploring!); as a matter of fact, it’s quite a handy feature - custom tags. This button allows you to put in your own HTML tags that you use frequently (i.e. for me, one making a centre-aligned paragraph would be useful because of all the pictures I post).

Then you have a control area - Options, a pseudo-logout button, which brings you back to the w.bloggar start window. Next is your blog list - if you use Blogger, this is a very handy tool - it will retrieve your full list of blogs, and you’ll be able to select the blog you want to work on. The next button (the one with the red checkmark on it) is the Blog Properties button, if you click it, you will be brought to this window, where you can make custom settings for previewing, how you upload your images (yes, you can upload images properly to WP - with thumbnails!), and media information -

The other buttons of importance on the first row are the next one - go to blog site, which loads the blog in either IE or your default browser (a simple option you can switch in the options), and the Posts button - if you click on the down arrow next to Posts, you’ll be able to edit the last number of posts, or choose a post number to edit (if you know the number of the exact post you want to edit, that is ). The Template button that you see at the end, before the Help button is grayed out because you can’t edit the template for WP blogs, only for Blogger blogs that use classic templates.

If you select a number of posts to edit, you’ll see this dialog, from which you can select a post to edit (by the way, it doesn’t have to have been made in w.bloggar to edit) -

The second row of buttons is a standard formatting bar, with a couple of buttons that are important at the end - first is the upload button, which allows you to upload a file to your blog. There’s also the Post and Post & Publish buttons - Post is used to save a post as a draft on your blog’s site, and Post & Publish is used to publish the post to your blog.

This is what the Upload dialog looks like -

Now, in the main body of the screen, you have your basics, like post title, and categories (which are culled from your category list; if you want to use more than one category, click the ellipsis to bring up your tag list and tick as many boxes necessary. The tabbar that is there is used to create options - More is for if you want to have a jump in your post, and preview allows you to look at your post in what should be your blog, but so far I’ve had issues with getting it to work properly with WordPress.

One of the features accessible from the More panel is the Advanced options. This is where you can set your trackback and comment settings, along with text filters (if enabled), and edit the date and time.

Using these advanced options has created an interesting problem - if you choose to edit the time of your post, WordPress will read that as having been posted at the time you set, GMT. For example, if I set a post in w.bloggar to have a timestamp of 4 PM, my blog would think that it was published at 10 AM, or 6 hours behind server time. However, if you use the current date & time option, it will publish the post at the time it currently is on your blog.

The status bar has the usual stuff - date, lock info, insert/overwrite status, and a couple of other things - first, the WordPress logo is clickable - that will bring you to the account properties, where you can adjust the settings from the original setup, and the notes brings you to the Media page from the Blog options dialog

Using the Editor

It’s simple to use the editor in w.bloggar - it’s just like using any other plain-text editor (EditPad, or the WordPress “code” view), where you need to insert the HTML code manually, but the program does give you a generous helping hand, by way of the Format and HTML menus, along with the HTML toolbar.

You’ll notice that the HTML toolbar and the HTML menu have the exact same layout, save for the Custom Tags item appearing in the menu and not the toolbar as it is already in the main Toolbar. If you want to try a preview of how it would look on your site, you can try the Preview tab, but it has some pitfalls, as this is what a preview of this post looks like in there -

As always, your mileage may vary with your platform, but so far I’ve had issues with WordPress, and when I used this for Blogger, they didn’t have the customised CSS functionality that I remember.

Give it a go!

If you’re interested in giving w.bloggar a go, check out the download page - there you’ll find links to download all the versions of the program. It is Windows-only, with a selection of languages available. If you’re adventurous, you could always use the first stable version, but then you’d lose a lot of the additional functionality of the newest versions, including uploading files.

I have to say, by the way, that I’m actually pretty sold on this program again - it’s simple to use, there isn’t that much of a learning curve, and the best feature of all - I’ve had it running for quite a while, and done a lot with the program today, and it’s only using 17 megs of virtual memory, and 25 megs of RAM; I bet Windows Live Writer can’t live up to that.

Last week, I had a post published on the Aussie Bloggers blog about how to get your own Gravatar set up. This is the natural extension of that - making your blog Gravatar-friendly. This guide is for WordPress blogs, but there will be some information available at the end of the post about other platforms. First off, an important question is if you’re already using gravatar and might not know it, because you’re using a Gravatar-ready theme.

Gravatar-ready themes

There are a few themes out there which are already set up for Gravatar - including one of the more common themes that I see on a daily basis - Freedom Green & Widgetized. It’s the theme in use on the Aussie Bloggers blog, on Snoskred’s, Lightening’s, and quite a few other blogs. Any site that is running this theme really doesn’t need to read further. Of course, I’d like it if you did anyway.

Gravatar plugin

If you’re not running one of those themes, you’ll need to do one of two things - hack your own theme’s code to match the code that you can find in the Gravatar-ready themes, or you can make it easy for yourself and download the Gravatar plugin. You will still have to fiddle with your site’s code, but going this way, it’s only a matter of adding a simple bit of code into your comments file.

Gravatar says on its site that the plugin is only for WordPress 1.2, however, I have tried this on a blog that is on version 2.3.2, and I know that it works up to and including the latest editions of WordPress with no problems.

Installing the plugin is no different to installing any other plugin. Simply download the zip file, expand it to your system, and then upload it to your blog. Then, in the Plugins page, activate it. Now, what you need to do is find the file that controls your comments.

Generally, that will be found in your Theme’s directory - and is normally called comments.php. If you have the permissions set where you can edit files while they’re on the server, then you can edit it using the Theme editor, which can be found in Presentation -> Theme Editor. When there, click on Comments, and you can edit the file.

A word of advice

Before getting into showing you how to put the Gravatar into your comments, I want to give you some important advice about styling. As you will see in my example here, I haven’t done any styling to the image. I’m just putting it in there as a proof-of-concept that it works. You will have to take some time to play around with the CSS to get it where you want it. If you would like some assistance with that, feel free to contact me, and we can work something out.

Also, I am doing this on my personal testing bed (which has a very stylish black theme which I modified; I gotta say that I’m a bit chuffed about it, but I digress), and you should do the same thing; with the same theme that you are using on your blog, so that it is simply a matter of copy the code that you’ve come up with and paste it into the same files on your current theme. I’m a firm believer that end users probably shouldn’t be the ones checking out live testing of something.

With that out of the way, let’s go back to the show.

So, in the comments.php file - either in your offline editor, or in the built-in editor in WordPress, you will want to look for a section that looks like this in the file -

If you don’t find something exactly like that, searching for “comment_text()” should come back with what you are looking for in the file.

Now, again, this is why it’s just a proof-of-concept showing you how to put it in there, I’m going to put the Gravatar code into the comments.php file just before the comment text. An important thing is that you need to put in image tags around the Gravatar code. Otherwise, you’ll see the address that your blog is looking for to load the image.

The code that you will need to put in is this - <img src="<?php gravatar(); ?>" alt="Gravatar" />

There are variations to the code that you can make to restrict the types of Gravatars that appear - you might want to restrict by Rating (G, PG, R, X). You might also want to set the size of the Gravatar that shows by putting in a number. It will then show the images in that size, up to 80×80 which is the maximum for a Gravatar. A special function that you can control is what shows when the user doesn’t have a Gravatar by telling it what address to cull the image from to put in its place. Lastly, you can put in a border if you want by declaring the Hex code for the border you want.

In my example, I’m going to use just change the image size to half-width, so the code will look like this -<img src="<?php gravatar("" ,40) ?>" alt="Gravatar" />

This is what the code looks like in situ in the rest of the file -

And, then, this is the output of the code as I have it:

Other blog platforms

If you aren’t using self-hosted WordPress, then your success at using Gravatar will vary. On the Implement page, they are open about what blogging platforms it will work with - TextPattern (using a hack), MovableType, WordPress, Expression Engine, PMachine, Nucleus, YACS, Blojsom, and instructions for PHP, PERL, ColdFusion and Java. However, two services that it doesn’t work with are Blogger and LiveJournal.

If you use Blogger, there are third-party services that you can use, but those services only mean that you and your readers are dependent upon another party getting everything together every day to serve up your comments. While Blogger’s commenting system is quite flawed, it is my personal opinion that you are better off just going with Blogger’s default and waiting for them to hopefully get something going where you can have the option of using Gravatar.

If you have questions

If you have any questions about implementing Gravatar on your WordPress blog, feel free to leave a comment here or drop me a line via the Contact page. I’m almost always willing to help out to get something sorted out, and if you’re looking for some design consultation, I’m willing to help out in that field as well.

Also, if there is a topic that you’re wanting me to cover in a future how-to, again, just drop me a line via the contact page.

This isn’t a message in terms of the standard blog post, but more a message along the lines of “I’ve moved, you can keep up with me at my new address” message. If you will, a sort-of sticky post.

It’s actually quite simple to do - and is probably something you’ve already done in the past on your sidebar. The first thing is to go into your blog’s template section (either by clicking on Layout on the dashboard or Template in your blog’s work page).

Then, when you’re in there, click on one of the “Add a Page Element” links -

It doesn’t matter which link you click, as we will be moving the text to the body anyway. When the window pops up, click on the Add to Blog link under Text element, since that is what is being added.

Now, you’ll be in the normal text editor. Put in the message you want to. For example, since I’m actually doing this on a testing blog, I’ll just put in some generic rambling.

When you’re done, click on save changes to confirm your message. If you want to have full control over the look of the message, you can always use the Edit HTML link to edit the code behind the text.

Now, you’ll be back in the Layout screen, and the new element will be the first one in the spot where you chose to put it. In my case, I used the sidebar, so it’s there. What you need to do now is simply drag it over to the body of the blog (don’t worry, a box will appear to show you where it is going to).

When it’s in the place you want it to be, click save to confirm the changes.

Of course, be sure to check the blog to make sure that the message is there, and then it’s all done. As you can see on my example, it is above the posts, and if you would like to use your blog for other things (you know, paid blogging, etc), you’re free to, and the message will stay the first thing visitors see.

As always, if there’s something you’d like to have explained, drop me a line, either through the contact page, or if you’re on the Aussie Bloggers forums, drop me a PM. I’ll post about it and show not only you, but anyone else who may be wondering how to do the same thing how to do it.

Not a lot of y’all know this, but I have quite a decent knowledge of Spanish - I’m not completely fluent, but I have advanced conversational skills, and can compose emails with minimal assistance from online translators. However, one thing that I can’t normally do with Spanish is have my spelling checked in Firefox.

This is something easily fixed, and in the process of my installing this particular language to my Firefox, I’m going to show the rest of y’all as well (I’ve already done this to add another language, which you’ll see when I show you the menu later).

The first thing is that you need to be at a text form (it can be any type of input line - even the search box that comes up when you go to Scroogle’s homepage can suffice). In this case, I’m going to use the title line of this post. You will need to turn on spellcheck for that particular field by right clicking and turning on Spell Check This Field first.

Next, right click again on the field, and go down one line below Spell Check This Field, and you will see Languages, which will expand into a new menu, with (in most instances) only one language in the list. Select Add languages… from that sub menu.

That will bring you to the Firefox Add-ons page which has a whole list of dictionaries that you can select from. They’re organized by the language’s first letter, in that actual language - thus, you have Welsh (Cmyraeg) listed before English.

Go through the list until you find the language you want to install, and then click the Install link. This will bring up the standard warning about the extension you want to install being unsigned. However, since you are downloading it from the official Addons site, it should be safe to use.

Then, the Add-ons window will open, and the new dictionary will install itself. After it’s done, you will need to restart Firefox to use your new dictionary. Unless you’re working on something important (like this blog* post, or an online application), you can go right ahead and restart right away, as it will keep your current tabs remembered for when you restart.

After you’ve restarted, it’s as simple as going back to the Languages sub-menu and selecting the newly installed language as the one you want to check your spelling in. Firefox will remember your choice from then on.

*Apparently, in the Australian English dictionary that I downloaded from Mozilla, “blog”, “firefox”, and “Mozilla” are considered misspelt. Go figure…that’s why there’s the Add to dictionary option, I guess.