Will the WordPress plugins you add be supported?
One of the great pluses of WordPress is that there are so many plugins available to add those nifty extra bits of functionality which aren’t in the core but which make your site special – or just allow it to meet your minimum requirements. Most of those plugins are free which is another big plus […] [more…]
By Kate Phizackerley
Adding Co-Authors
One of the requirements for a magazine displaying academic and near-academic papers is the ability to cope with co-authors. As standard, WordPress only supports a single author and that author has to be set up as a user. Now it’s possible to make then only a subscriber, but I still dislike the equivalence between author […] [more…]
By Kate Phizackerley
Google XML Sitemaps PlugIn
The Google XML Sitemaps PlugIn was the first added to the site. It builds a site map in a form easily read by search engine spiders. Every site needs readers and that means at least some effort needs to go into improving the visibility of the site with search engines. The Google Sitemaps PlugIn does […] [more…]
By Kate Phizackerley
Risk Assessment
As part of building our magazine we undertook a risk assessment to make help identify and address potential problems and issues. In this post, learn about the basics of risk assessment [more…]
By Kate Phizackerley
Browser Compatibility – Pseudo Elements
(This is an article for HTML/CSS newcomers.) When building Egytpological we took the decision that: we wouldn’t support IE6, and would support IE7 and IE8 for functional essentials (while pushing the design further in better browsers) The attached table gives some clues as to why this is necessary. It shows browser compatibility for pseudo elements. […] [more…]
By Kate Phizackerley
Scenes from an Italian Restaurant – Billy Joel
There is some great material on YouTube and I’m delighted they have come to an agreement with some major artists to feature their material. The trouble is, one is never sure which artists’ work has been approved and which haven’t so videos might disappear or embedding might be disabled. It’s a shame because it can […] [more…]
By Kate Phizackerley
Cheiro – Palm Reader
A short post about the clairvoyant astrologer and chieromancer Count Louis Hamon aka “Chiero”. [more…]
By Kate Phizackerley
Bruce Lee
My visit to Hong Kong was overcast at the best: wet much the time. I was staying in the Shangri La hotel in Kowloon, near the Tsim Tsa station. I’d caught the ferry back over the harbour and by the time I reached Kowloon the weather was finally starting to clear. I walked past […] [more…]
By Kate Phizackerley
Adding Halos (Opaque Children of Transparent Parents)
One of the most difficult aspects of the design was adding the transparent halos around blocks using the CSS opacity settings. This is difficult to do in pure CSS because opacity is inherited. A white backgound placed on a transparent parent will itself be transparent even if its own opacity is set to 100%. The […] [more…]
By Kate Phizackerley
Akismet Spam Defender / Site Status
Akismet is one of two plugins which come as part of the standard WordPress build (as at version 2.9.1). The second is Hello Dolly which has no purpose and can just be deleted. Akismet, though, is an essential plugin in the fight against recognising spam comments. The advice is very simple: implement it immediately. One […] [more…]
By Kate Phizackerley