By going into the Backblaze settings in your System Preferences, you can select the check box next to “Show Backblaze icon in the menu bar.”  However, every time I checked the box, the icon would not come back.  And upon return to the preferences, the box remained unchecked.  A mystery?  Yes, indeed.

Therefore, I contacted customer support and they gave me a quick and easy solution that made my day.  Try the following steps below to fix the mysteriously missing Backblaze icon from the menu bar in Snow Leopard.

1. Click on the Finder
2. Press Command + Shift + G
3. Enter /Library/Backblaze in the text field and press “Go”
4. Right click on the folder “bzdata” and Get Info (or press command + i)
5. Change the permissions, so that all users have “Read & Write” permissions.
6. Then click the gear icon and select “Apply to enclosed items..”
7. If the Backblaze icon doesn’t show up on the menu bar, follow steps 1-3 again and this time double click “bzbmenu” and this will place the icon in the right spot.

Enter the Genesis Framework from StudioPress. As soon as I got a look at how the framework is built I was instantly impressed. First, it has several great features that are helpful to both developers and users. It offers automatic updates, great security, customizable theme settings, custom widgets, plenty of layout options, and the list goes on. There are a lot of frameworks out there that give you similar things, but Genesis has some really cool features for developers too.

For starters, the theme is fully compatible with all the new features in WordPress 3.0. StudioPress was quick to add those features for their users, and that kind of dedication to their product is a huge value. Another great value for developers is the themes construction. They have built Genesis to be a starting point for child themes, allowing for radically different sites without having to do the same edits to the main theme over and over again. To help make a child theme as customizable as it needs to be in order to be successful, they have built in plenty of hooks to do whatever you need. If you want to add a widgetized area above the footer, it’s easy. You need an add area above the content, it can be done. Anything you can think of you can do. Proof of this is easy enough to find, since from what I can tell every theme that StudioPress has available is a child theme of Genesis.

On top of all this, StudioPress has an active community of users and developers on their forums that can offer help to any problems people come up with. I think anyone who really uses WordPress knows how important an active community can be.

To wrap this up, I can simplify my first impressions into one word : awesome. I’m really looking forward to building some cool stuff on top of this theme framework, and when I do i’ll be back writing a post about it.

add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'my_get_posts' );
 
function my_get_posts( $query ) {
	if ( is_home() )
		$query->set( 'post_type', array( 'post', 'page', 'album', 'movie', 'quote', 'attachment' ) );
 
	return $query;
}

So to add your custom post types into the your blog homepage you can put this code just before the WordPress post loop. The following code adds in the post types you would like to use and also checks to make sure your paging still works.

<?php 
if( is_home() ){
$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts( array('post_type'=>array( 'post', 'linkpost'),'paged'=>$paged ) );
}
?>

if you want to read more about the first piece of code you can check it out on Justin Tadlock’s blog.

VPS.net WordPress Hosting

Think2Loud doesn’t yet need the power that Yoast.com is running on. I got a VPS.net Cloud Server with the following setup on it, and what’s more, I did it all on my own. Yoast mentions in their WordPress article that if you buy 6 nodes or more, VPS.net will set you up with exactly what they have. Since Think2Loud currently only has about 15K visits a month, I couldn’t justify that much power. With some help from the VPS.net forums and following Yoast’s setup list, this is what I have running:

• 1 Cloud Server at VPS.net, (2 nodes at the moment, tried 1 and there was just not enough RAM)
• Centos with CPanel in the Atlanta cloud
• replaced Apache with LiteSpeed (this really is easy )
• installed APC so I could do database and output caching with the W3 Total Cache plugin
• and of course a CDN. I went with MaxCDN because they were the best deal I could find

Pretty simple, right? Now there are a few things that I would like to share with you about VPS.net and the setup they have. I couldn’t find this info anywhere on the web but you may find it valuable. I know it made my day once I signed up and got started.

• CPanel and WHM are monthly add-ons and VPS.net does the licensing.
• LiteSpeed is also a monthly add-on and has a CPanel module. VPS.net also takes care of the license.
• TThere is a small fee for there snapshot service. (Get it! you can never have too many backups).
• I also setup Rsync on my server with the help of VPS.net. Again, there is a small fee, but it backs up everything.

That’s it! With just a little work, you can have one lean, mean, WordPress hosting machine. Be sure to check out the WordPress hosting article over at Yoast.com, and I would like to thank them for pointing me to a great hosting service.

<?php if ( have_posts() ) while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
	<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(); ?>>
		<h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
		<div class="entry-content">
			<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
			<?php the_content(); ?>
		</div><!-- .entry-content -->
	</div><!-- #post -->
<?php endwhile; // end of the loop. ?>

Doing this causes the intro of the post to show twice, once from the auto-generated excerpt and once in the post content. To fix this, we added a quick check to the post loop. Simply replacing the_excerpt function in the post loop with this little piece of code removed the double intro.

<?php 
	if( !empty($post->post_excerpt) ) {
		//We have a excerpt so print it
		the_excerpt();
	} 
?>

In jQuery the easiest way to do that is to use the built-in ajax functions to call the XML and use the each function to loop through all the nodes. The each function is nice, but is much much slower than a for loop. Just imagine what happens when we have an XML document with multiple levels of nested nodes you need to get at. You end up with multiple nested $.each functions and without much trying, you end up with a script that crawls. With JSON it’s easy to get at the data since its already native javascript. No parsers or proxies necessary–all you need to do is loop through the data, fast and simple. That’s one point for JSON.

There are aspects of XML that people point to as reasons to use it. First, XML is both human and machine readable. It is nice to see what data is being returned just by viewing the source, but that problem is solved by having good documentation, including an example of the JSON that will be returned. Also, being a front-end developer, I spend a lot of my time reading javascript anyway. I find it just as easy to read as XML, it’s just different.

Another good reason to use XML is that it’s widely available. Lots of websites offer APIs to get at their public (and sometimes private) data, and I usually find the returned format of these APIs are often either XML or JSON. However since XML has been around longer than JSON, there is simply more XML out there.

Sometimes you might find yourself in a situation where you don’t have JSON as an option. So do you submit to the API gods and slow down your site and just use the XML? Why do that when you can write the API yourself! This is where some server side skills come in handy. It’s super easy to load an XML document via PHP and print out the data in whatever format you need it to be in.

So in conclusion, you should be using JSON every chance you get.

Selecting by ID

This is best used when you want to target one specific element. The selector is exactly the same as what you would use to set styles for the particular element in CSS.

Selecting element with CSS and setting some styles.

#youridhere {
	display: none;
}

Now selecting the same element with jQuery and adding CSS styles.

$("#youridhere").css("display","none");

Selecting by Class

With the class selector you can select multiple elements at once. jQuery deals with multiple elements in a very simple manor. It returns an array of jQuery objects. With the way jQuery is designed it will automaticaly apply anything you do to your selection to all elements without having to loop threw the results.

Lets take a simples example of hiding all elements with a class of hide. To do this with CSS we would create the class in our style sheet like so:

.hide {
	display: none;
}

To do this same thing to all the elements with the class of hide in jQuery. You would use the following statement:

$(".hide").css("display","none");

This should get you started on the path of using jQuery in your projects. To read more about the selectors your can use in jQuery check out the documentation.