The really simple solution we came up is resource-friendly while he can keep all of his links. Most probably the best thing of this simple usage of Wordpress functions: it’s entirely based on Wordpress’ template tags and there is no need for another plugin.

Wordpress Template Tags

Our weapon of choice is the wp_list_bookmarks template tag. It comes in handy if you use a new Wordpress theme as starting point, which already uses this tag. If not, now it’s the time to get rid of deprecated tags like get_links() or get_links_list().

To start, open the file where your link-list is located, most probably sidebar.php or footer.php. The default usage for wp_list_bookmarks is:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks(); ?>

Useful parameters: limit and orderby

Remember, we need to limit the output because of the new design while still giving link-love to all of our blog-friends. To achieve this goal, we applied two parameters to the tag:

limit and orderby.

The Function

These two parameters combined provide us with the limited set of randomized links we need. Seven randomized links fit into the available space, so here is the final template tag with two parameters applied:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('limit=7&orderby=rand'); ?>

Jupp, it’s remarkably simple, but it works exactly as intended.

Late last month I released Green Park 2 Beta 4 with a small support for i18n — thanks to a lot of people with a lot more eyes than I have, I could fix around 15 smaller issues, two bugs and I got a lot of feedback regarding the i18n of the theme. Thanks to the community, we have support for the following languages:

1. Chinese by wxzbb
2. English (default) by me
3. French by Julien
4. German by Andreas Jacob
5. Polish by Tosiek
6. Spanish (castellano) by José Manuel Mao
7. Swedish by Jon Klarström

I’d love to see your language here as well Please check this posting: Green Park 2 – for translators

Green Park 2 Beta 5 is available for download

So it’s time to release Green Park 2 Beta 5 into the wild. The download is now available:

Download Green Park 2 Beta 5 | Demo (Changelog)

Like it? Buy me a cup of coffee

As you might know, coders love coffee — and I need a lot. If you like my free themes, feel free to send me 1$ for a coffee.

During the last five years I studied literature and linguistics, worked as webdesigner for an agency, gained a lot of good and some not so good experiences, travelled about 29 thousand miles, made the decision to resign from my job and started to work as freelance webdesigner which I didn’t regret and — I had one blog.

Five years ago I started this blog on August 19^th, 2004 as a personal blog with an entry about a lost laptop of my Korean friend Young. The focus shifted slowly and I covered mainly web 2.0 services. For about three years now the blog is about web development & webdesign with few exceptions.

Statistics of five funny years

• 2 domains (cordobo.de & cordobo.com)
• 3 webhosters
• 6 plugins (Akismet, All in One SEO Pack, Dean’s Permalinks Migration, Google XML Sitemaps, Twitter for Wordpress & WP Super Cache)
• 7 MySQL databases
• 12 wordpress themes (some are available for free)
• 24 wordpress updates/upgrades
• visitors from 151 countries, mostly from the USA, Germany, China, Brazil, India, Australia, Canada & the U.K.
• 332 articles (+11 drafts)
• 1,952 comments, trackbacks and pingbacks
• 4,540 backlinks (says Google)
• 131,132 spams
  highest: July 2008 – 7,927 spams
  lowest: November 2006 – 35 spams
• 1,260,113 visitors
• 4,019,760 served pages
• 3,753 GB of Traffic
• and infinite hours spent with CSS, HTML, Wordpress, Photoshop, Illustrator, Eclipse …

Today I celebrate my blogs fifth birthday with some new clothes – the actual theme used on Cordobo is called “Hardbound 2“. Its a clean theme optimized for fast rendering, features a lot of accessibility improvements with a strong focus on typography. Although there are still some minor issues, misalignments and unformatted areas here and there, I couldn’t resist any longer to change to the new theme.

Hope you liked it so far, for another term of five years.

Comments not related to Beta 5 pre will be removed from this post to keep the focus on translations.

If you want to help translate Green Park 2 (GP2) into your language, download the pre-release theme. The theme contains a folder with default.mo/default.po files (English) and example files de_DE.mo/de_DE.po (German).

Translations for Beta 5 should be zipped and mailed to the e-mail mentioned in the readme.txt file.

Ressources for Translators

Localizing Wordpress Themes (English) (German version)
Localizing WordPress Themes and Plugins (English)
Wordpress Codex: Translation Tools

Feedback

If you encounter any issues regarding the grammar or syntax in your language, please let me know.
Feedback, bug reports and workarounds in general are highly appreciated.

Download

Not recommended for production use
Green Park Beta 5 – i18n (Updated August 21^st, 2009)

Translations

These translations will be available for Beta 5:

1. Chinese by wxzbb
2. French by Julien
3. German by Andreas Jacob
4. Polish by Tosiek
5. Spanish (castellano) by José Manuel Mao
6. Swedish by Jon Klarström

If you use a Wordpress driven blog, get the latest release of Green Park 2 for Wordpress here or leave your comment here.

I started porting Cordobo Green Park 2 to Habari. A demo is available here: Cordobo Green Park 2 for Habari Demo.

Please note that GP2 for Habari is in early development and far away from being feature complete. Please report any bugs you encounter.
Download: Green Park 2 for Habari (updated July 18^th, 2009)

Cordobo Green Park 2 (GP2) has reached the Beta status after 8 Alpha revisions. The download is available at my Wordpress Themes Page.

Apart from a new header graphic and more appealing forms and buttons, GP2 comes with a lot of code and CSS improvements, to render the website even faster along with typography and SEO optimizations. The Beta needs ~3KB less code on each created page compared to the latest alpha. The new settings page located at the Wordpress Admin section, to configure Feedburner, Adsense and Analytics, has been cleaned up although.

Download Green Park 2 Beta 4 | Demo (Changelog)

Like it? Buy me a cup of coffee

As you might know, coders love coffee — and I need a lot. If you like my free themes, feel free to send me 1$ for a coffee.

The theme is released as “ALPHA”, to let you know I’m still adding features and improvements. So please feel free and report any bug you may encounter in the comments section below.

Featurelist

• Fully compatible with Wordpress 2.7.1 and up
• Support for Wordpress widgets
• Light-weight: optimized CSS for really fast cross-browser rendering, less graphics (Grade “A” in YSlow)
• Fast: the minimum set of SQL queries
• Findability: SEO optimizations for humans and search-engines
• Accessible: clean and structured code for screen-readers and “jump links” for navigation
• A very clean typography for advanced readability
• Use of css sprites for images for even less http-requests
• Built-In Simple-Twitter Plugin support
• Built-In Sitepagination-Plugin support

Download Green Park 2 Alpha 7

Don’t just change the color of the link, provide feedback

Instead of just changing the color of your links, provide your websites’ visitors with visual feedback for their interaction.

1. Improve the contrast between background and foreground

If you have a low contrast between the link-color and the background-color (white on light-green, like in the image shown above), apply a light text-shadow to your navigation links.

The text-shadow property adds a grey drop-shadow with one pixel to the bottom relative to the text (0px on the x-axis, 1px on the y-axis, 0px blur radius and the color #555)

a:link { text-shadow: 0px 1px 0px #555; }

Note: This effect is only visible in Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3+, Opera 9+ and Chrome.

2. Highlight the state of the link

Change the color for an :hover effect, or like I did in the navigation, apply a darker and slightly bigger text-shadow to the link.

With the following CSS applied, the link has a light 3D effect, like hovering over the navigation.

a:hover { text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #000; }

Note: this works only in Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3+ and Chrome, but neither in Internet Explorer nor Opera 9+

3. Show me the click

If it’s a link, let the link show some reaction.

Use a:active to apply a small button-style effekt to your links. As a result to the code shown below, your link will “jump” 1px below its current position.

a:active { position: relative; top: 1px; }

4. Seamless transition for links & visible states

If image 4 + 5 looks the same to you — well, that’s by intention.

The 1^st page, right after you clicked the link, but before the 2^nd page loads.

The 2^nd page after the click.

I use the same color for a:focus and a.current (whereas .current is the class applied to the current page link on the 2^nd page.

a:focus, a.current { color: #111; }

I also used it to create a seamless transition between the 1^st and the 2^nd page. Note, it’s only useful if you know, that the now current link on the 2^nd page is at the same position like the a:focus on the 1^st page, e.g. the navigation above. Also note, if it’s not obvious that the new page loaded, because of a very big header using the browsers complete viewport, this effect can be confusing. It can also be confusing if your page loads very fast or very slow.

5. The complete transition effect

If you haven’t seen a lot of changes in the images above, open my website with either Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 2 or Opera 9+ and check the top navigation above.

Thanks to Korsti and Björn.

Spotify Desktop Application for Windows

Spotify is an online music service offering users the ability to stream music on demand using Spotify’s unique technology. Spotify will be marketed both as a premium monthly subscription service and a version which is free for consumers to use, and supported by advertising. Consumers will also have the option to purchase a day pass that gives access to Spotify without advertising.

Quoted from About Spotify

Leave a comment with your email address (Spotify requires a valid email address, no spam) and I’ll send you your invite for Spotify free.

Please note: As a resident of Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain you don’t need an invite to register for Spotify free.

Update: All invites are gone.

With the help of Arne’s Google XML Sitemaps plugin you can easily create a Sitemap for Google Webmastertools and check your blog for any inconsistencies after Googlebot re-indexes your site. I was presented with some easy to fix 404’s, which resulted from an earlier permalinks structure. The next thing was to remove the “post feed links” and “trackback-URLs” from the Google index to avoid duplicate content.

You can tell Google not to index a certain URL by applying rel='nofollow' to the link. Open single.php from your theme’s folder and replace

<?php post_comments_feed_link('RSS 2.0 Feed'); ?>
with
<a href="<?php echo get_post_comments_feed_link() ?>" rel="nofollow">RSS 2.0 Feed</a>

The trackback-URLs are easier to fix. In my case they came attached with

rel="trackback"
to which I added a ” nofollow” so it resulted in
rel="trackback nofollow"

Repeat this procedure with all the files with “feed” and “trackback” URIs and upload them to your themes folder. Finally, wait and let the magic happen.