raphael haefeli | portland, oregon freelance web design and development

How to Display the Most Popular Content in Your WordPress Sidebar

Raphael — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:01:34 +0000

What is best way to keep your visitors entertained and make them stay longer on your blog? One way is to list the most popular content in your sidebar. The following code will display the top five posts with the most comments in your site. All you need to do is to paste the code below into your sidebar.php file and you are good to go.

Popular Posts:

< ?php $result = $wpdb->get_results
("SELECT comment_count,ID,post_title FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC
 LIMIT 0 , 5");
foreach ($result as $post) {
setup_postdata($post);
$postid = $post->ID;
$title = $post->post_title;
$commentcount = $post->comment_count;
if ($commentcount != 0) { ?>

< ?php echo $title ?> {< ?php echo $commentcount ?>}
< ?php } } ?>

Credit: WPRecipes

Create a “Share on Facebook” Button for Your WordPress Blog

Raphael — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 06:31:32 +0000

A few weeks ago I posted the article Create a “Send to Twitter” button for your WordPress blog, in which you can create a button that will share what you are reading with your followers.

This week I will show you how you can add a “Share on Facebook” button in your WordPress blog to bring in more visitors. This is very simple, just like the Twitter button tutorial.

Open your single post file (single.php) file from your theme directory and insert the following code within the loop:

Share on Facebook

To make things more interesting, you can use getTinyUrl() function to send a short URL to Facebook:

< ?php $turl = getTinyUrl(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>
Share on Facebook

That’s it! Now your readers will able to share your posts in their Facebook. This is a great way to boost your site’s traffic!

Source: WPRecipes

Refer a Friend and Get a $25 Visa Gift Ceritificate

Raphael — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:17:39 +0000

Would you like to score some free cash? Starting today, January 18^th, 2010 I am offering a $25 Visa gift certificate for friend referrals. That’s right, if you refer a friend and the person hires me you will receive a $25 Visa gift certificate!

CSS Fixed Menu – Pinned-Down Style

Raphael — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:10:56 +0000

CSS is such a simple, but powerful mechanism for adding style to websites which makes your design options infinite. One of the most common uses of CSS is to create nice looking and useful menus for websites. We can create all kinds of different styles for menus: Horizontal, vertical, with drop down boxes, etc.

Pinned-Down Style

There’s another technique that I found to be very interesting and pretty cool to apply to our menus. It’s called Pinned-Down Style. Our menu is going to be in a fixed position on the page and when the user scrolls up and down the menu will float over the page at the position we defined.

The XHTML Code:


...



    
        Home
        About Us
        Our Activities
        Contact Us
        Site Map
        Privacy
        Links
        Our Partners
        Articles
    

...

This is just a paragraph with links that we are going to style with CSS. We can see the final result after we apply the following CSS code:

The CSS Code:


div.banner {
	margin: 0;
	font-size: 100% /*adjust to make the menu larger or smaller*/;
	font-weight: bold;
	line-height: 1.1;
	text-align: center;
	position: fixed;
	top: 2em;
	left: auto;
	width: 8.5em;
	right: 2em;
}

div.banner p {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0.3em 0.4em;
	font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
	background: #990000;
	border: thin outset #000;
	color: white;
}

div.banner a, div.banner em { display: block; margin: 0 0.5em }
div.banner a, div.banner em { border-top: 2px groove #CCC }
div.banner a:first-child { border-top: none }
div.banner em { color: #CFC }

div.banner a:link { text-decoration: none; color: white }
div.banner a:visited { text-decoration: none; color: #CCC }
div.banner a:hover { background: black; color: white }

Summary

This is a good technique for a website that has a lot of content. It enables the user to access the menu quickly instead of having to scroll up the page to access the menu in order to navigate the site. What makes this work are the the 2 following rules: position: fixed; which causes the menu to be in a fixed position, and the display: block; that makes the a elements inside the menu to be displayed as block elements causing them to display one below the other. It would be a good idea to place the XHTML code for the menu at the top of all the content, right below the opening body tag for organization purposes. That’s it. Pretty simple. Play around with these settings and find the best design for your needs!

Examples:

Click here see an example.

Credits:

W3C: CSS Fixed Menus

Create a “Send to Twitter” button for your WordPress blog

Raphael — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:20:13 +0000

Do you use Twitter on a daily basis? If so, you know how good Twitter is for sharing with everyone what you find interesting around the web. Here’s a great way to give your readers a chance to share your Wordpress blog posts with their friends and bring more visitors to you.

This is a very simple Worpress hack where you will create a link to Twitter with a status parameter. We will use the function the_permalink() to get the page URL:

Share on Twitter

You can add this line of code to your single post file (single.php) in order to display it on each individual post and also add it to your main index template (index.php) to display under each post title in the blog’s index page.

Source: How to: Create a “Send this to Twitter” button.

Enjoy!

Amuse Resort Wear website is launched!

Raphael — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 07:44:06 +0000

My latest project has just gone live. Amuse Resort Wear is a start-up company based in Portland, Oregon dedicated in serving women with design fashion from the world’s most exciting vacation places. The simple site now serves as an online presence with many more features to come. Check them out at www.amuseresortwear.com!

3 Simple CSS Tips you Should Know

Raphael — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:59:37 +0000

1. CSS Short-Hand Code:

When writing your CSS, you may want include many properties that could make your CSS code a bit messy. You can solve this problem by using CSS short-hand code to make your code neat and clean. The most common CSS properties that allow you to use short-hand code are font, margin, padding, background and border. The properties must be put into a specific order for your web browser to read them.

In the examples below you can see how much shorter and simpler your code can get:

Font:

#some-div{
font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Sans-Serif;
font-style: oblique; 
font-weight: bold; 
font-size: 16px; 
}

#some-div{
font: oblique bold 16px Helvetica, Arial, Sans-Serif;
}

Margin/Padding Properties:

This example also shows how to use the short-hand code for margin and the short-hand CSS for padding works the same, just replace margin with padding.

#some-div{
margin-top: 5px; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 15px;
}

#some-div{
margin: 5px 10px 20px 15px;
}

If your top and bottom have the same margin and the left and right have the same margin you can use the code below. This also works the same for padding.

#some-div{
margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 30px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 30px;
}

#some-div{
margin: 10px 30px;
}

Background Property

#some-div{
background-color: #000;
background-image: url(image.jpg);
background-position: left top;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

#some-div{
background: #000 url(image.jpg) top left no-repeat;
}

Border Property

#some-div{
border-width: 2px; border-style: solid; border-color: #000;
}

#some-div{
border: 2px solid #000;
}

You can also use this short-hand CSS with border-top, border-right, border-left, and border-bottom.

#some-div{
border-top: 2px; border-right: 5px; border-left: 10px; border-bottom: 3px;
}

#some-div{
border: 2px 5px 10px 3px;
}

2. Multiple classes together in one element

If you want to apply multiple classes to a certain element of your page, you can combine them as shown in the example below. All you need is to separate the classes with a space and voilá. Remember that CSS cascades so if you have the same properties in your second class as your first it will be overwritten by your second.

content here

3. Underscore (_) and asterix (*) to hack multiple browsers

Sometimes coding for multiple browsers can be a pain as your styles can look different in each. A simple but effective solution is to add an asterix (for Internet Explorer 6 and below) or an underscore (for Internet Explorer 7 and above) in front of your property and that fixes your problems. In the example below we can have a margin-bottom property that will work differently for Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

#some-div{
margin-top: 25px; *margin-top: 20px; _margin-top: 35px;
}

Firefox will give the element above a top margin of 25px while Internet Explorer 6 will give a 20px margin and Internet Explorer 7 a 35px margin. Pretty cool, huh?

Thanks for ready and please leave some feedback!

Raphael Haefeli v3.0 is online!

Raphael — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:41:43 +0000

I’m happy to announce that the new and improved version of my website is live! The new site features a new design and social media tools for interactivity. Check it out and leave me some feedback!

CSS Image Preloader

Raphael — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:05:45 +0000

In today’s age of high-speed internet, the last thing that users want to do is to wait for a website to load even if it is for a few seconds. One of the “musts” for today’s web design is to create a website that loads quickly enough so users don’t leave your site before the whole page is displayed.

To minimize this problem, many sites are designed to preload images in order to speed up page display. JavaScript is the most common way to preload images but it is not the only option available. An alternative to JavaScript is to use the CSS display: none; property. This technique may be more reliable and it requires less complex code. Easy!

Preloading images using JavaScript is a good technique, however, browsers must be JavaScript-enabled and have JavaScript turned on. Without JavaScript, the images won’t preload.

CSS: Our Best Preloading Friend!

CSS offers us a simple and reliable option. By using display: none;, we tell the browser to request an image from the server, but not to display it on the page. The browser just requests the image from the server and caches it for future use.

Common Uses:

Use in the home page to load images that will be used on the rest of the website
Cache all the hover images in your site for menus, slide shows, etc.

The CSS Code:

This is a very simple technique. All we need to do is to place the img tags at the beginning, right under the opening body tag and insert CSS style directly within the img tag:

...











...

Very Important: The empty alt tag is important because screen readers will simply ignore the image. You MUST insert the empty alt tag otherwise your website will fail the W3C’s accessibility standards!
A good idea is to insert comments like in the example above just to separate and locate your rollover images

Summary:

That’s it for this technique! Very simple, almost no code and same results as JavaScript.

Replacing Text With Images in CSS

Raphael — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:24:42 +0000

Sometimes we want to decorate our site with nice looking text but can’t achieve it by just formatting the text to a different font. Why not? Because not all users have the same fonts installed in their systems.

With CSS we can replace a piece of text with an image containing the graphical presentation of the text. These images will only serve the purpose of decorating the page with a fancier font because they don’t carry any value to the content of the page.

How Can We Achieve That?

There are some CSS techniques in which you set the dimensions of the element to the image’s dimensions and define the image to be the element’s background image. Also, to prevent the text from overlaying the image we have to enclose this text in a span tag and hide it in the CSS using display: none;

There is a problem with this technique: If the image cannot be displayed (broken link, corrupted file, etc) nothing will be visible to the user because the only available text is hidden. This is a no-no in today’s accessibility standards!

There’s a very simple way to replace your text with an image file. We will still use our image and text, but this time we are going to place an empty span tag next to the text that we are going to hide. Then we are going to position that image absolutely, causing the image to overlay the text. Let’s get to it!

The Image:

The CSS Code:


h2{
	margin-bottom: 40px;
        font-size: 14px;
}

h2 #chapter1{
	position: absolute;
	width: 240px;
	height: 46px;
	background: url(chapter_1.jpg) no-repeat;
        display: block;
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
}

The XHTML Code:


Chapter 1

Note that I added 40 pixels of bottom margin to the h2 element in order to push the paragraph down causing it to clear the image. You can experience with this value depending on the height of your image.

Summary:

With this technique the text will always display even if the image doesn’t load. Also, screen readers will ignore the image and read the piece of text under it – this helps your site’s accessibility. Lastly, this is search engine friendly! Images have no value to search engines but because you have text below them, search engines can read that text. This is a technique that I use abundantly throughout my site.

You can also use this technique with links and also add different images for a rollover state!