Zack Live

LockerZ Offers Free Gifts for Playing Games

Zack — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:19:52 +0000

Is it possible to get a free MacBook or iPod for playing games? LockerZ is a new website still in beta version, users of LockerZ gain points(PTZ) via playing games, answer questions and watching videos. These points can be used to change with real gifts, like MacBook, iPod, Wii, Amazon Gift Card and so on. Check out the list below:

Samsung 40″ 1080P / 120Hz / LCD HDTV – 3200 PTZ
MacBook Air 13″ – 2500 PTZ
MacBook Pro 13″ – 1500 PTZ
MacBook 13″ – 1000 PTZ
iPod Touch 64GB – 800 PTZ
PSP – 675 PTZ
Xbox – 675 PTZ
PS3 – 625 PTZ
iPod Nano – 425 PTZ
DSi – 375 PTZ
iPod Shuffle – 200 PTZ
iPod Shuffle (1GB) – 150 PTZ

You win PTZ by daily login(2 PTZ), answering questions(2 PTZ) and inviting friends(2 PTZ). For now, you must have invitation to register, if you want to give it a shot, you can comment on this this post, I will send a invitation to your email. It’s available for global users since October.

The invitation looks like this one:

Click on the link to register, after fill in your information, you can start to earn PTZ.

Click “PLAY” on the bottom, the game will be started, just catch as more PTZ as you can.

You can find the questions by click on “DAILIES” at the right bottom. You can only gain PTZ from the question of today.

After invited 20 friends, you will be on the Z-List, like a VIP, you will gain twice PTZ, 4 PTZ for a question, for example. I heard that someone from Taiwan had received a $50 iTune Gift Card, let me know if you’ve got your gift.

This article is also posted on Gearor.com.

Update: BlackNWhite Theme Update 05/November/2009

Zack — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:16:03 +0000

While updating Gray Lines theme, I also did the same modifications to BlackNWhite theme. Here is the change log:

05/Nov/2009:
Sidebar tabs added for Recent posts, popular posts and recent commentsSidebar tabs added for Recent posts, popular posts and recent comments
New Blockquote Design
Fix a missing “l” in a
of sidebar
Codes of blog title and description been changed, better code style, looks no difference

14/Aug/2009: Control panel added.

21/Jul/2009: Upgrade to WordPress 2.8 (Supporting threaded (nested) comments, sticky-post and comment pages)

The updated version have been uploaded to Theme Directory of wordpress.org, may be available in several days, you can now download it here:

Download: Black n White WordPress Themes

Let me know if you got some ideas about this theme.

Update: GrayLines Theme Updated 05/November/2009

Zack — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:59:51 +0000

I’ve done some modifications to GrayLines theme, here is the change log:
Chang Log:

05/Nov/2009:
Publish Date added to individual posts
New Blockquote Design
Fix a missing “l” in a
of sidebar
Codes of blog title and description been changed, better code style, looks no difference

14/Aug/2009: Control panel added.

21/Jul/2009: Upgrade to WordPress 2.8 (Supporting threaded (nested) comments, sticky-post and comment pages)

Because changes are very small, I am not going to upload it to Theme Directory of wordpress.org, you can download it here:

Download: Gray Line WordPress Themes

Let me know if you got some ideas about this theme.

WordPress: Getting Most Popular(Commented) Posts

Zack — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:04:31 +0000

After my post Getting Recent Posts In WordPress before, I am thinking about getting the most popular posts or most commented posts. Talking about most popular posts, are those most posts commented mean they are most popular. Not really, there may be some posts, they’ve been read many times, but people seldom leave comments, aren’t they popular? So at the first place, I thought popular posts should be calculated by both view count and comment count. But when I go deep to coding, I found that it’s much more difficult to get the view count than comment count, because WordPress saves comment count by default, we can get the number from the database. On the other hand, view count is not saved. Which means we need to count every posts from the every beginning by ourselves, and most of time, this is not worth to do. This reminds me the Popularity Contest plugin, it counts the views, comments, trackbacks and so on, to determine the popularity of posts. If you want a exactly perfect popular posts list, you may try out this plugin. But I prefer a light way to do it as it’s not a really important need, let focus on most commented posts.

The first solution I found is from bavotasan.com, it’s simple and clear. Here is the main code:

function popularPosts($num) {
    global $wpdb;  

    $posts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT comment_count, ID, post_title FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , $num");  

    foreach ($posts as $post) {
        setup_postdata($post);
        $id = $post->ID;
        $title = $post->post_title;
        $count = $post->comment_count;  

        if ($count != 0) {
            $popular .= '';
            $popular .= '' . $title . ' ';
            $popular .= '';
        }
    }
    return $popular;

But when I come to blogohblog.com, the blogger used a more complex way to do it, he thought about more details, like do not count unaproved comments, able to set duration and should the password protected posted be counted or not. To make this happen, he re-counted comments by the comment_post_ID, very clever, here is the codes:

', $after = '', $show_pass_post = false, $duration='') {
global $wpdb;
$request = "SELECT ID, post_title, COUNT($wpdb->comments.comment_post_ID) AS 'comment_count' FROM $wpdb->posts, $wpdb->comments";
$request .= " WHERE comment_approved = '1' AND $wpdb->posts.ID=$wpdb->comments.comment_post_ID AND post_status = 'publish'";
if(!$show_pass_post) $request .= " AND post_password =''";
if($duration !="") { $request .= " AND DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL ".$duration." DAY) < post_date ";
}
$request .= " GROUP BY $wpdb->comments.comment_post_ID ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT $no_posts";
$posts = $wpdb->get_results($request);
$output = '';
if ($posts) {
foreach ($posts as $post) {
$post_title = stripslashes($post->post_title);
$comment_count = $post->comment_count;
$permalink = get_permalink($post->ID);
$output .= $before . '' . $post_title . ' (' . $comment_count.')' . $after;
}
} else {
$output .= $before . "None found" . $after;
}
echo $output;
} ?>

The second one is a better choice, more options and flexibility. You can display popular posts list by placing the following code to your theme, sidebar.php or index.php or else.

CSS: How to Center Your Images

Zack — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:09 +0000

If you have a paragraph(

) or a

with only images, it’s very easy to center them, just set the ‘text-align’ to ‘center’:

p{ text-align: center }

What if there is other content in the paragraph, like text, and you don’t want it to be centered. Well, one way to do this, is to add a container, for example, a

, and the ‘text-align’ of the container to ‘center’. But this doesn’t look like a smart way, as the container is quite a waste. Can I do this within the ? Of course, you can make this happen with CSS, Check out the following code:

Just set the ‘display’ as ‘block’ and both the left and right margin as ‘auto’, that’s it, or you can add this to you CSS file:

p img{ display: block; clear: both; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }

Let me know if you have a better idea.

This article is also posted on Gearor.com.

Little Tip for Image Editing in WordPress

Zack — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:09:23 +0000

I used to resize every images manually while they are to big for the post. Later, Automatic added ‘Media’ setting to WordPress, we could set default image sizes, so that we could select our image sizes just by one click after uploading. But sometime we don’t upload, we use ‘From URL’ to insert images. In the ‘From URL’ page, there is no image size option for you to select. How to resize these images? How to do it if I only know the width, and I want the height of the image to be auto-adjusted?

Actually it’s very easy to do, and no need for a image editor. You just insert your image to your post via ‘From URL’. And then click on the image in the text editor, you can see a small image logo on the left top of the image, by clicking on the logo, you get a popup window, choose the ‘Advanced Settings’ tab, you can find ‘Size’ setting in the middle, if you input the width and a blank height, WordPress will resize the image according to the width, you don’t need to worry about the height.

Hope this simple tip could help you, too.

This article is also posted at Gearor.com

Getting Recent Posts in WordPress

Zack — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:38:14 +0000

Getting recent posts in you WordPress blog, is a old topic. WordPress now has a default widget to do this, but sometime we need to display recent posts outside of the widget area. It’s a simple task, you can use one line of codes to do it:

The function wp_get_archives() is used to display a date-based archives list. While setting ‘type’ to ‘postbypost’, it returns posts odered by post date, which means recent posts, that’s what we want. And then we need to set the limit of posts by ‘limit=10′. That’s it, we have 10 recent posts now, you can put this codes into wherever in your theme.

For detail of wp_get_archives(), you can visit the WordPress Codex here.

This article is also posted at Gearor.com.

Margin or Padding – CSS Learning

Zack — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:22:00 +0000

Padding is inner space.
Margin is outer space.

Take a look at the image above, from outside to inside: margin, border, padding and the content. You may notice that the padding was affected by the background color, while maggin is not. That’s the difference between inner and outer. So padding is used for design, making some private room for the element, for example, and maggin is always used as white space to saperate elements.

One more thing to be mentioned, padding adds to the width or height of the element, which means it expends the final width or height. For example, you had an element which was 100px wide and 50px high, and then you set all paddings of the element to 10px. You will end up with 120px of width and 70px of height.

Width: 100px + 10px(Left padding) + 10px(Right padding) = 120px
Height: 50px + 10px(Top padding) + 10px(Bottom padding) = 70px

for more references:

CSS: How to Center Your Images

SwebApps: Build Your iPhone Apps Online

Zack — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:32:20 +0000

ReadWriteWeb: A new website Sweb Apps launched for iphone developer, the service is aimed to help anyone to build your own iphone apps in six steps.

[via: ReadWriteWeb]

My WordPress Themes Updated

Zack — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:16:47 +0000

New update:

I’ve created two WordPress themes, the Gray Lines WordPress Theme and the BlacknWhite WordPress Theme. I updated them today for WordPress 2.7(also 2.8), supporting threaded (nested) comments, sticky-post and comment pages. And added a control panel which you can set your own RSS feed and your logo image.

Download:

Gray Lines WordPress Theme

BlacknWhite WordPress Theme