If you don’t play with it you’ll lose it.

So, recently I ran into a very nice WordPress theme which I’m currently using called Freicurv v2.0. However, there seems to be a very special combination of themes and MySQL versions which cause all your stories to show in ascending order instead of the default descending order. This is all great information, however it took me a few hours of searching around before I put the pieces together. So, here is it. If the order of your stories or posts is reverse and you’ve gone to WordPress support and read this article and you’re still trying to use this theme, here is my work around:

In the index.php change
php query_posts($query_string . "&cat=-111")
to
php query_posts($query_string)

I’m still playing around with the theme to see if I broke anything, but more than likely the big issue will be the whole Asides category this theme uses. Since, I will not be changing that section very often, I’m happy with just modifying the intro.php file when ever I want to make a change to that section.

david

Moving away from PHP 4 to PHP 5

So, by default the good folks at 1and1 give you support for php 3-5, however 4 is the default. So, recently one of the plugins I use in my site upgraded to php 5 which forced me to continue using an older version. However, since I’m always a big sponsor of upgrade to the latest and greatest especially when it comes to software, I decided it was time to make the move. Doing a little bit of google work, I ran into 1and1’s official FAQ on how to do this, which is found here. However, that was not the first link which showed up in google. This guy had a pretty good write up and discussion about this change and 1and1 in general. Thanks to that .htaccess change I’m now humming along with php 5.

cheers,

david

08/11/2008 edit: Funny, a day after I posted this PHP 4 support ended with the last release of the 4.4 branch. Perfect timing!

Cross browser themes…

So, I had been running the same WP theme for a few months and not until yesterday did I decide to visit my own website using IE… what a monstrosity. The right column showed up at the very end of the page and a few things just looked out of order. Basically, it seems to be related to a way that IE handles some CSS, as opposed to Firefox and Opera. Needless to say, I’ve picked up a new theme called Barthelme and I’m really digging it. I might need to tinker with it a bit, but overall my site looks a lot better than it did before.

On a totally unrelated note, work has been kicking my butt. While I am one to usually turn the other cheek, I’m kicking butt at work too. It’s a vicious cycle of violence. :-)

~david