At the time of the writting of this blog, the Popularity Contest Plugin in only compatible with Wordpress releases up to up to wordpress 2.3.1. That means, if you are using the newer versions of wordpress say 2.5 or or the latest release wordpress 2.6 for that matter, you should brace yourself for one or a few surprises when trying to use that plugin in your blog.

That is exactly what happened last night when I tried to activate in the admin panel of my client’s blog. I have been slapped with a PHP error message:

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

That should not deter you from using this wonderful plugin. Here are the steps I took to solve the issue at hands:

Step 1
The first thing I did was to check on my local server for parsing error since my client’s web server does not display those errors for security reasons. The only error revealed to me was the include path of the wp-blog-header.php which should be

../../../wp-blog-header.php

instead of

../../wp-blog-header.php

because  the calling file pouplarity-contest.php is 3 folder levels down from the blog root folder where the wp-blog-header.php is.

Step 2
I made that correction then run the file (pouplarity-contest.php) again in my localhost server.
This time I only receive a database connection error. Good! No PHP parsing error.
I then uploaded the “pouplarity-contest.php” file to the remote server, went to the plugins section of the blog admin panel and tried once more to activate that plugin.

Not a chance, same fatal error message on my face. Grrrrr!!!.

Mind you, I have the utmost respect for the PHP developers (I am a member of that tribe) devoting their time to develop various applications and widgets they freely give to the online community.

Step 3
I commented out any add_action call and tried again to activate that Popularity Contest Plugin. No luck again, same fatal error message.

Step 4
I stopped for a few seconds, looked again then told myself: “the wp-blog-header.php file is already called somewhere by the admin header section with the require_once() PHP function!”

Solution:
* Remove or comment out (// or /* …..  */) the line 59 or whatever line contains the code:

require('../../wp-blog-header.php');

Tried again to activate the Popularity Contest Plugin.
This time it works!!

I can now use the akpc_most_popular() function in my blog sidebar to display the most popular posts.

I just save you  time and frustration.
Now go ahead and
- make that change in the PHP code
- upload the file
- activate the plugin

.. and happy blogging!

When any of those icons is clicked on a pop-up layer (not a new document window) opens and displays 3 tabs:
1) Choose file will let you:
* choose a file from your computer and upload it to your blog . Click on the “Choose Files to upload” button to see the file upload field appear
* or enter the URL of your image file (web address of your file e.g. http://www.saheltech.com/images/logo.gif” ) in the Image URL box
- * choose an option to define how your new image will be aligned with the rest of the content in your post (none, left, center or right)
* Once you are done, you can just click “Insert into Post” button to insert your image and resume editing your post

2) the “Gallery” tab switch to a window displaying thumbnails of pictures previously uploaded.
You can then click ”Show” to see each image in more details then decide whether to insert int your post or not

3) the “Media” tab as you might have suspected will show all the multimedia files (pictures, audio/video files) already uploaded and used or ready to be used in your post.

Two other tools I found particularly useful are to the “Toggle Fullscreen Mode” and “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink” icons on the very right hand-side of your visual editor toolbar.

Try’em and see for yourself.

I will be upgrading to wordpress 2.6 very soon. I am trying to keep up by jeez these guys at WORDPRESS are rolling fast lately.

That’s all for now folks!
Happy blogging!!

* It would display a video in a “Featured Video” section or the sidebar of your blog.
I have used it quite a few times during the cutsomization process of some of my clients’ blog using themes from Revolution News/Magazine
However when using it in the “Revolution News” theme, the Featued Video seems to be displaying the same video on the featured video section despite the fact that my customer has

Solution:
* open the “featuredvideo.php” file in your wordpress plugins folder /wp-content/plugins/FeaturedVideo
* add ORDER BY post_date DESC to the $sql varible which becomes:

 $sql = "SELECT distinct ID, post_title, post_date, post_content                         
            FROM {$prefix}posts, {$prefix}term_relationships, {$prefix}term_taxonomy
            WHERE {$prefix}posts.ID = {$prefix}term_relationships.object_id
            AND {$prefix}term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = {$prefix}term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id
            AND {$prefix}term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category'
            {$catsql}
            AND post_status = 'publish'
            AND post_type != 'page'
   ORDER BY post_date DESC";

 * save and upload that file to your blog at the same location (/wp-content/plugins/FeaturedVideo/featuredvideo.php)

Just as with any other plugin, you need to activate it in your blog admin panel and set the options offered.
Then “Featured Video Plugin” will now located the latest youtube or googlevideo file used in your posts and display it in the Featured Video section of your choice. Just be sure to have to call vsf_show_video() in order to get the job done

1. make a backup copy of your blog database should something unexpected happen.
2. download the zip folder containing the latest version of wordpress (i.e wordpress 2.5.1) from http://wordpress.org/
3. extract the content of that folder somewhere in your computer
4. use an FTP program or Dreamweaver to upload all the newly downloaded wordpress files except the wp-content ( and whatever is inside the wp-content folder)
5. execute the upgrade program by entering http://www.your-blog-address/wp-admin/upgrade.php in your web browser’s address bar.
   http://www.your-blog-address is whatever your blog address is. For instance our blog web site address is http://www.saheltech.com/blog
6. follow the step-by-step instructions displayed on your screen.

and you are done! Great job!

Everything in your blog should be working just fine. However if your blog is hosted in a Yahoo web hosting account and you are upgrading from a wordpress version lower than 3.1 you might run into some little issues like links not working properly.

The problem stems from the fact that most Yahoo customers (at least the ones I worked with so far) do not have access to the .htaccess file in their wordpress admin panel or even web hosting control panel. To handle the Wordpress permalinks update, Yahoo offers a “Customizable Permalinks” plugin to handle the .htaccess file rewriting.

Since the version 2.3, Wordpress has introduced Canonical URL Redirect which causes links to not work in Yahoo Hosted blog using “Customizable Permalinks” to manage the permalinks updates.

The solution is therefore to disable that Canonical URL Redirect redirect and everything will be working like a charm.
To do so you need to download the “disable canonical redirects” plugin from this website http://txfx.net/files/wordpress/disable-canonical-redirects.phps
1- Upload that file to your “plugins” folder
2- log into your blog admin panel and activate that plugin
Et Voila!

However once activated that plugin causes the file uploading iframe feature in the wordpress editor to disappear. It seems like that is caused some javascript error or CSS float elements issue.

In the same time the “optional excerpt”, “trackbacks” and the “custom fields” features are nowhere to be found or are maybe just hidden because of the reduced height of the container window.

We’ll investigate on this matter and eventually come up with a solution.

The visitors counter is made of 2 files:
- counter.txt which is a simple text file where the number of visitors is recorded and will be read from.
- counter.php is the PHP logic that takes the current number of visitors from counter.txt, increments it then write back the new value.

Most popular visitors counters I came across keep counting whenever you hit the refresh button. That does not provide an accurate measure of the number of visits to your web site but rather how many clicks and refresh are made.

Our counter relies on a much smarter logic and accurately provide the actual number of visitors. A visitor browsing through different pages is counted as 1 until s/he leaves your web site. If s/he comes back about an hour later than the counter will be incremented by 1 more visits.

You can open the counter.txt file to reset your counter to a value you would like to start counting from.
An extra file “code.html” contains the actual line you would copy and paste in the location where you would like your counter to appear.

The other 2 files “counter.txt” and “counter.php” have to be uploaded to your web hosting account. You should set the permissions of the “counter.txt” to enable read-write by counter.php

Feel free to contact us for technical assistance.
Download counter

At first I attributed that to the fact that those pages do not have that much content besides the products pictures and titles as compared to the home pages and the new arrivals page which was PR 2. Well I was wrong or maybe something I still do not have a clue about.

Anyway I am glad to see that most of the web pages have now a Google PR3. That’s cool!! Happy Cinco de Mayo!!

A of this site Saheltech.com, for a long time, about a year, all pages but the homepage where taken off for redesign and complete SEO & SEM. The new look-and-feel has been online now for about 3 months with a homepage hanging on PR4, all other webpages were PR0.

Well to my delight amazement this morning pretty much all pages on the “level 1″ (i.e. 1 click away from the home page) have now a Google PageRank ranging from 4 to 2. I guess my patience and the long hours of marketing and link building strategies have paid off.

To get a simple line break instead use the combination Shift + Enter in your keyboard.That will create a simple line return which is translated in html by
. As a matter of fact most Rich text Editors I came across on the internet exhibit the same behavior as Dreamweaver. Not Wordpad of course, but HTML based rich text editors.

If you are using the Hotmail rich text editor, you know what I’m talking about.

There you have it. Happy updates!!

To do so, from the Dreamweaver main menu (top):
Click on Edit then select Preferences
A new window opens. Make sure the "General" option is selected in the "Category" column on the left.
In the General tab on the right hand-side, locate the check box with a label "Allow consecutive multiple spaces" and make sure it is checked.
Click "Ok" at the bottom of the window. You are done.

You can now edit your web pages text and insert as many consecutive blank spaces as you want.

The other alternative would be pressing at the same time: Shift+Ctrl+Space Bar (PC) or Shift+Apple+Space Bar (Mac).

In general, you will always find at least 2 ways to perform a given task in Dreamweaver.
Talk about being user-friendly!

Typically a Style Sheet is a plain text document with a set of instructions (CSS styles, rules) specifying how each element (selectors) in your web page should be appear in a computer screen or even how it is printed on a sheet of paper.

You can use CSS to specify for instance:
- to specify what font to use in a paragrah, in what the size the text will be and it color, alignment, the paragraph’s background image, background color and more.

- or even intead of the regular blue color of text link, with CSS you can choose a different color and even create a rollover effect on each text link when the mouse hover on it.

Above all, the power of Style Sheets is more revealed when it comes to positioning different sections of a web page.

For example in this web site, the HTML code of the navigation menu is at the very bottom of the page code. Without CSS this web page navigation would appear on the botton of your screen. But thanks to CSS positioning our web site navigation (Home, Web Design, …, Blog) is et to be shown at the top of the page.

In othe words your web pages visual appearance is not anymore determine by how the HTML code is formatted. To illustrate that with a metaphor, the HTML represent the inventory of the store and the CSS determine how items are placed in the shelves.

You can pretty much use CSS to create a visual layout of your web page just like a puzzle except that in this case the pieces are in a rectangular shape.

YEH, YEH, YEH, we got it now!! What is the Cascading For in CSS?
I am glad you ask.

The cool thing is you can have as many style sheets in a web page as you want. Each style sheets defines a certain number of styles named CSS rules. When the web browser read the CSS rules coming from each style sheet it combined them then apply each CSS rule to your web page.

You can define the positioning of a element in one style sheet, then its font formatting in another style sheet and so forth.
Therefore the final style of that element is the combination of CSS rules defined is different style sheets: that’s a cascade of styles

If the CSS rule defined in a style sheet does nt conflict with those defined in the next style sheets then the last CSS rules augment any previous style defined for that element (selector).
If the CSS rules of the style sheets conflict, then the last defined rule takes precedence.

Using CSS make not only the web page code cleaner by separating the content ffrom the presentation, it also make your web site maintenance easier. Many web pages can share the same CSS file. You can modify your entire web site presentation by just updating your CSS file without going through each web page.