That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.

– Elizabeth Wurtzel

Wait, Week 05? What ever happened to Week 04? Well, my proper camera met with a bit of an accident back on Christmas day and it’s been finally sent in for repairs. It took me a bit to locate my old P&S ¹. Plus, I’ve just been feeling a bit down of late. When I first realized I’d missed week 04, I planned on posting 2 photos for week 05 to make up for it. Unfortunately, I’ve not been shooting as many images and this was the only halfway decent one of the few I did have. Maybe I’ll post an extra image later in the year to make up to week 04; we’ll just have to wait and see.

Side note: I’ve been working on a new theme for this site and unlike most themes I’ve done this time I plan to do it all from scratch (sort of). I’m using a combination of HTML5 Boilerplate an 960 Grid System to build it, rather than working with an existing WordPress theme. Why? In part because I’ve not worked with HTML5/CSS3 yet and want to and in part because I feel Ian Stewart’s right when he says You should be building your own WordPress Theme Framework. .… Make it your own. When you’re done you’ll have the best WordPress Theme — for you.

Week 05: Cage Without a Key © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Initially when I setup the author page, I used the Cimy User Extra Fields plugin to get those extra fields; however in the words of Lord Downey, “It, uh … lacked elegance.” Don’t get me wrong, Marco Cimmino has created a very powerful and useful plugin. My problem is that it’s too complicated for what I want to do. Then almost as though the WordPress developers read my mind, the release of WordPress 2.9 included a new filter making it simple to add/remove new fields to the user profile page.  So easy in fact that the following bit of PHP code added to my theme’s function.php file was all that was required to add the fields I needed.

function vl2_contactmethods( $contactmethods ) {
 // Add Twitter
 $contactmethods['twitter'] = 'Twitter';
 //add Facebook
 $contactmethods['facebook'] = 'Facebook';
 //add flickr
 $contactmethods['flickr'] = 'Flickr';
 //add linkedin
 $contactmethods['linkedin'] = 'LinkedIn';
 //add delicious
 $contactmethods['delicious'] = 'Delicious';
 //add phone
 $contactmethods['phone'] = 'Phone';
 //add phone-type
 $contactmethods['phonetype'] = 'Phone Type';
 //add locality
 $contactmethods['locality'] = 'Locality';
 //add region
 $contactmethods['region'] = 'Region';
 //add postalcode
 $contactmethods['postalcode'] = 'Postal Code';
 //add country
 $contactmethods['country'] = 'Country';

 return $contactmethods;
 }
 add_filter('user_contactmethods','vl2_contactmethods',10,1);

Of course just storing the info with the user’s profile isn’t enough; we also need to be able to pull it back out. This can be done using either the_author_meta or get_the_author_meta. I ended up using get_the_author_meta for two reasons:

1. I’m pulling the author’s meta info outside of the Loop.
2. I wanted to return, not echo the values, so I can manipulate them before displaying them.

But that still wasn’t complicated enough, after all I started this project wanting to generate an hCard, using some jQuery UI to give it a fancy accordion effect. First we load the javascript for that accordion effect, by adding the following to our author.php file.

<script type="text/javascript">
 $(function() {
 $("#accordion").accordion();
 });
 </script>

Next we get all the user fields by:

<?php if(isset($_GET['author_name'])) :
 // NOTE: 2.0 bug requires: get_userdatabylogin(get_the_author_login());
 $curauth = get_userdatabylogin($author_name);
 $id = $curauth->ID;
 else :
 $curauth = get_userdata(intval($author));
 $id = $curauth->ID;
 endif;

 $twitter = get_the_author_meta('twitter', $id);
 $flickr = get_the_author_meta('flickr', $id);
 $linkedin = get_the_author_meta('linkedin', $id);
 $delicious = get_the_author_meta('delicious', $id);
 $lastfm = get_the_author_meta('lastfm', $id);
 $phone = get_the_author_meta('phone', $id);
 $ptype = get_the_author_meta('phone-type', $id);
 $addr = get_the_author_meta('addr', $id);
 $locality = get_the_author_meta('locality', $id);
 $region = get_the_author_meta('region', $id);
 $postalcode = get_the_author_meta('postalcode', $id);
 $country = get_the_author_meta('country', $id);
 ?>

Now that we’ve got the data and the JavaScript; we need to combine it

<div id="authorbox">
 <?php if (function_exists('get_avatar')) { echo get_avatar((get_the_author_meta('user_email', $id)), '120'); }?>
 <div id="accordion">
 <h3><a href="#">About</a> <span><span><?php echo $curauth->first_name; ?></span> <span><?php echo $curauth->last_name; ?></span></span></h3>
 <div id="about">
 <p><?php echo $curauth->description; ?></p>
 </div> <!-- #about -->
 <h3><a href="#">Contact</a></h3>
 <div id="contact">
 <p><span><span><?php echo $ptype; ?></span><a href="callto:<?php echo $phone; ?>"><?php echo $phone; ?></a></span></p>
 <p"><a href="<?php echo get_the_author_meta('user_url', $id); ?>" rel="me"><?php echo get_the_author_meta('user_url', $id); ?></a></p>
 <p><span><?php echo $addr; ?></span><br/>
 <span><?php echo $locality; ?></span>, <span><?php echo $region; ?></span> <span><?php echo $postalcode; ?></span><br/><span><?php echo $country; ?></span></p>
 </div> <!-- #contact -->
 <h3><a href="#">Networks</a></h3>
 <div id="social-networks">
 <ul>
 <li><a title="View <?php echo $curauth->first_name; ?> <?php echo $curauth->last_name; ?>'s Profile" href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/<?php echo $linkedin ?>"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/linkedin.png" alt="LinkedIn" width="48" height="48" /></a></li>
 <li><a title="Follow <?php echo $twitter ?> on Twitter" href="http://twitter.com/<?php echo $twitter ?>"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/twitter.png" width="48" height="48" alt="Twitter" /></a></li>
 <li><a title="See <?php echo $flickr ?>'s photostream" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/<?php echo $flickr ?>"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/flickr.png" alt="Flickr" width="48" height="48" /></a></li>
 <li><a title="<?php echo $delicious ?>'s Bookmarks" href="http://delicious.com/<?php echo $delicious ?>"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/delicious.png" alt="Delicious" width="48" height="48" /></a></li>
 </ul>
 </div> <!-- #social-networks -->
 <h3><a href="#"><?php echo $curauth->first_name; ?>'s Last 5 Posts</a></h3>
 <?php $my_query = new WP_Query('showposts=5&author='.$id); ?>
 <div id="5posts">
 <ul>
 <?php if ($my_query->have_posts()) : while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
 <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> <?php the_time('j F Y'); ?></li>
 <?php endwhile; ?>
 </ul>
 </div> <!-- #5posts -->
 </div><!-- #accordion -->
 </div><!-- #authorbox -->
 <?php else : ?>
 <h2>Not Found</h2>
 <p>Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.</p>
 <?php endif; ?>

Oops, I almost forgot to mention; we need to make sure we’re loading jQuery & jQuery UI on the author page. Since I separate out the header stuff into it’s own file (header.php); I added this bit of code before the closing </head> tag in that file:

<?php //if (is_author()) wp_enqueue_script('jquery-ui-core');
if (is_author()) {
 wp_deregister_script('jquery');
 wp_register_script('jquery', ("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js"), false, '');
 wp_deregister_script('jquery-ui-core');
 wp_register_script('jquery-ui-core', ("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.2/jquery-ui.min.js"), array('jquery'), '');
 wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
 wp_enqueue_script('jquery-ui-core');
} ?>

And that’s that. Now my author page will by default display my gravatar next to the Biographical Info entered in my profile. There will also be three other section available…

* Contact: Gives selected contact information for me.
* Networks: Displays icons for some social networks I use with links to my profiles on those networks.
* Last 5 Posts: Shows my latest posts.

Later when I have more time, I’ll update the zipped copy of the VectorLover2 theme on this site for people who want to download a complete copy of the code I used for the author pages.

Update: I forgot to thank Joost de Valk for his excellent article, User Contact Fields in WordPress 2.9.
Update 2: I changed the code to register jquery-ui-core, so that it recognizes jquery as a dependency. This tutorial had been working fine; but for whatever reason, it suddenly was trying to load jQuery after jQuery-UI (which doesn’t work so good).
Update 3: Hmm, now that I look back at this old post I realize a couple of things: 1) several of the links I’d intended to be here are missing (since corrected) and 2) this post was written worse than I thought it was.

Author Pages with hCard & jQuery © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Features

• Threaded comments with quick reply links.
• Integrated plugin support for: Now-Reading, FAlbum, Tweetbacks, wpLicense
• Custom login page
• Added a new default Gravatar image to list of options under Settings -> Discussion in WordPress’s admin backend.
• hCard microformatting to both post & comment authors.
• A stylesheet to remove unnecessary elements from printed pages.
• Changed page titles to display as “PostTitle « BlogName” vs the previous “BlogName » PostTitle” for better SEO
• Wrapped posts in a DIV with post_class() to add support for fancier styling on posts.

Special Thanks

This release would not have been possible without Erwin Aligam — who designed the initial theme, ThemeLab — who ported the design to WordPress, famfamfam — designed some wicked-nice icons or any of these sites: WPEngineer.com, TheEnglishGuy.co.uk, OttoDestruct.com and Sivel.net — all of whom provided valuable information while I was working on this release.

Download

You can download this release from my VectorLover 2 page.

VectorLover 2 — Initial Release © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

UPDATE: I’ve removed the sticky setting from this post, as I’ve completed all the work I intend to do for now on this theme. Lastly, I’ve setup a page where any new information on VectorLover2 will be released and I will be posting a zip file of VL2 there for people interested in my version of the theme.

CHANGELOG

• Integrated the Now-Reading plugin.
• Integrated the FAlbum plugin.
• Added Edit links to all posts/pages, available to the admin only.
  • Formated the Edit links (including comment edit links) to be in red text and display the pencil icon from famfamfam’s Silk Icons.
• Changed RSS & Admin login links in header to use icons (again from famfamfam’s Silk Icons).
• Added hCard microformatting to both post & comment authors.
• Added a stylesheet for printing which removes the sidebar and the comment form.
• Wrapped posts in additional DIV using post_class() to add support for fancy styling on sticky posts.
  • Technically, I can do a lot more then just styling the sticky posts, but that was the motivation to do it.
  • Redid my implementation of this to allow for backwards compatibilty. Ran across that tip while search for more info on styling sticky posts.
• Altered the body tag on the index.php page of vectorlover2¹ to conditionally have an id added to allow for specific styling on just the home page.
• Changed footer credit to link to the home page of the site.
• Changed page titles to display as “PostTitle « BlogName” vs the previous “BlogName » PostTitle” which I prefer the look of.
  • Especially when I see my posts show up in Google’s search results.
• Integrated Tweetbacks plugin.
  • Only integrated with pre-WordPress 2.7 comments
• Implemented WordPress 2.7’s Enhanced Comment Display features.
• Fixed Logout link in comments.php to work with WordPress 2.7
• Added custom “default” gravatar image.
• Changed “Read More” links to only show on front page when I use split an entry and hide some of it behind a link.
• Integrate Tweetbacks plugin with WordPress 2.7 enhanced comment display features.
  • Separating Pings from Comments in WordPress 2.7 has been very helpful with this.
• Build-in custom login page
• Developed special styling for sticky posts now that they should be appearing at the top of my home page.
  • It’s not exactly how I want it, but it’s good enough for now.  I’d rather the sticky posts get written to the home page with a different structure (vs hiding bits with CSS) but while I did find this article with some info on doing just that, my PHP-fu isn’t strong enough to get it to work right now.
• Added a second “sidebar” in down at the bottom of the page to display more widgety goodness
  • The styling of the Footer sidebar isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough.
• Altered RSS links & comment form as suggested by Branding Rant to setup & track goals.
  • Decided to scrap this idea for now, especially as after rereading Branding Rant’s article and noticing it wants Google’s javascript at the top of the page rather than the bottom  (which can negatively affect page loading times). Changed my mind on this after reading Rob’s comment.

TODO

• Figure out where the original author got the icons for VectorLover from (they look like an icon pack I’ve seen but can’t remember where).
  • Appears to be the Vector icon set from monofactor, unfortunately:
    • I no longer remember exactly why I wanted to know this.
    • The icon set was released as a single Adobe Illustrator file, which neither Gimp or Inkscape can open correctly (some of the gradients are screwed up).

¹ The utterly original name I’ve given to my revision of VectorLover.

Updating VectorLover Theme © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Under function outputHtmlAds(), I changed the following line of code from:
echo "\n<ul>\n";</ul>

to:
echo "\n<ul class=\"tla_sponsor_link\">\n";</ul>

Also under function returnPostAd($postId), I changed:
return "\n\n<em>".$prefixes[$prefixIndex].":</em> $ad->before_text <a href=\"$ad->url\">$ad->text</a> $ad->after_text";

to:
return "\n\n<div class=\"tla_sponsor_link\"><em>".$prefixes[$prefixIndex].":</em> $ad->before_text <a href=\"$ad->url\">$ad->text</a> $ad->after_text</div>";

Side note: TLA, you guys should change the Our Blog to be called something else as the link doesn’t actually take users to your blog.

¹ I don’t make enough from these ads to get rich mind you. Just enough to cover the costs of running CoffeeBear.net and maybe a cup of good coffee from my local coffee shop.

Text-Link-Ads Updated © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Library Renovations © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Website Oddness © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Into this…

And all it took was the Stylish extension and this little bit of CSS:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("animeiowa.com") {
html {
color: #0F0F0F !important;
}
body {
color: #0F0F0F !important;
background-color: #FFF !important;
}
a:link {color: #D57100 !important;
text-decoration:none !important;
}
a:visited {color: #459045 !important;
text-decoration:none !important;
border-bottom:none !important;
}
a:hover, a:active {
color:#6F2314 !important;
text-decoration:underline !important;
}
table tr td {
background-color: #F1EFFF !important;
color: #0F0F0F !important;
}
font {
color: #000 !important;
}
font .quote {
background-color: #FEFFBF !important;
}
font .catbg {
background-color: #F1EFFF !important;
}
}

Don’t believe this makes that much difference? Then try it out yourself, your bleeding eyes will thank you.

AnimeIowa Forums be Stylish © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Give your homepage the title of your company.

When you build your site, make sure your company’s name is the title of your home page. It should not be things like: “Welcome!”, “email”, “under construction” or “index”. This makes your site both more professional and easier for search engines to properly index your site.

Do not use massive amounts of Macromedia Flash/Javascript/Animated Gifs.

Some truly amazing things can be done with Flash. Using it to animate your navigation is not one of them. Flash is best used sparingly as it limits your audience, blocking the blind for your site and users of mobile internet devices (e.g. cellphones).

Likewise, javascript should be sparingly and the site should degrade gracefully when a user without javascript visits. Which is to say if your navigation or other major site features break without javascript; then you’ve done something wrong. So go back and fix it!

The occasional animated gif can add impact and interest to your site; while dozens are annoying and look amateurish.

Color is important, but try not to blind your site visitors.

When you blind your site visitors with odd bad color choices; they will move on to your competitors. Along the same lines if you have overly complicated background images behind the text of your website; you are marking it harder for people to read what you have to say. Keep it simple for maximum impact.

Make sure all your links have logical names.

Naming your various pages as: “Page 1″, “Page 2″, etc… might seem simple and easy, but it makes those links useless to your visitors. How can anyone other than you know that “Page 1″ is the page where you sell dildos or whether it is the page where you’re selling balloons? They can only find out by clicking the link.

Avoid Comic Sans MS

While Comic Sans MS may seem like a fun, cheery sort of font to you; it’s been greatly overused and most people find it annoying/unprofessional.

So faithful readers that’s my list of big tips for the small business owner who wants a web presense. Did I miss one of your hot button issues? If so, please add it in a comment!

Updated: 2007-03-19

Kind readers have added some extremely good tips that I should have remembered in the comments on this post!

Web Design for Business Owners © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

And yes, that’s a teaser to make sure you come back once the dust settles around here.

Finally Upgrading © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.