WordPress is being used increasingly for the development of fully-fledged websites. After all, it offers a powerful combination of being (at least in theory) easy to skin whilst also providing an excellent user interface for managing the site once it’s up and running.

I’ve been developing a business creating WordPress sites using the excellent Thesis theme from DIYThemes.com. Thesis makes it possible to have pretty much any design you like, some of which can be implemented using the WordPress dashboard. To move significantly away from the Thesis default theme, however, you need to use CSS and Thesis makes this easy by making a .custom CSS class available. What this means is that any class based on .custom will override the equivalent class in a design. In practice, this means that if I wanted to have my own <h3> styling, I would simply apply it like this within custom.css:

.custom h3 {
    color:#ff000;
}

I’m sure you can immediately see the power of this: you can change the entire design this way without touching the core Thesis or WordPress CSS. Thesis also includes a wide range of addition Hooks into the WordPress framework but that’s beyond the scope of this article.

The problem is that websites (as opposed to blogs) often need very different layouts across their pages. In WordPress, when you add a Widget, it’s added for every page in the site whether you like it or not. What’s needed is extra flexibility in hiding, showing and editing all aspects of the page. Thesis does add the “no sidebar” template, but that still doesn’t give enough flexibility.

I want to talk about a little known feature that Thesis makes available for WordPress pages. You see, not only can you override css at a global level but also on each individual page. To access this, enter a new, unique, class name in the CSS field within the Page.

Once you’ve done this, you can access CSS properties using (in this case) the .resource class rather than .custom, but still within the custom.css file so it’s all in one place.

Let’s imagine, for example, that I want to hide one of the sidebars on my “Resources” page. Here’s how I’d do it:

1. Load up Firefox and use the Web Developer Toolbar to find out the CSS selector used to display the sidebar
2. Open up custom.css and set this CSS’s display property to “none” like this:

.resource #sidebar_1 {
    display:none;
}

Whilst you can, of course, achieve the same effect by creating a new template for the page, this is a much simpler way to make changes unless you want an entirely new layout.

You can also use the multimedia box in Thesis to add any HTML you like so it’s possible to further customise the page that way. There is a point, however, where all this customisation would be better done with an entirely new template. Once you start feeling as though you’re bodging it- that’s when to start from scratch. If all you want to do is hide or show sidebars or make other unique changes to the design of one page, give this technique a try, it’s a whole lot quicker!

Scribbleit is a UK based web design and hosting company. Scribbleit develops applications for clients and also develops its own web applications and ecommerce sites. PassYourTheory, MakingYourOwnCandles and PassYourCitizenship are all Scribbleit developments.

Fixed price development

Scribbleit is currently developing a product that will allow small business owners and others to have a fully designed site built using WordPress technology and hosted on our space with built-in webmastering services for a fixed development price of £399 followed by a low cost monthly hosting fee. This product is being tested with a number of clients at present before launch. If you’d like to find out how to be part of this beta test phase email me now at kevin.partner@scribbleit.co.uk  to qualify for a £100 discount on the development fee.

Founder Kevin Partner has been a Contributing Editor of PC Pro Magazine since 1996 and is also the author of How to set up an online business, a complete guide to planning, building and marketing a profitable web business idea: it even includes methods of ensuring that your idea will make money. Order it from Amazon.

Follow Kevin on Twitter at kevpartner for all the latest technology and internet marketing news, and some undisguised grumpiness.

We use BigCommerce, by far and away the best online ecommerce solution we’ve found.

Current Scribbleit Projects include:

• a publishing project with PCPro Magazine
• a 360 degree appraisal survey on behalf of a management consultancy including a highly graphical report delivered as a costomised PDF to each respondent
• an online desktop publishing application for consumer use written in Flex/Flash and PHP
• an ecommerce business selling Candle Making Kits to the public

Out of curiosity, I wanted to find out how much of time time I could spend using Ubuntu. I am not about to abandon Windows 7 entirely as there are too many applications on that platform that I use (including Adobe’s CS5 suite) but I’d realised that I spend most of my time working in a browser these days.

Here’s the best way to do it:

• Go to http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/windows-installer and click Start download. This will download the Wubi installer for Windows.
• If you’re using a 64 bit processor (you almost certainly are) then Wubi will, unfortunately, install the 64 bit version of Ubuntu which the makers of Ubuntu themselves say is not for “daily use”. The problem is that drivers (relatively scare on Linux in the first place) and programs often only exist in the 32 bit version. This happened to me and I was forced to reinstall. To force it to use the 32 bit version, simply download the 32-bit iso image from http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download into the same folder as Wubi.
• Run Wubi. You may well get a message about being unable to find drives. This is likely to be because you’ve got a built in media card reader. Simply click Continue time and time again until it goes away and all will be well.
• Reboot. You should see a text menu with your current Windows installation as the default and the new Ubuntu installation. Select Ubuntu and follow the steps through to complete the installation.

You’ll find most of the commonly used applications have already been installed (including OpenOffice) but to add more software go to Applications > Ubuntu Software Centre and do a search. You can find the Flash player and Filezilla there, for example. Google Chrome can be installed from within Firefox. Tweetdeck is slightly more involved but full information can be found by searching their user forum (hint: do not click the Install Now button as it doesn’t work).

I’ve spent a couple of hours this afternoon solving an irritation. I like to keep an eye on how many Twitter followers I have, not as an obsession of course but just out of interest. Doing so involves going to my Twitter page: www.twitter.com/kevpartner or clicking on my profile in Tweetdeck (having found a recent tweet). What I want is a way to see the number all the time, preferably updating every few minutes.

So I created a simple Windows Sidebar gadget that interacts with the Twitter API using jQuery to retrieve this bit of data (it could retrieve anything, of course) every five minutes and display it in the sidebar.

I’m just going to show you the crucial bit. You’ll need to create a blank Sidebar Gadget using Microsoft’s instructions and make it look however you want. The code would work in exactly the same way if inserted in a web page if you’d prefer.

This bit goes in the  <head>  section. It assumes you have jQuery in a subfolder called js.

<script src="js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
<script>

$(document).ready(function(){
getfollowers();

function getfollowers(){
requestURL = "http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show/kevpartner.json?callback=?";
$.getJSON(requestURL, callback);
}

function callback(data)
{
var now = new Date();
var theminutes=now.getMinutes();
if(theminutes<10)
{
theminutes="0"+theminutes;
}
var thehours=now.getHours();
var thetime=thehours+":"+theminutes;
$('#time').text("at "+thetime);
$('#gadgetContent').text(data.followers_count+" followers");
setTimeout(getfollowers, 300000);
}
});
</script>
</head>

There are two main functions. getfollowers() calls the Twitter API and asks it to return (in this case) my user data. It uses the getJSON method to do that and, once it gets a response, it calls the second function callback

callback calculates the current time (so I can see when it last updated) and also pulls out the followers_counts JSON element. These bits of information are then inserted in the appropriate span object using standard jQuery notation. The setTimeout function repeats the process every five minutes.

And this is the bit in the body:

<body>
<g:background id="imgBackground">
<span id="gadgetContent"></span>
<span id="time"></span>
</g:background>
</body>

This is very rough and ready with no visual styling at all. But it does the job and does it nicely! I might polish it up into a proper widget which will allow users to insert their own user name. If I do decide to do that, I’ll publish it. Follow me on Twitter to find out when this happens!

So, you’re a freelance designer, developer, copywriter or journalist. This excellent blog post covers how WordPress can be used by you in your business.

One of the main aims of a blog or landing page is to build a mailing list. With a list full of people eager to hear what you have to say, it becomes possible to sell targeted goods and services alongside advice, news, reviews etc. When I find a blog I’m interested in, what I usually want is to receive blog posts by email rather than having to remember to visit the site regularly. For example, Seth Godin and Perry Marshall offer this sort of service: in Seth’s case his system sends an email containing the blog post each time he adds a new one whereas Perry’s are more traditional Autoresponder fare and tend to point you back to one of his pages for further information. You can also see this in action at MakingYourOwnCandles.co.uk

However, if Seth and Perry’s emails were constantly attempting to sell me something I would unsubscribe in an instant

What I like about these two and a few others is that I get plenty of useful, actionable, information for free. If I want to get into a subject in greater depth, there’s sometimes a product available but, in the main, this is simply great info and insights.

So how do you set things up so that your visitors get an email each time you write a blog post? Feedburner is the obvious choice but the main problem with it is that there’s no way to add users signing up via Feedburner to your autoresponder/mailing list. It’s actually much easier the other way around: get people to sign up to your mailing list (which is a whole other art) and then send blog posts automatically to that list on a regular basis (daily or weekly).

There is a risk with this. If you cheese people off with your blog posts, they might unsubscribe from your mailing list. However, a mailing list should be an opportunity to build up a relationship and to establish yourself as the friendly expert in your field. If your blog posts don’t reinforce that, then you’re writing the wrong blog posts!!

Sending Blog Posts to your Mailing List

I’ve done this using the MailChimp service. I only recently discovered MailChimp, having been a GetResponse and AWeber user for some time and I’ve been blown away by it. Not only by the service itself but by the burgeoning array of integrations with other products (including, shortly, BigCommerce) and imaginative ways that MailChimp allows you to make use of your list and to build it.

1. Add a signup form to your blog. You will need some sort of inducement if you want people to sign up in any numbers – a free report (give away your best stuff), a big discount or free gift. You should have an autoresponder sequence set up giving them the information they’re looking for.
2. In MailChimp, click the down pointing arrow on the orange “Create Campaign” button and select RSS-driven Campaign
3. Now, set up the campaign in a similar way to a standard email campaign. You have additional merge tags which allow you to specify exactly what the emails will contain and how often they’re sent out. For example, you might want to send both the HTML extract and the list of recent posts.

…and that’s it. Set this up and every day at the time you specify MailChimp will check the RSS feed of your blog and if it finds anything new it’ll send out an email containing just the new entries. Genius.

Thesis is, in my view, the best WordPress theme for commercial sites but there can be a couple of niggles when it comes to installing it on a shared hosting platform such as, in my case, a Heart Internet Reseller account.

Thesis includes the facility to include a post image: this is an image that appears near the post title and which is then used as a thumbnail – obviously exactly how these appear is configurable within the Thesis options panel.

Installing for the first time on a shared space went fine until it came to specifying the Post Images which simply didn’t appear. After a good deal of digging around on the Thesis forum at DIY Themes and some experimentation, here’s the process I went through to fix the problems:

1. In notepad, create a file containing just these lines:
   < ?php
phpinfo();
?>
   FTP this file into the root folder of your website and then launch your browser and go to http://[yourdomainname]/phpinfo.php. This will bring up a whole heap of information about your PHP configuration. Use your browser’s search function to find the lines allow_url_fopen and allow_url_include. If allow_url_fopen is set to ON, then allow_url_include must also be ON. The chances are that allow_url_include is OFF and what you need to do is set allow_url_fopen to OFF also. This is easily done…
2. Open up Notepad and create a new file with just this one line:
   allow_url_fopen = off
3. Save this file as php5.ini (or, if you’ve left your domain set as PHP4 for some reason, this file should be called php.ini) and FTP it to the root folder of your site (usually something like /public_html or /httpdocs). This should sort out the post images issue but possible not the thumbnails
4. To fix the thumbnail issue, fire up your FTP program and find and select the following folders, right click and select File Permissions, then type the number shown into the dialog that appears. This allows Thesis to create the thumbnails:
   • /wp-content/themes/thesis_16/custom/cache/ (set to 755)
   • /wp-content/themes/thesis_16/lib/scripts/ (set to 755)
   • /wp-content/themes/thesis_16/lib/scripts/thumb.php (set to 744)

   Thanks to “pulselv” for this on the DIYThemes forum

5. Finally, click the “Big Ass Save Button” (or whatever you’ve renamed it to) on the Thesis Options screen. This makes Thesis take notice of the changes. All should now be well!

THESIS 1.7 UPDATE: I’ve found with Thesis 1.7 that you need to click the Save button on every one of the Thesis option pages. I suspect you, in fact, only have to click one but I clicked them all to be sure.

Let’s just begin by saying that I have purchased Apple products in the past. I’ve owned an iMac, an eMac, several iPod Nanos, a MacBook and an iPod Classic. To me, they are the masters of hardware design and some of their software is also excellent (the iPhone/iPod Touch OS and Keynote being two outstanding examples for me – on the other hand Quicktime and iTunes are amongst my least favourite pieces of software, right up there with Adobe Reader). My loathing of iTunes and my discovery of how liberating it is to have a plain, vanilla MP3 player, buy MP3s from Amazon and simply drag and drop them across has led to my abandonment of the iPod series, for now at least.

As a geek but not an early adopter, it’s people like me that Apple needs to impress if it’s to increase its market share. Apple evangelists will buy the iPad, even if they don’t really know why and I don’t doubt they’ll find uses for it (even if it’s annoying other commuters by watching “Love Actually” on their lovely big screen) but people like me need a justifiable reason for laying out the money.

So, if money were no object, what would I buy in the following categories?

SMARTPHONE

I would buy: an iPhone

The iPhone was and is a game-changing device. Many of the apps are of high quality and, once 3G support was introduced, it offered truly liberated browsing and pseudo-computing.

What I actually bought: an HTC Magic running Android

Why? Just look at the figures. When I was choosing my next phone (my first smartphone having been a Sony-Ericsson user for a few generations), the cost of owning an iPhone was an £80 upfront payment and then a 24 month contract at £45 per month. This equates to a total cost of ownership of around £1,150 over 2 years.

My Magic, on the other hand, cost zero for the handset on a 18 month contract at £25 per month for a total cost of ownership of around £450. Android has proven a joy to use and I’ve already enjoyed 2 updates. It’s closely integrated (of course) with Google’s applications so for web use it’s ideal. And, of course, you don’t have to close one application to use another.

LAPTOP

I would buy: a Macbook Pro

…running Windows 7. I bought my first Macbook when they moved over to Intel chips and therefore became capable of running Windows. Windows 7 (and, to be honest, also Windows Vista) are nice, usable and productive operating systems and the choice of software for me, as a developer, is many times what it is under OSX.

What I actually bought: an Acer Laptop from Tesco

Why? Again, price. The 15 inch MacBook Pro starts at £1,328. The Acer Laptop cost £349 to which I would need to add £50 or so for an upgrade to Windows 7. What, in practice, does the MacBook Pro offer that makes it worth around 4x the price. And just to be clear, the technical specification of the Acer is very similar to the MacBook Pro.

DESKTOP

I would buy: Chillblast Fusion Midgard (£896 inc VAT)

This is PCPro’s current A list Desktop PC with a blistering benchmark score of 2.48 (3.2GHz Pentium D = 1)

What I actually bought: A cheap Dell Studio with a Quad Core processor (£299)

Runs my applications perfectly quickly. I play games on my PS3 so I don’t need game playing capability.

NETBOOK

I would buy: Samsung NC series Netbook (around £300 incl VAT)

…and this was what I actually bought. What a lovely little device. Excellent keyboard, nice bright display, around 7 hours of battery and a good rugged feel.

I guess this is the category the iPad could most obviously compete in. Except that it doesn’t have:

• a keyboard – software keyboards are NO replacement for a real one
• a webcam (are you having a laugh?)
• any protection for the screen
• a card reader so I can import my photos
• USB (!!!!)

…and it costs more than twice as much. The fact is that the iPad cannot replace a laptop or a phone. It’s only possible place is in the netbook market and it cannot compete there on either features or price. It is a lovely product, technologically very clever but its market (beyond Apple disciples) isn’t obvious to me. It’s too fragile to be used in education and not suitable for typing extensively on. I can see that if I were giving a presentation, it would be great to load it up on the iPad and then simply connect it to the projector and use the iPad as a controller. But I won’t spend £650 for this, very minor, benefit.

Sorry Apple, I simply cannot get excited by it. If you offered me an iPhone at a reasonable price I’d bite your arm off. If you offered me a Mac Mini, I’d have it and install Windows 7. If you offered me an iPad I’d politely decline.

About Me

I’m not a self-development guru but I am interested in the area and have studied many of the best practitioners. This series of blog entries summarises the main themes I’ve seen reoccurring time and time again: a series of universally accepted principles that really should be taught to our children at school.

I don’t pretend to be great at all of these – far from it. However, I know from experience that when I work on each of them, my life becomes more productive, richer and happier.

Just to reiterate, I am not preaching or evangelising these principles. I’m simply summarising what I see as the most important of them so that you can think about incorporating them into your day. If they make sense to you, I suggest applying them one at a time until each becomes a habit and part of your natural outlook on life.

Step1 : Taking Responsibility

You’re probably familiar with the concept of “stimulus-response” as in the famous experiment by Pavlov in which he trained dogs to salivate when they hear a bell which had previously been rung whenever there was a sausage in the vicinity.

The stimulus (the bell) lead directly to the response (dribbling). In a similar way, the stimulus of being cut up on the motorway might lead to the response of sticking two fingers up, honking your horn and chasing the offender. Or you might feel miserable because the weather’s wet or because you’ve just heard a sad story on the news.

However, there is an essential difference between animals and humans. Animals have no choice about responding to a stimulus, humans do. If you feel miserable on a cloudy day, you’re giving control over your mood to an outside force (the weather) about which you can do nothing. If you get stressed when someone overtakes you on the motorway and then cuts in, you’re allowing that person’s behaviour to stress you. Note the verbs: “giving” and “allowing”. You see, it’s your choice how you react to any stimulus: you choose whether to react with anger, sadness, calmness or even not to react at all.

It might feel as though you are taking control by reacting but, in fact, you are giving up control to the stimulus just as surely as if you were a dog salivating over a sausage. The truly strong, empowering thing to do is to stop, think and then respond in accordance with your values.

One of the best ways to make yourself more effective is to work on those things you can influence and ignore those things you can’t. The weather doesn’t make you miserable, it’s your reaction to it that does so: this is why one person’s gorgeous sunny day is another’s wasp-infested slice of hell.

By only trying to exercise control over things you can control (and this rarely includes other people), you focus your energies in productive areas and greatly reduce your stress. If the weather’s crap (the UK is locked in a new Ice Age as I write this) then don’t let it get you down: work out how you’re going to control those things you can. If you’re unable to drive anywhere (as we are at present) then work on managing with what you have at home. Think about helping your vulnerable neighbours out. Clear the snow from in front of your house and car. Enjoy it!

Don’t underestimate the power of this. By taking responsibility for how you react, you stop blaming the world for your misfortunes and this is empowering (after all if you stop believing that the weather can make you miserable, you’ve just given yourself the power to be happy). It also makes you more forgiving of others and much less affected by their weaknesses.

Do what you can about what you can influence: and remember that your reactions to everything that happens are entirely in your control. Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp victim and psychiatrist reasoned that he has complete control over his thoughts and reactions and, in that understanding, more freedom than his prison camp guards. His is a humbling story and well worth reading.

Further Reading: I came across this principle first in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. This was an enormously influential experience (I listened to the audio of a seminar) and very much affected my way of looking at life and my performance.

I’m all for Buyer Protection (after all, I’m a buyer more often than a seller) but Paypal’s Dispute Resolution system needs sorting out.

One of my companies offers an online subscription service. On Christmas Eve, a customer emailed us to say they couldn’t access the service having paid for it. On Boxing Day having waited a whole 48 hours over Xmas and not received a response, they put a claim in. What did they claim? That the product had not been received.

I then got notification of this, logged into Paypal (having emailed the customer and asked why they’d escalated it without giving us reasonable time to respond) only to find that the three options open to me when it comes to responding are:

1. I have posted the item, here is the tracking number
2. I did not post the item, I will refund
3. I have already refunded.

THERE IS NO ITEM TO POST! This is an entirely online product. The customer has (either wilfully or through ignorance) filed an incorrect complaint. Unfortunately, Paypal don’t bother to investigate the type of product and take the customer’s word for it. There is no way I can find to add a “note” to the dispute and surely the simplest solution would be:

4. This is not a physical product

…or something similar.

Paypal have now found in favour of the customer and refunded them. This leaves businesses like mine open to ignorant or malicious claim-backs without any recourse to defend ourselves. It really is time Paypal got their finger out and at least gave merchants such as us (with a long and blemish-free history) the opportunity to respond properly to inappropriate claims.