Design Topics

Searching for a WordPress plugin for HTML snippets

I love WordPress, there is no question. It provides so much power to website and with little work can make any mediocre online presence shine due to the established framework. But since I started using WordPress over two years ago there are a couple of items I am still searching to find and one of them is an easy way to re-use pieces of HTML code that I find myself typing time and time again. (more…)


Different Mr. Do! Bezel Sizes

I was looking forward to today, a package was coming for me that contained not one but two of those character artwork Mr. Do! bezels that you can find on the rare white licensed version of the game. The price to ship is the same whether it was one or two, so I just bought both. However, I got a little bit of a surprise when I did some comparison. (more…)


Amazing Arcade Themed Illustration

Looking through my feeds today for some design ideas I came across a post that had an awesome piece of arcade themed artwork in it! Check out this Space Invaders, Pac-man and much more-piece below. Oh, and to me this one doesn’t even scratch the surface of some of the work of this Guilherme Marconi! Makes me feel awestruck inspired and silly all at once.

Marconi - Arcade

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New Website Design – Auto Repair Facts.com

Been picking at this website since May of 2008. In April a friend of mine who has been a mechanic for many years was looking to start up a website that talked about repairing cars. I could tell by the way he spoke and knowing his passion that he was looking for a creative outlet.

I knew that there were plenty of websites out there talking about car repair, the key would be finding a niche mission. Oh, and the little thing that I know very little about cars, so the website was highly reliant on him being consistent about writing content. Here we are September of 2008 and this Auto Repair Facts.com website has taken off. (more…)


New Website Design – Image Builders Institute

I’ve been busy you might say on many different projects. Here is one that I started about three weeks ago, a new contract / freelance website design for a client here in Indianapolis called Image Builders Institute.com. Image Builders is an Incentive and Impression management service in the Indianapolis area and their website looks static, but is built off of WordPress. (more…)


Edit your WordPress theme – Headers

Some of you out there really want to start your own arcade game blog, but are clueless about web design and therefore don’t understand how to customize the look of your own WordPress website. There are plenty of tutorials out on the internet on how to make your own WordPress theme, sifting through the good ones might be a challenge. Regardless of that fact, I don’t feel the need to rewrite them because customizing your theme is a time investment no matter what you do. You need to learn HTML, CSS and understand the purpose of each html file in the theme.

However, just about any themes out there typically can look like a completely unique website by just adding your own header graphic. I am going to show you how to edit the header in your newly downloaded WordPress theme to add your own custom designed banner graphic. (more…)


Commenting not working

For now, it appears as if the commenting feature isn’t working on the blog. I have spent a ton of time, more than I care to think about, trying to figure the problem out.

When a comment is attempted, you will get an error page with a message that says “Sorry, comments are closed for this item”. Some of the fixes I have attempted;

  • Validating my pages, fixing validation errors
  • Tested in Safari, IE, Opera and Firefox. IE gives me an error page, no message
  • Checking commenting for the whole site
  • Checked commenting on a per post basis
  • Checked my website error logs and general logs, couldn’t identify any problems
  • Searched WordPress Forums – No posts at this writing about comments broken
  • Searched the Web
  • Upgraded all plugins that needed it, deleted unnecessary plugins
  • Reverted back to the default theme
  • Upgraded testing environment to WordPress 2.5 final, but can’t replicate the problem
  • De-activated any comment type plugins for subscribing, etc.

The only step I see left is to try to deactivate all of my plugins and see if one of them is the cause. I thought that WordPress 2.5 was supposed to have a “re-activate all” function, but apparently I misread that somewhere.

I wish I could get this problem to show up on my testing environment, it would make it easier to isolate the plugins without frogging around live. But at this point, the changes in validation and restructuring of some of my html has been enough work to make me go crazy.

I hope to have this issue fixed in the next day or two. Please remember your comments until then.

Thanks.

Jeff

~Edit: Comment error in WordPress 2.5 fixed.

Big thanks to Jamie. In my wp-includes/comment-template.php file my code stopped at line 327 with the function comments_popup_link. But in the new WordPress install, that file went to line 768! So, I replaced that whole wp-includes directory again, and my problem appears to be fixed. I may have been able to just overwrite that one comment-template.php file to get rid of the “Sorry, comments closed” error, but I decided to be safe.