shamsulazhar.com

The Audio Player WordPress Plugin is an excellent way of streaming audio from your blog posting.

Here’s an example of it in action from my collection of mp3s :-

Mind blowing isn’t it

A few people have asked me about WP plugins that I use for this website. Well here it is taken directly from my ‘Plugin Management’ page with some slight editing :-

A while back a new plugin called WordPress Widgets (WPW) was released. This plugin allows WordPress users to easily customize their theme by dragging and dropping widgets into their theme’s sidebar(s).

I’ve updated the Tiga theme theme with support for this plugin.
To install:-

1. Download the latest version of the Tiga theme.
2. Download and install the ‘Wordpress Widgets’.
3. In the Admin page go to ‘Presentation>Sidebar Widgets’ and drag & drop the widgets into the sidebars.

At the time of writing there’s still not many widgets out there yet, but this is definitely the way forward.

I’d like to say thank you to the guys at Automattic, Inc. for developing this fantastic plugin.

Keep up the good work guys!

If you need to post some time in the future, for instance if you have a backlog of articles but want to appear as if you are posting on a daily basis, what you can do is :-

1. Set the time and date in the ‘Post Timestamp’ control to some future time.
2. Make sure that the you’ve checked the ‘Edit timestamp’ checkbox.
3. Make sure that the ‘Post Status’ is set to ‘Published’.
4. Click ‘Save’.

Et voila, unattended posting, like this post.

Have you ever commented to a blog and have to regularly check back to see if the blog owner has replied to your comments?

If your answer is yes and would like to make life easier for your readers you might want to take a look at the subscribe to comments plugin.

This useful plugins allows your readers to subscribe to comments on a particular post. If the person comments to your post he/she will automatically be added to the subscribe list and be notified via e-mail when new comments are posted.

The user is also able to subscribe without commenting and also remove himself from the subscription.

I’m actually using this plugin for this site and you can see some extra fields in all the comments section that is added by this very useful plugin.

I wish more blogs would use this plugin.

What are you waiting for?

Install it ……now!

I was looking at my web logs and found a hit from Taiwan and it turned out to be from a Chinese language rap oriented website using the Tiga WordPress theme I’ve created a while back.

Ok, I’m taking a big risk posting this because this site might change it’s theme at any time, but what the hey…… I just can’t resist it because I find that their music is pretty catchy and deserves a shout out.

Here’s a sample of their music.

Very cool stuff.

Now how do you say “Yo G, I’m gonna put a cap in your white a**¹” in Chinese .

The color change to predominantly black seems to work quite well here.

Well, I guess black……is the new white .

1. I don’t really know what that actually means but I guess that’s what the kids say these days . [back]

In developing the Tiga theme I often need to test my changes on various web browsers, but since I only have access to PCs at home and at work, my testing have been limited to Firefox, IE and Opera on XP.

So I was grateful to have found safaritest which allows you to see how your website look like on the Apple Safari browser.

Although to be honest I don’t really need to use it that much because Safari’s compliance to web standards is pretty good. So as long as I keep my pages XHTML compliant, it should look the same across most browsers. But for ocassional testing……indispensible.

Highly recommended.

If you are a theme author and would like to allow your theme users to configure elements of your theme from the admin pages you will be grateful for the WordPress Theme Toolkit by Ozh.

I’ve integrated this excellent plugin into my Tiga theme and now some of the things that the Tiga theme user¹ will be able to do are :-

1. Easily modify the height of the header.
2. Easily add background image to the header.
3. You can now set the minimum and maximum page size to avoid your page from being stretched or squished to ridiculous values.
4. Widths of left and right sidebars are now modifiable.
5. Some color and font adjustments are also possible.

My thanks to you Ozh for contributing a great tool to the WordPress community, what a great time saver for theme developers.

1. Also known as ‘Tigarati’ . [back]

click for slideshow

Tiga¹ is a simple three column theme that I did as a learning exercise in order to understand the WordPress theme system.

Writing a new WordPress theme from scratch is surprisingly not too difficult, given the excellent documentations.

Perhaps one day I’ll write a simple tutorial on how to do it if there’s enough demand.

To install:-

1. Download tiga.zip (version 1.0.2).
2. Unzip it to your local PC.
3. Upload the ‘tiga’ directory to ‘wp-content/themes’ so that you have ‘wp-content/themes/tiga’.
4. Go to the ‘wp-admin’ presentation page and select ‘Tiga’ as your active theme.

After a successful installation go to the ‘Presentation’ tab in the ‘Admin’ interface. You will see a new ‘Tigarator’ submenu there. If you click on this tab, a page with various configurable options can be seen.

If you need to configure the theme even further, you can edit ’style.php to add your changes.

Once you’re satisfied with your changes you can go to:-

http://your-wp-path/wp-content/themes/tiga/style.php

to retrieve the CSS file produces and save it in ’style.css’.

Important: Please do this from IE! This is because ‘style.php’ generates some extra codes for IE compatibility. So doing this from IE will ensure that this extra code is generated and your pages would look consistent in IE and also most modern browsers.

You can then switch to this stylesheet by selecting a checkbox in the admin page. You may also want to do this to produce a back up of your style changes.

1. ‘Tiga’ literally means three in the Malay language. [back]