It is fairly easy to exclude a category from your home page with 4 lines of code, or 5 if you include the comment!

Open up your loop.php (or page.php depending on your theme) file and look for the line that starts the loop:

<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

Just before that, you want to add this:

<!– exclude the weddings category from the home page –>
<?php if ( is_home() ) {
query_posts($query_string . ‘&cat=-1′);
}
?>

In this example, the number 1 refers to the category we want to exclude. To find the category number you need to go to the Categories page in the admin panel and hover over the category name. You’ll see the number in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window.

Save your loop.php (page.php) file and that’s it.

I recently encountered a problem when updating a client’s WordPress-based website; the update failed. In fact, several attempts failed in spite of logging out and back in again, clearing browser cache and scratching my head a couple of times. With frequent updates to the core WordPress installation, there are two methods of updating your main site files; either automatically or manually. If you see the nag/notice screen at the top of your admin area click on the Please update now text and you’ll be taken to the update page with the options buttons:

Clicking the blue Update Now button should start the process automatically and as of version 3.3, once this successfully completes you should see a “What’s New” screen.

If your update fails for any reason, you should download the files using the other button and take a full back-up of your WordPress site. The best way to do this is is via FTP. There are several apps and programs for this, and a lot of people like the free FireFTP plugin for Firefox. (It is a good idea to backup your site before any major update to your core installation.) Download the entire folder or directory your site is sitting in.)

Use the WordPress Tools menu to export a file which you can also use for moving content from local to remote installations, or when moving your WordPress site to another web host.

Export all the content and images too as this covers all your bases. If you are moving a site, you can import this file through the Tools menu to fill your new installation with your content.

Now you have a backup, it is worth logging in to any cPanel or web hosting account panel you have that lets you see how much web space you have left. This can save you a lot of work! If you are over your limit or have almost no room to spare, updating WordPress might be an issue. Check to see that you don’t have full email boxes or large backup files eating in to your web space. Clearing some of this out might make all the difference, so if you have this situation and have deleted some unneeded content, try the WordPress updater again.

If you use a WordPress backup plugin, you will have options to state how many backups you want to keep. Some of these backup files can be quite large so think how many you need and how often you need to back up your site.

If this doesn’t work, you can trying disabling your plugins and seeing if that makes a difference. You can deactivate them all in one go using the checkbox and drop menu on the Plugins > Installed Plugins page.

If that doesn’t work, changing some of your WordPress files may be the way to go.

1. Using FTP, delete the wp-includes and wp-admin directories.
2. Upload the new ones (from the files you downloaded right at the start.)
3. Upload any loose files from your wp-content folder, but do not upload the whole folder or delete the existing one. You will be over-writing any existing files at the root of the wp-content directory.
4. Upload all the new, individual files that are NOT in the wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes directories to the root directory of your site (or wherever you installed WordPress.)

If you had a failed automatic upgrade, using FTP you need to remove the .maintenance file to clear the “Failed Update” nag message.

Hopefully, you should now be able to update your installation.

Since moving away from the increasingly-bloated Dreamweaver some time ago, I have tried various other options for coding websites. I have tried TextWrangler, Komodo Edit, Coda (demo only as it never had all the features I expected to find, and the Coda 2 release is taking forever to arrive) and TextMate which has been my longer-term favourite. However, I think my search for an editor may be over as Espresso 2 does (almost) everything I want and beautifully too! You can get a fully-functional 15-day demo here: http://macrabbit.com/espresso/.

Initial Steps

After installing, I had to make a couple of changes in my System Prefs, as I’m a UK user and Espresso uses the Mac’s internal understanding of word characters to govern its selection settings. (Double-clicking in URLs selected the entire string including the .com). To fix this I went to System Prefs > Language & Text > Text tab and chose English (United States computer) for my Word breaks. This worked fine after a restart of Espresso.

Espresso Projects

I then went to File and created a New Project. Like TextMate, if you do this you can do site-wide searches which is really hany when working with a CMS like WordPress and debugging or editing files. Project icons can be coloured and have graphics added to them, making it visually very quick to select from one of several projects.

Espresso in Action

The interface is really good to work with, particularly if you are a mainly front-end designer. You have the project files displayed in a vertical list down the left side and the edit window in the middle. On the right, there is the option to show the code navigator or CSS tools. This can be switched on and off with the slide of a button or using cmd + i.

The navigator helps you to quickly see and jump to points in your code, using a tree structure to display your document hierarchy. It has folded blocks so you can hide and show just what you need to. (The code editor has code-folding too which is one of the odd omissions that stopped me going any further with Coda as an editor.)

Other than code-folding, other very useful features include code-completion and syntax error detection and colouring. You can work with the defaults (I do) or make your own theme. Espresso uses Sugars to extend the functionality and these are much like TextMate’s bundles. My only wish is that there was a visual editor for creating your own Sugars. There is a Snippets editor and this provides a means to add quick code snippets to your files.

Main Espresso window

Standard HTML files can be previewed with live updates (no refresh needed) and there is a feature called X-Ray which lets you see how your CSS is affecting your layouts. This is a little like using Firebug and it’s a great little tool.

There is support for a range of languages including HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python and XML.

There is no native Diff support for checking or comparing files, although there is a Changes app Sugar which can be installed from Changes. You will need to set Espresso to open in 32-bit mode for this to appear on the Actions menu and I’m not able to get it working as it does properly in TextMate yet. This means running it in the background.

For CSS editing, MacRabbit have integrated their CSS Edit app, making it a breeze to style your content. In most cases, I find it quicker to manually write the styles for my elements, using the code-completion making it faster still, but for me, this really comes in to it’s own when it comes to colour selection:

The Color Picker

When I want to colour my elements, I have often gone through a bit of trial and error to find the right tints and tones. With Espresso, this is now incredibly easy as I can work with a familiar colour picker, that lets me also control opacity! Best yet, there is a magnifying glass icon that lets me pick colours from outside of my Espresso workspace. This alone has made me very happy and it is one of my most-used features surprisingly!

Creating CSS3 radial and linear gradients is equally super-easy, making a pretty hefty chunk of code writing effortless. It automatically creates all the code for -moz and -webkit gradients, along with the angle in degrees. If you want to change the angle, it updates both vendor-prefixed lines on-the-fly.

Again, the navigator helps out by giving you visual feedback on the styles in your document. The styles can be re-ordered in your file by simply clicking and dragging them into their new place. This is a fast way to move styles about if you have issues with the cascade in your file. It is obvious that a lot of thought and work has gone into Espresso, from the point-of-view of the end-user and the support provided by Ian at MacRabbit has been excellent.

FTP Support

Once you are ready to upload your files, the built-in ftp options make this simple too. You have a choice to sync your site or use one of a couple of other handy methods; auto upload or quick publish. To get started you need to set up your server(s). Click on the Settings button and a nice animation opens the panel to set your servers up.

Espresso FTP servers

There is support for FTP, SFTP and S3 engines and you can have more than one server! This is yet another one of those really useful features. If you are working on a development server you can set that up, along with your live site, then you simply decide which server you want to upload files to. No more switching between settings or using a third-party FTP app, this is as simple as choosing from a drop-down menu! To enable auto-uploads, just switch the server of choice on and every time you save the file it uploads to the server. Or, you can right-click on your file in the left pane and upload it to whichever server from there. Or, you can connect to your ftp server and drag files from the left pane to wherever you want on your server. Hover over your directories to expand/open them.

Summary

This really is a scratching-of-the-surface as far as Espresso 2 is concerned. I’ll add some of the shortcuts and snippets I use most in another post soon. I mentioned that you can extend the app with Sugars and I would suggest these for a start:

The HTMLBundle which includes some of the TextMate snippets.

The jQuery Sugar adds autocompletion for jQuery methods.

Ian’s Handy Sugar lets you edit, prepend/append multiple lines at once, and has a neat increment for numbers.

Espresso 2 is beautifully-written, a pleasure to use and makes coding quick and easy. At the moment it costs $79 (£50.61) which is certainly very good value for money. I keep discovering useful features and if built-in file comparisons and a visual sugar editor were added, this would be the best Espresso I ever tasted!

Hobarts Estate Agents approached me saying they wanted their website to be given a new lease of life as the previous site was starting to look a little bit tired. It was working well for them but it really needed a revamp, and simplifying, without losing functionality.

Hobarts 2009 website

Hobarts 2011 website

As the site was working well, the first thing was to make it more accessible, so the content was available to users of mobile devices (including iPhones/iPads) too. This was not designed as a web application, but rather, intended for desktops but still navigable and accessible on these devices. There has been a shift away from the use of Flash in my work over the last few months, towards the use of jQuery and HTML5/CSS3. I use CSS3PIE wherever possible for Internet Explorer browsers, for things like the rounded corners and shadows. There is also use of some of the new HTML5 mark-up, such as placeholder text on forms, along with a bit of jQuery for the showing/hiding of elements. I have also used it to control styling on the property feed which comes from a third-party.

The client is happy with the site and so am I. Feedback and thoughts are welcome!

The phone went and a guy on the other end introduced himself as Kevin from the Microsoft Support Department. (Other friends have been called by Steve and Mike. ) The caller had an Indian accent and didn’t strike me as your run-of-the-mill Kevin, but I guess I could be a little unfair on this count… He told me that the support department had received a number of error log reports that had been traced back to my computer. He had obviously got my details from the electoral register or by other means and wanted me to boot up the machine so he could talk me through the errors and fix them.

I asked what the errors were but he insisted on me starting the machine so he could go through them with me because “it would be easier”. I kept asking what messages he had got and where he got my number. He told me it was from the host PC I used when registering Windows. I asked which version and was told that the reports relate to Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP. Didn’t the report tell him which version they were being generated by, I asked? I then told him that actually, I don’t own a PC and only run a virtual Windows machine on my Mac, which is on a local development server used for nothing other than looking at my own websites on Internet Explorer.

I was put on hold before his “supervisor” took over. He introduced himself as the Mac specialist and asked me to boot the virtual machine. I kept asking why (by this stage I was like a cat with a mouse!!!) and how was he going to be able to help? He said he would give me some details so he could log in remotely and fix the errors directly from the Microsoft Support Centre.

Basically, he wanted me to hand over control of my computer to someone who had called me out of the blue, on the most flimsy of premises and with no evidence to support his laughable attempt to remotely hack my Mac. Furthermore, can you seriously imagine Microsoft phoning anybody to offer support? When I said this to him, the call ended rather quickly with him hanging up.

Funny that…

I hope nobody has been burnt by these chancers. If you have had a similar call and DID allow access to your machine, I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t get you to install something nasty or leave a backdoor open for them. Contact a reputable computer expert and get their advice asap.

For reference, I live in North London, UK.

Just so we are clear on what I’m talking about
this is where a line break has been used.

The line has been ‘cut’ after the word ‘about’ so the sentence continues on the next line. Paragraphs, often have some space between each other, or the first line of new paragraphs is indented. This is to make it easier on the eye when following blocks of text, and to provide visual cues where paragraphs begin and end.

Back to Contribute…

You can set yourself up as administrator (if one is not already in place) by using the Contribute >  My Connections panel. (On a PC this is under the Edit menu.) Select your connection and click the Administer… button.

My Connections Administer... button

Contribute will then connect to your site and offer you the chance to select the editing style. Pick Dreamweaver-style editing and confirm that you want to become the site administrator.

Select Dreamweaver-style editing

Yesterday, I used the new AirPlay Mirroring feature on my iPhone 4S for the first time and was pleasantly surprised…

First of all, AirPlay Mirroring is a new feature included in the iOS 5 software update. It lets you wirelessly stream whatever you are doing on your iPhone 4S or iPad 2, straight to your HD TV, using your Apple TV unit as the bridge.

To access it you need to double-tap the home key on your device.

This brings up the hidden dock with all your currently running apps in a horizontal list.

Scroll all the way to the right, past the Music  and orientation lock screen and you’ll see a new AirPlay button and volume slider.

Click on the AirPlay button and an options screen opens. Select your Apple TV and slide the Mirroring button to On.

Click Done and now you should see the image on your HD TV showing whatever is on your iPhone 4S/iPad 2.

This is seriously very cool (I don’t use that word often!) as you rotate the device and the onscreen image mirrors your device. You can use pinch/zoom gestures, and use your device as you would normally and everyone gets to see what you are looking at. You can show web pages and even the games as you play them – now this might have some very practical benefits!!!

Well done Apple – I’m impressed!

Custom menus are a huge bonus for WordPress users. They allow you to easily create a navigation structure, filtering the content and cherry-picking what you want to include. By default you can add pages (and sub-pages) or categories, but you also have the ability to to add links of your own choosing, such as individual posts or external content.

There are a couple of simple steps to add a custom menu to your theme, and you can either do this with a text editor (such as the excellent Espresso which I’ll be reviewing soon!) or with the built in WordPress Editor, found under the Appearance menu.

Open your theme’s functions.php file and add these lines before the closing ?>

// allow for custom menus
add_theme_support( ‘menus’ );

This prepares the theme to accept the custom menus. Now open your header.php (assuming that’s where you want it to go – more about this later…) and add the function in where you want it to appear:

<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'main-nav' ) ); ?>

This tells WordPress a couple of things; to sort the menu to match how you set it up in the Menus panel, and the name of the class (main-nav) that you have given the container for styling. Now, hop over to Appearance > Menus and you’ll see your new custom menu.

You can set it up to automatically add new main/top-level pages as you create them by checking the box next to your Menu Name. On the left, check the pages or categories you want to include and click the Add to Menu buttons. Once they are on the menu, you can simply click and drag them into the order you want, placing sub-menu items by ‘indenting’ them as you drag. You’ll see a dotted border showing you the sub-level each item will appear at. Click the disclosure triangle for each item to change the navigation label and set a title attribute, or remove the link from the menu altogether.

Custom links can be added by entering a URL, setting a label and adding them to the menu, where you then control their placement in exactly the same way.

If you want to add multiple menus to your theme, you need to give them unique IDs, slugs or names. More here at the WordPress codex. There is also a very helpful post here over at Think Vitamin.

All you need to do now is style your menu and you are all set to go!

This is one of those annoying moments that doesn’t seem to have any explanation and has been experienced by a lot of people judging by the various Mac-support forums. Any wireless device you use such as a mouse or keyboard can also go down suddenly, and Apple have a dedicated page here where you can find troubleshooting advice: Apple Bluetooth Support page.

For me, the solution was powering down for 10 minutes to flush the cache and resetting the PRAM. To do this, restart your machine and as soon as you hear the start-up sound, before you see the grey screen, press and hold cmd + alt/opt + p + r. The screen goes black and you hear the sound for a second time. Once you get to the grey load screen you can release the keys.

Christopher Parsons also has some helpful advice here on his blog.

Anyway, with the idea of just freshening the look and using the existing graphics, the site has gone from Nocturne (blacks and dark greys) to Lemongrass (whites and softer greens.)

The blog revamp will follow!

Nocturne Theme

Lemongrass Theme