WordPress Rotating Header Images no Plugins
The first time that I saw rotating header images was on Chris Pearson’s personal blog Pearsonfied.com and I really liked the feature a lot. If you do not already know Chris is the man responsible for the well designed Cutline WordPress Theme that actually comes with an implementing tutorial for adding the rotating image headers including the images. This may be the answer you’ve been looking for if you do not mind changing your entire theme just to get image rotations up top.
Anyway since I do not want to change my entire theme and with a little from my friend Google I was able to locate quite a few methods in which to accomplish the fabulous image rotation. As always I will only be explaining the route that I choose for my site. If you are interested in some possible plugin solutions you can find a few at Lorelle’s site.Â
Unfortunately for the novice I did not decide on a WordPress plugin this go around and instead I with some good old code manipulation. Given the fact I am not an expert by far in the department of; php and css it took a little time to figure out how to make this work with my theme.Â
Rotating Header Images Step 1:
- Copy the php code here (below rotator apart header)
- Save it to notepad
- Save the file as rotator.php
- Open your FTP program
- Make a new folder (random)
- Upload the rotator.php to the random folder
- Find images now that meet header height & width
- Upload those images to the random folder
Rotating Header Images Step 2:
The coding if your using the Misty theme your in luck because that is what I use and I have already figured out the coding to make this all work.
Go to your style.css file in your dashboard and you have to find out what attribute your theme uses to place your header image and you have to place the URL to the random folder which has the images and the rotater.php file. Once again if you are using the Misty them then just find #headerimage and copy the code below.Â
#headerimage {
 clear: both;
 background: #fff url(http://jakeldaily.com/random/rotater.php) no-repeat 0 0;
 margin: 0px;
 color: #fff;
 height: 175px;
}
Congratulations to those of you that have finished this task and successfully made it work for your theme. I must admit immediately after I got it to work with my test images I went directly to Flickr and starting stealing images to put into my new rotation. Â
Then thirty minutes into my image stealing frenzy I realized something! This is my personal blog and why am I putting other people’s pictures into the image header focal point of the site.
A light blub went off at this moment and that is when I decided to start looking through my personal travel pictures and use them (travel date & place right hand corner) in my rotating image header. My intentions are to have ten images in total in the next few days and at the moment I have six to include; Ferrari Vegas, Venice Italy, Attre Belgium, Bognor Regis UK, Maldives, and Alicante Spain.Â
Get The Magazine Look with Pullquotes
Get The Magazine Look with Pullquotes
Give your blog the magazine look with pullquotes! The publishing industry has been successfully using pullquotes for years. The professional touch that adds style and usability that helps the reader scan your articles efficiently.
There are a few methods that you can use to get pullquotes on your site, I’m will only be explaining the method for which I used. The code below of course can be customized to your liking colors, fonts and backgrounds. Â
The Code:Â Copy into style.css:
q {float:left; width:9em; display:block; margin:0.25em 0.75em 0.25em 1em; padding:0.5em; border:3px double #ccc; border-width:3px 0; color:#484848; background-color:#ffffff; text-align:center; font:bold 1.3em/1.3 Georgia;}
q.q2 { width: 200px; margin: 5px 0 5px 15px; padding: 5px 0; border: 3px double #aaa; border-width: 3px 0; font-size: 1.4em; text-align: center; float: right; }
To Insert Pullquote in the Post:Â
<q>Your Text Here</q> — quote shows left
<q class=”q2″>Your Text Here</q>Â — quote shows right
To Insert (Option 2) Pullquote in the Post:
Quicktags Wordpress Plugin : The quicktag is an excellent plugin for the lazy guru blogger. With quicktag you just add your code into the simple user interface under options and when you return to the editor your button will be available for quick use of adding the pullquotes or any other function you want to quickly use while writing.Â
Quicktag Interface:
WP Editor:
WordPress Pullquote Plugin Options:
Fancy-Pullquotes Pugin : Negative effects if deactivated and RSS trouble according to comments.
Nerdaphernalia Pullquotes: I actually installed this plugin and it has an excellent user interface located under the presentation tab but I was unable to make the pullquotes show up when adding the required markup tag in the post.Â
WordPress Plugins Equal Traffic
I remember back when I first start this blog back in February and was completely new to the WordPress world! Little did I know WordPress was just an empty shell just dying for a plugin or two. Do you think WordPress did this purposely since they knew programmers would do them a favor in return for traffic to their new plugins?  Â
I’ve actually had thoughts of designing a plugin in return for traffic!
To get started I made the famous list that millions of other bloggers have posted ‘The Best WordPress Plugins’ that I use for this site. There are so many plugins being made everyday you could almost start a site just talking about new plugins. Here are 5 more to take a look at but I personally only use the duplicate content cure for this site.
- Duplicate Content Cure (stop search engines from indexing duplicate content)
- Bankroll (sell your own reviews)
- Postviews (show the number views per post)
- Tiger Admin (change the look of your wordpress dashboard)
- Feed Footer (add messages under your posts in your RSS feeds)
My Favorite PluginÂ
Have you ever received an email after commenting that welcomes you to the site? At first you may have thought that was really nice for the blogger to email you personally welcoming you, right. Well sorry to burst your bubble but that is a plugin also called comment relish and I highly recommend it!
DoFollow Promotion and WordPress Plugin
I think is was around April that bloggers started jumping on the dofollow wagon for removing the nofollow tag off comments in order to give readers that comment a full backlink.
To be honest I had not given this much thought until yesterday when I came across a list of 170 + blogs created by CourtneyTuttle & GeekySpeaky that have already removed the nofollow tag.
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After viewing the list it got me thinking that I should give in and remove the nofollow tag from my site also. The second thing that crossed my mind was to also use this list for promotion of my recent change and to get 170 + backlinks by visiting each site and commenting with something relative.Â
A time consuming endeavor commenting on every blog on the list but I guestimate that at least 20% will become readers after checking my site out from the comment, making it all worthwhile to me!
Wikipedia defined:
nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of spamdexing, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.
In order to remove the nofollow tag I came across two plugins that can be installed and then activated:
- Semiologic: download here.
- Kimmo: download here.
I ended up installing the Semiologic plugin since I was unable to get the Kimmo page to resolve it must have been down at the time of trying to reach it. The Semiologic was simple to install just upload it to the plugins folder then go to dashboard and click activate – finished no configuration was need.
Permalinks – Turn On SEO URLs
I first posted on this on 9 Mar 2007 and still four months later I see that new bloggers are not taking care of this from the start. As you can see from the post below even I was guilty of it taking almost 8 weeks before I updated. If you have not turned on your permalinks you are like an invisible needle in a hay stack. Â
======Permalinks Take Care Of This======
I was actually wondering about this around 8 weeks ago the time it has been since my first post on 10 February 07 but I have been so busy installing one million plugins I just forgot about fixing the permalinks. This is a mistake that many bloggers including myself make and it will definitely cost you a lower search ranking by Google. It is somewhat easy to correct depends on your level of computer competence.
Dynamic URL & SEO URL explained;by default WordPress names its URL with a generated sequential number each time you post a article. The number is then placed after your domain name and looks like this http://jakeldaily.com/?p=50 to Google and other search engines this does not mean anything. Therefore the search engines have to then spider your content to figure out what your articles are about. On the other hand if you are using SEO URLs you’re your url will look something like this http://jakeldaily.com/review-my-blog-link-back-batch-2/. With SEO URLs it is much easier for the search engines to figure out instantly what your posted articles are about.Â
For WordPress turning SEO URLs on go to options in the WordPress control panel and then choose permalinks. In this window you have four choices for the way you would like your site URL to be displayed by default, date and name based, numeric, and custom. You should select use date and name based but I recommend that you use custom to display the post name after your domain name; to do it just input /%postname%/Â
Important step:before WordPress can update your site to SEO URLs you must first make an adjustment to your .htaccess file. FTP to your site and find your .htaccess file, should be located in the root folder and then you have CHMOD it to 666 afterwards when WordPress have updated your permalinks structure you should change it back. If you want your blog to achieve its full potential you need to make this change now do not put it off.Â
If you are unsure on how to change the permissions of the .htaccess file and you are using Cute FTP 7.0 find the .htaccess file in the root directory and right click it then at the bottom you will see CHMOD click it. In the next window you will see 644 in an input box change that number to 666. After you have updated the permalinks go back and then change it back to 644 and click then apply.
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