I don’t normally mention anything when I add a new WP plugin to this site but this one is very new and quite useful.

While displaying too many plugins can make a blog look cluttered and unprofessional, contextual internal links can increase your pageviews and make your site flow more intuitively.

If you haven’t already grabbed it, download and install a Related Posts plugin and then install the Where Did They Go From Here plugin.

Where Did They Go From Here is very similar to the Amazon list that say something like, People who Bought this Also Bought…

Basically, once installed it can track where users click after they have viewed one of your single posts. Unfortunately.. there is no relationship between this plugin and the Recent Posts plugin so you will often see duplicate links across the two lists.

Installation is routine (follow the instructions on the plugin page) except that the plugin attempts to hook into the WP footer and display itself just before the comments. This type of installation will probably work for most people but I found it to result in a badly displayed page when applied to my severely hacked theme.

The fix is simple however, all I had to do was comment out this line in the plugin:

add_action(’comment_form’,’show_where_they_go’);

And add a function call to single.php just above where I placed the Recent Posts call:

<?php show_where_they_go();?>

That was it! The content will start populating once people begin to click away from your single post pages. I highly recommend this plugin!

Although I plan on creating my own theme whenever I stumble across some free time, the default Kubrick theme that came with WP suits my needs just fine for now.

Lately I’ve been finding myself wanting to take advantage of the entire width of my blog screen. Elements that get in the way of accomplishing this are obviously the sidebar but also the column width as defined in the CSS.

Fortunately we can take care of that with a simple Page Template. If you’d like to create the occasional wide page and use your existing blog width, read my article on creating a Page Template.

Still Need More Space?

Alright, we still need more room for things like Amazon’s astore so let’s widen our standard Kubrick width from 760 to 800.

Note: Take note of the 40px increase as we’ll use that to adjust div padding and such.

As always, be sure to backup your CSS file (default: styles.css) just in case. I’ll present the following steps in an order you can follow if modifying a production site for minimal disruption.

Modify Some Graphics

Using your favorite editor or even MS Paint, open the following files and increase the image attributes to your desired width.

• kubrickbg.jpg
• kubrickbgwide.jpg (this might only be present if you’ve installed the sidebar widget)
• kubrickfooter.jpg
• kubrickheader.jpg

Once that is done, extend the image length by cutting off the right size and moving it to the new “right side”. Then copy a middle section of the image and paste it to fill the hole left behind by your initial cut.

If someone knows of an easier way of accomplishing this please share. All it all it isn’t very difficult at all anyway.

Save the new files as a name you’ll recognize to associate with your new width like *_800.jpg or .png (e.g., kubrickheader_800.jpg).

Note: If using MS Paint, you might want to save the image as a PNG to avoid the default JPG dithering that Paint applies to new files.

Edit The CSS

Using the standard Kubick Stylesheet, there are only a few CSS elements you’ll need to modify. Modify your style.css doc by navigating to Read More »

While I’m very happy with how WordPress2 handles dynamic page generation with customized permalinks and the like, that doesn’t quite suite my needs for storing static content in a “real” directory.

From time to time I find myself wanting to drop files into a directory under the root location of WordPress. Occasionally it’s nice to upload and link to source code, compressed archives, demo applications or even just random files.

If you’ve ever tried this you realize of course that Wordpress assumes all links coming to anything at or below the root location is a link it should dynamically handle and generate appropriately. As such, creating a location such as “…\mydirectory” under the WP root will result in WP 404 message.

Static Jack

I tried out Jack Born’s “Static Jack” plugin which is supposed to allow you the ability to basically add a redirect rule for static pages.

This worked find for a while but when I leaned on it a bit I found that it wasn’t quite designed to accomplish what I needed. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a great plugin (thanks Jack) but it wasn’t specifically made to address my particular need.

The plugin handled a few things differently than I desired such as not being 100% compatible with IE and not allowing the browser to render txt documents correctly.

Present Solution

While I didn’t necessarily look forward to messing with the .htaccess file, I knew that the problem could probably be solved with inserting a line or two. Thanks to a helpful article by Håvard Stranden, the line I ended up adding was:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/mydirectory/?

Adding the /? after “mydirectory” allows any directories beneath it to also serve “static” pages.

The WordPress section of my .htaccess now looks like this

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/mydirectory/?
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

I hope someone else finds this helpful.