Processor

The heart of a system is the CPU so this is where I started. I have been an AMD fan since the early 90’s. When their Athlon line came out we finally had some competition for Intel. But a lot has changed in the last few years, Intel have brought out the dual and quad core processors at a good price to performance ratio. AMD are now in the position of working hard to try and keep up.

So it was with some sadness I moved into the Intel camp and had a look at the dual core series. I chose the E8400 Retail version. It runs at 3.0Ghz with a 1333 Mhz Front Side Bus and 6 Mb L2 Cache and it comes complete with a cooler. For the price (£118) I think it’s a good deal. I could have gone for a quad core but they are another £50.

MotherBoard

There are several good makes out there Gigabyte, MSI, Asus but my favorite manufacturer is Abit, I have found them to be dependable and easy to get going. They make several motherboards, I settled on the IP35 Pro, it has won several awards and had some good reviews and costs £112.

It has everything I needed, it supports both dual and quad processors for when I upgrade the processor. There are 4 memory slots that support upto 8Gb. It has onboard LAN, 7.1 channel HD audio, 6 x USB2, 2 firewire ports and 2 eSata ports. There are 6 SATA ports and 1 ATA port (for 2 ide drives).

Memory

Choice of memory can either kill or make a system. On my previous system I had 4Gb because I do a lot of high resolution multi-layer Photoshopping, 3d animations and some video editing.

The motherboard can support 800/667/533 DDR2 memory so I picked 800. Just recently there have been some price drops and I was able to get 2Gb of OCZ memory for only £34. It is built for gamers and overclockers and has a timing of 4-4-4-15.

Video Card

At one time there were lots of manufacturers to choose from, these days you have basically 2 - either ATI or Nvidia. I needed good Open GL support and so Nvidia was chosen, now which model? I don’t (often) play games so I don’t need a top of the range card but I want something that has good performance and will last me a couple of years.

The most price effective one was the 9600 series and I chose a Zotec GeForce 96009GT AMP at £120. It has 512Mb of DDR3 memory and supports Open GL 2.1

Misc Stuff

The motherboard supports only 2 IDE drives, this meant that I had to get a SATA DVD-ROM for £16. I had already got a new PSU, 650W modular, and a couple of IDE HD’s. I am using the same case from the previous PC as it is a good quality one, it cost about £120, 5 years ago.

The Build

The hardest part of building the new PC was stripping out all the old stuff from the case. Once everything was out I gave the case a good cleaning. I had already installed the processor, cooler and memory on the motherboard so that was the first to go in the case. then I attached the case connectors, power, hd light etc. to the motherboard.

Next, I installed the hard drives and DVD-Rom and connected them to the motherboard, then I installed the graphics card. Lastly, I connected the PSU cables. With the hardware done, I installed Win XP and the drivers. Total build time was just under two and a half hours.

On the old PC I had three HD’s full of stuff. The new PC had only 1 IDE connector which was in use. I had thought about this beefore building and I bought an Icy Box. This is basically a USB connected box that has connectors inside of it for an IDE drive. The next hour or so was spent copying over data from the old HD’s onto the new ones.

I do have a problem with one of the HD’s it is a SATA drive. I connected it up to the motherboard and powered up the PC. The system recognizes it correctly but does not show in the Explorer. In Disk Management the drive shows up as a "foreign" format!! As this was the most recently added drive it has stuff on it that is important to me and I shall have to find some way of get the data off of it.

The last week has been spent installing software, finding bookmarks and restoring projects.

Wrap Up

Overall I’m happy with the performance of the new PC, even if it is "Intel Inside" and I stayed on budget, just. I have yet to install the Wacom tablet, scanner and printer as I haven’t needed them yet. The worst part of all this is trying to remember all the settings for the system and software as this was not a planned build. Normally I can do a complete rebuild in only one day as I backup everything before dismanteling the old PC, this time it died without warning.

The Icy Box was a real bonus find. I’ve never really thought much of external drives, they’re usually more expensive, need power and are slower. When I bought my case I made sure it would last and that there was a lot of space inside for extra HD’s. But this experience has changed my mind slightly in two connected ways. I have never, in over thirty years, backed-up stuff. If I lose data then tough in fact once I finish a project I often delete it and start over as the second time around usually has a better result. But now I have a couple of spare HD’s that I can quickly swap out of the Icy Box, so I might just start backing up stuff.

To see how much of an improvement in performance the dual core gives me, I rendered two 3d scenes in Cinema 4d. Both images rendered with about a 30% saving in time.

The one surprising thing that has happened was that in the recent Google update I went from PR3 to PR4 despite a slowdown of posting and traffic in the last month.

You can find tutorials on wide array of subjects such as Flash, PhotoShop, Cinema 4D, Bryce, CSS, Dreamweaver, Javascript. PHP, Word, Excel, Business Development, Databases, Programming, Video Editing and more. Most that I looked at were of a decent quality. You can also vote for the tutorial and leave comments for the author.

So, I thought what the heck and signed up. As a test I submitted part 1 of How To Create A WordPress Theme. Well, like I said that was about a month ago, with everything else going on I forgot all about it, that is until about 4 days ago.

During the day I check my traffic at Hit Tail and I noticed a sudden influx of traffic from tutorialized.com. By the end of the day I had over 300 hits and to date I have had just over 500 hits.

Despite the delay of 2-3 weeks, Which may be down to this being my first submission, I am more than happy with the results and will submit more tutorials to them. If you write any kind of computer related tutorials I can heartily recommend that you get on on over to tutorialized.com and submit them.

Now I love Macs because they run a BSD based OS and I grew up on Unix but I tell you this machine is a dog to use for everyday stuff especially card dropping. I’ve also had some character modeling to do and the 3d stuff is as slow as molasses. Well, all of this will soon be a thing of the past This morning I got an unexpected surprise in the mail - a £420 tax rebate!!

This means that Saturday morning I shall be going up Tottenham Court Rd in London to the Computer Fairs there to buy:

• A Motherboard
• CPU
• Memory
• Graphics card

Now it’s been about three years since I last built a PC and things have changed, back then the Athlon 64 was king of the hill and I built of 3Ghz PC with 2 250Gb HD’s and 4Gb of memory. But now it looks like Intel have reclaimed their throne with the dual and quad processors. I have been reading up on stuff most of the day today and it looks like the E8200 is the best buy at the moment, and that’s as far as I’ve got on my shopping list.

The Motherboard: I really don’t know yet… the MSI P35 Platinum looks to be a good deal. I need plenty of USB ports for cameras, 2 printers and stuff. I have two brand new ide HD’s, 250Gb and 500Gb, and I plan on using the ide DVD drive or should I get a SATA drive or DVD?

The Memory: I want at least 2-3Gb, 3d apps are memory hungry when it comes to textures and rendering! I think I need PC800, yes?

The Graphics Card: It has to be Nvidia because I need decent Open GL support, at least 1.5. The 9600 GT looks like a good deal but I haven’t any experience with PCI graphics, I do know I will not be running dual gfx cards. do motherboards come with AGP anymore?

I just bought a 650W modular PSU so that should be able to handle any power requirements.

I don’t play games very often but I do a lot of 3d stuff, stills and animation in Cinema 4D, Cararra and Poser. I also do some film work with Adobe Premiere. Those are the most tasking things I do, I also have Adobe CS2 and some music programs as I have a keyboard, a synth module and a drum box.

So this is where I would like to ask you guys for some advice…

Bearing in mind my budget of £420, have you got any recommendations for the 4 items I need? Any advice would really be appreciated. If you can convince me or twist my arm in a particular direction and it works out then if you are a fellow Ecarder I’ll send you 2000ec’s, this is how important it is to me to get this done as I want to get of off the Mac and back to the comfortable world of PC’s

• Smiley Cat Showcase
• 30 Comment Designs for Web Designers

I am going to show you how to do to basic layouts. The first is where the gravatar, comment author’s name and date are above the comment. the second is where the same info is off to the left and the comment text is to the right. Once you can do these and understand how they work you can then go on to using images as backgrounds to recreate any of the designs you saw in the above showcases.

If you do have any difficulty with either what I show you here or in creating a specific design let me know and I’ll see what I can do to help you.

Gravatars

A gravatar is a Globally Recognized avatar that you can get for free at gravatar.com. Your gravatar has a MPAA style rating so you can have any image you like and restrict it to a specific audience. All you need to do is design your avatar image, sized to 80×80 pixels and upload it.

I shall be implementing gravatars on this blog so I suggest you create an avatar and signup, then it will show up whenever you make a comment here or any other gravatar-enabled blog.

The reason I am even mentioning Gravatars is that Wordpress, as of version 2.5, now supports their use. To display the icon you must enable them in the Admin Panel. Go to Settings > Discussion and at the bottom of the screen you can set whether you want to show or not show Gravatars and what rating you want to be used on your blog.

The following function is used to display a gravatar is given as:

function get_avatar( $id_or_email, $size = '64', $default = '' )

$id_or_email: You can use ‘$comment’ or ‘$comment->comment_author_email’ which I think is slightly faster.
$size: This can be anything up to 96 pixels. If a size is not specified then 96 will be used.
$default: If the comment author has not got a gravatar a boring default image is supplied. If you want to supply an image that fits in better with your theme you can specify it here although I haven’t had much luck on my local server.

Here is an example use within a theme:

if (function_exists('get_avatar')) {
  echo get_avatar( $comment, ‘64′);
} else {
  //alternate gravatar code for < 2.5
}

If you are using Wordpress 2.5 or greater then all you need is the line that is in red, but if you are going to distribute your theme you should use all the code. It tests to see if the function is available, if it is, it is used otherwise you can supply an alternate. Either display a default image or you can use of one of the many gravatar plugins available.

So that we are all on the same page, all the styling I am about to show you are based on the default theme with separated trackbacks and author highlighted comments implemented as per parts one and two of this series.

Defined Comment Styles

In the default theme the stylesheet is very disorganized! For example styles for the comments are close to the start, in the middle and close to the end. The following styles are defined:

.alt

.commentlist li
.commentlist li.auth
.commentlist li
.commentlist li .avatar
.commentlist cite, .commentlist cite a
.commentlist p
.commentmetadata

/* Begin Comments*/
.alt
.commentlist
.commentlist li
.commentlist p
#commentform p
.nocomments
.commentmetadata
/* End Comments */

So what I have done is bring them all together so that they are easier to edit and to remove the duplicates like this:

.commentlist, .commentlist li
.commentlist li, #commentform input, #commentform textarea
.commentlist li
.commentmetadata
.commentlist li .commentmetadata
.commentlist li.alt
.commentlist li.alt .commentmetadata
.commentlist li.auth
.commentlist li.auth .commentmetadata
.commentlist li .avatar
.commentlist cite, .commentlist cite a
.commentlist p
#commentform p

Comment Style One

As you can see this is a simple layout with no images, Visitors comments are alternatively yellow and green and your comments are red.

The first thing that needs doing is to put the gravatar, author and date info inside a div so that it can be styled differently to the comment’s text. The comment’s metadata is a slightly darker shade so that they are not as prominent as the the actual comment text.

In comment.php make the following changes:

  <li <?php if ($comment->comment_author_email == get_the_author_email()) {
    echo $admincomment;
  } else { echo $oddcomment; } ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">
    <div class="commentmetadata">
      <?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 32 ); ?>
      <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:
      <?php if ($comment->comment_approved == '0') : ?>
        <em>Your comment is awaiting moderation.</em>
      <?php endif; ?>
      <br />
      <small><a href="#comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>" title="">
      <?php comment_date('F jS, Y') ?>
      at <?php comment_time() ?></a>
      <?php edit_comment_link('edit','&nbsp;&nbsp;',''); ?></small>
    </div>

    <?php comment_text() ?>
  </li>

Now it is a simple matter to style the individual parts. The main parts that make it work are to give .commentlist li zero padding then give .commentlist li .commentmetadata zero margin and a height slightly more than the size of the gravatar which is floated left. Here are the relevant styles:

.commentlist, .commentlist li  {
  margin: 0px;
  padding: 0px;
  list-style: none;
}
.commentlist li, #commentform input, #commentform textarea {
  font: 0.9em 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
}
.commentlist li {
  background: #ffc;
  border: 1px solid #dda;
  margin: 10px 0px;
}
.commentlist li .commentmetadata {
  background: #eea;
  padding: 5px;
  height: 38px;
}
.commentlist li.alt {
  background-color: #cfc;
  border: 1px solid #ada;
}
.commentlist li.alt .commentmetadata {
  background: #aea;
}
.commentlist li.auth {
  background: #fcc;
  border: 1px solid #daa;
}
.commentlist li.auth .commentmetadata {
  background: #eaa;
}
.commentmetadata {
  font-weight: normal;
}
.commentlist li .avatar {
  float: left;
  padding: 2px;
  margin-right: 5px;
}
.commentlist cite, .commentlist cite a {
  font-weight: bold;
  font-style: normal;
  font-size: 1.1em;
  color: #ooo;
}
.commentlist p {
  font-weight: normal;
  line-height: 1.5em;
  text-transform: none;
  margin: .5em 5px;
}

Comment Style Two

This style is more like what you would find in a forum, where the gravatar and info are up against the left side and the comment text is on the right.

This one is a little more complex in comment.php but essentially it is two divs, .commentmetadata is floated left and given a width and then the comment text is inside another div and floated right.

Once again, I have used yellow and green to alternate the visitor comment’s colors and then red to highlight your comments and in each case the comment’s metadata is in a darker shade of the parent color.

 <li <?php if ($comment->comment_author_email == get_the_author_email()) {
    echo $admincomment;
  } else { echo $oddcomment; } ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">
  <div class="commentmetadata">
    <?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 64 ); ?><br />
    <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite><br />
    <?php if ($comment->comment_approved == '0') : ?>
      <em>Your comment is awaiting moderation.</em><br />
    <?php endif; ?>
    <small><a href="#comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>" title="">
    <?php comment_date('F jS, Y') ?><br />
    <?php comment_time() ?></a><br />
    <?php edit_comment_link('edit','&nbsp;&nbsp;',''); ?></small><br />
  </div>
  <div class="comwrap">
    <div>
      <?php comment_text() ?>
    </div>
  </div>
  <div class="clrem">&nbsp;</div>
</li>

And here are the relevant styles:

.commentlist, .commentlist li  {
  margin: 0px;
  padding: 0px;
  list-style: none;
}
.commentlist li, #commentform input, #commentform textarea {
  font: 0.9em 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
}
.commentlist li {
  background: #ffc;
  border: 1px solid #dda;
  margin: 0px;
}
.commentlist li .commentmetadata {
  float: left;
  width: 80px;
  background: #eea;
  text-align: center;
}
.commentlist li.alt {
  background-color: #cfc;
  border: 1px solid #ada;
}
.commentlist li.alt .commentmetadata {
  background: #aea;
}
.commentlist li.auth {
  background: #fcc;
  border: 1px solid #daa;
}
.commentlist li.auth .commentmetadata {
  background: #eaa;
}
.commentmetadata {
  font-weight: normal;
}
.commentlist li .avatar {
  padding: 5px;
}
.commentlist cite, .commentlist cite a {
  font-weight: bold;
  font-style: normal;
  font-size: 1.1em;
  color: #ooo;
}
.commentlist p {
  font-weight: normal;
  line-height: 1.5em;
  text-transform: none;
  margin: .5em 5px;
}

Here I am using a technique that employs negative margins. Say you want two columns, one has a fixed width the other you either don’t know or don’t care about it’s width value just as long as it it fills the remainder of the width. In this case I want the info div to be a known size, the layout looks like the image to the right. The html looks like:

<div id="sbar"></div>
<div id="comwrap">
  <div id="content"> </div>
</div>

The CSS looks like:

#sbar {
  float: left;
  width: 80px;
}
#comwrap {
  float: right;
  width: 100%;
  margin-left: -90px;
}
#content {
  margin-left: 90px;
}

Note that both comwrap and content have the same margin-left value, BUT it is a negative value on comwrap only. There is also a 10 pixel difference (90-80), this is to allow for a gutter between the two columns. I use this technique a lot in my design work as I have found it easy to use and works in all browsers reliably.

Removing The Trackbacks And Pings

The first step is to show only the comments, this is done by adding the code that is in red. If you want to you can stop there if you do not want to show the trackbacks and pings. All the code is doing is testing if the input is a comment, if it is then it goes on to display the comment otherwise it’s a track-back or ping and is ignored.

Showing The Trackbacks And Pings

If you do want to show the track-backs and pings then add the code that is in blue. This will print a header that shows how many track-backs there are followed by a list of them. I’ve added an optional bit of code in purple, you add this only if you want to show that you have no track-backs or pings yet.

Other Fixes

You might have noticed that the default theme uses the h3 tag as a title to different parts of the comment section. To me this is a no-no, the h tag is used to bring the Search Engines attention to the included text. This is fine if you want to try ranking for the phrase ‘No responses’, but it’s not exactly useful hey?

The h tags should only be used within the actual posts, outside of a post you can use the p tag and style it. So in this case we have three h3 tags, you can replace them with the following:

<p class="comhdr">

Don’t forget to change the </h3>’s to </p>. Note that there are other h tags in comment.php, you should really change them all. A little of topic but similar, virtual every theme I have seen uses h2, h3 or h4 tags for the plugin or widget headers - why? I don’t know! These too should be changed as I discussed in the How To Create A Wordpress Theme series.

All that’s left is to style these header tags something like this:

.comhdr {
  font-size: 1.6em;
  margin: 0px;
  color: #000;
}

You will probably have to play around with the font-size and color so that they match your theme.

Here is the section of comment.php that needs to be modified:

<!-- You can start editing here. -->

<?php if ($comments) : ?>
  <h3 id="comments"><?php comments_number('No Responses',
  'One Response', '% Responses' );?> to “<?php the_title(); ?>”</h3>
  <?php $ck_trkcnt = 0; ?>

  <ol class="commentlist">
  <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
    <?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
    <?php if($comment_type == ‘comment’) { ?>

      <li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">
        <?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 32 ); ?>
        <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:
        <?php if ($comment->comment_approved == ‘0′) : ?>
          <em>Your comment is awaiting moderation.</em>
        <?php endif; ?>
        <br />
        <small class="commentmetadata"><a href="#comment-<?php
        comment_ID() ?>" title="">
        <?php comment_date(’F jS, Y’) ?>
        at <?php comment_time() ?></a>
        <?php edit_comment_link(’edit’,'  ’,”); ?></small>
        <?php comment_text() ?>
      </li>

    <?php
      /* Changes every other comment to a different class */
      $oddcomment = ( empty( $oddcomment ) ) ? ‘class="alt" ‘ : ”;
    ?>
    <?php } else { ?>
      <?php $ck_trkcnt++; ?>
    <?php } /* End of is_comment statement */ ?>
  <?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

  </ol>
  
  <?php if($ck_trkcnt > 0) { ?>
    <h3>There are <?php echo $ck_trkcnt; ?> Trackbacks</h3>
    <ul>
      <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
        <?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
        <?php if($comment_type != ‘comment’) { ?>
          <li><?php comment_author_link() ?></li>
        <?php } ?>
      <?php endforeach; ?>
    </ul>
  <?php } else { ?>
    <h3>No Trackbacks Yet</h3>
  <?php } ?>

<?php else : // this is displayed if there are no comments so far ?>

After you have completed this and the last part, you have got a more organized layout for the comments section. I am assuming that you are using Wordpress 2.5 or better still, yesterday version 2.5.1 came out which fixes a lot of problems and a security hole. with that assumption, it means that your installation natively supports gravatar icons. So next time, I shall show you how to use them and how to go to town in styling the actual comments.

In this part I shall show you how to show alternate comments with a different style and then how to make the author’s comments look different to the reader’s comments.

Reader’s comments

The easiest change to make is to have alternate comments styled differently, this is built in to the default theme. All coding here is in comments.php and style.css on. Here is the way it works…

Around line 15 you will find:

/* This variable is for alternating comment background */
$oddcomment = 'class="alt" ';

This determines the style of the comment, in this case ‘alt’, that will be applied. Each comment is a list item and is written out within a foreach loop. The ‘class="alt" ‘ is added to a list item by a line a little further down:

<li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

This results in the following code being generated:

<li class="alt" id="comment-x">

You do not want every comment to have the ‘alt’ style and so a little further down you will find the code:

/* Changes every other comment to a different class */
$oddcomment = ( empty( $oddcomment ) ) ? 'class="alt" ' : '';

This line of code alternates the value of $oddcomment from ‘class="alt" ‘ and ” and back again. This results in:

<li class="alt" id="comment-x">

for odd numbered comments and:

<li id="comment-x">

for even numbered comments.

So that’s the mechanism for adding a style to a comment, all that you need to do is to add the styles in the style sheet. First of all, give the comment a default styling. You can be as imaginative as you like, but for the sake of simplicity for this example I shall have the comments styled with a yellow background as follows:

.commentlist li {
  background: #ffc;
}

Next we style the alt class, this time I shall make the background blue:

.commentlist li.alt {
  background: #ccf;
}

So adding these two styles will alternate the background color between pale yellow and pale blue.

Distinctive Author Comments

Now what if you, the author, wanted your comments to be styled differently so that you and your readers could spot them easily? Well, there are a number of ways you can do this, but they are essentially similar in method.

Before I go any further, I know there are plugins to change the appearance of author comments. They are great if you are the type that hates coding but really these are easy mods to do and do not slow down Wordpress like a plugin would. The only disadvantage is that if you change your theme you will have to do the changes to it as well.

First, go back to the lines:

/* This variable is for alternating comment background */
$oddcomment = 'class="alt" ';

and add:

/* This variable is for alternating comment background */
$oddcomment = 'class="alt" ';
$admincomment = 'class="auth" ';

Next go down to:

<li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

and change it to:

<li <?php if ($comment->comment_author_email == get_the_author_email()) {
  echo $admincomment;
} else {
  echo $oddcomment;
} ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

This line is saying if the author of the comment’s email address is the same as the post’s author’s email then print $admincomment otherwise print $oddcomment. So if you make a comment it will have your style, but if it’s a visitor’s comment it will have either the default or alternate style.

To get this working all you need to add is a style to the style sheet, in this case the author will have a pale red background:

.commentlist li.auth {
  background: #fcc;
}

In a similar way, if the blog has multiple authors, each author could have a different styling . Say the blog had two authors, Mickey and Pluto, then these are the changes you would make:

/* This variable is for alternating comment background */
$oddcomment = 'class="alt" ';
$mickeycomment = 'class="mickey" ';
$plutocomment = 'class="pluto" ';

<li <?php if ($comment->comment_author_email == "mickey@inbox.com") {
  echo $mickeycomment;
} elseif ($comment->comment_author_email == "pluto@inbox.com") {
  echo $plutocomment;
} else {
  echo $oddcomment;
} ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

.commentlist li {
  background: #ffc;
}
.commentlist li.alt {
  background: #ccf;
}
.commentlist li.mickey {
  background: #fcc;
}
.commentlist li.pluto {
  background: #cfc;
}

I don’t really like this method as it exposes the authors email addresses and what if they share the same email address? You could use the user ID number like this:

<li <?php if (1 == $comment->user_id) {
  echo $mickeycomment;
} elseif (2 == $comment->user_id) {
  echo $plutocomment;
} else {
  echo $oddcomment;
} ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

In this case, you look up the user ID in the Admin Panel and substitute those numbers in the above code. If that sounds like too much work or numbers mean nothing to you then you could check for the author’s name instead:

<li <?php if ($comment->comment_author == "Mickey") {
  echo $mickeycomment;
} elseif ($comment->comment_author == "Pluto") {
  echo $plutocomment;
} else {
  echo $oddcomment;
} ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

You just have to watch for visitors using the same name! On the other hand you could use this method to highlight the comments of honored visitors, by just plugging in their name into the above code.

In the next part of how to style your comments I shall show you how to seperate the pings and trackbacks from the comments or even remove them altogether so that only the comments show.

One thing that has bugged me since joining EntreCard is that the widget does not produce valid code, instead there are three warnings or errors produced. I have been meaning to get around to it, but other things always cropped up. Well, today I had a spare ten minutes to have a look at it and I fixed it.

Here is the code for the widget, I have highlighted the error causing part in red:

<script src="http://entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com/widget.js?user_id=xxx&
type=standard_127" type="text/javascript" id="ecard_widget">
</script>

This is for the 127 pixel wide widget, but the code is essentially the same for all versions of the widget, I have also replaced my id as ‘xxx’. The part that causes the xhtml errors is the ampersand (&). All that needs to be done is to replace it with &

<script src="http://entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com/widget.js?user_id=xxx&amp;
type=standard_127" type="text/javascript" id="ecard_widget">
</script>

Just to make sure, I first did this on my local server and then validated the code, no problems. Then I uploaded the changes this morning. I have had no calls or emails about problems clicking on the widget and I have seen clicks coming through normally all day.

Old Pricing System

Previously the blog owner had a degree of control over the ad price because it was calculated as the the average of the last five days plus todays drops multiplied by two. Reciprocal dropping was encouraged to up the possibility of higher returns, there were and still are a number of lists of these droppers. So the more you drop, the more drop on you. This upped the ad price and gave you the credits to buy ads to get more drops.

New Pricing System

Now the system is supply and demand. Count the number of ads in the queue, whether they are approved or not, and then apply that number as a power of two to get the ad price. For example there are currently 11 ads in my queue so 2 to the 11th equals 2048 and that is the price of my next ad spot. If I decline an ad or an ad expires the ad price halves and if an ad is placed the the ad price doubles.

Pros And Cons Of The Old System

Popularity and thus exposure was dependent on the ad price, so that the higher your price the more exposure the more drops. As long as you had a decent blog, this was a bit of a snowball effect.

Your ad had to target the EntreCarder so that you would get more drops. This caused a bit of a problem because although your traffic could quickly rise, it was mostly drive-by droppers with the occasional reader/commenter. This produced high bounce rates.

EntreCard is addictive, especially to a new blog that has little to no traffic. You can see sudden increases, you see how easy it is, so you concentrate on EntreCard and forget other ways of getting traffic.

There is a limit of 300 cards that you can drop per day per blog and 600 per IP per day, so if you have three blogs then you have to divide the 600ec’s between the three. To visit 300 blogs a day is time consuming. It takes me an average of two to two and a half hours to drop 300 and read/comment on any new posts that grab my interest. I have a question for you, the reader, if you drop 300 a day how many of them do you drop on purely to get a credit and you wouldn’t normally ever visit?

Fallout From The New System

Because the ad queue could have 15 or more ads from the old system prices are crazy right now at 32768ec’s or more in some cases. People are gnashing their teeth and wondering how they can afford to buy ads, it’s quite comical. In a lot of cases you can’t right now. Give it two to three weeks before all pricing finds a more reasonable level. Don’t worry about buying ads until then, this will also give you the chance to build up some ec credit power.

Ad prices should be more realistic compared to the possible returns. The pricing should be more stable as, if people determine that your site is worth no more than, say, 128ec’s then each day as an ad expires a new ad spot will be bought. Occasionally someone may splurge and buy an ad spot for 256ec’s.

The only control you have on your ad price is to decrease it by declining an ad. All the control is now in the hands of your visitors. Each ad placed will double your ad price.

The one good thing I can see happening is that the crap blogs will dwindle away because no-one will let them buy an ad or drop credits on them so their only source of income would be from their drops, so they could only buy stuff from the shop and that’s it.

A Possible Scenario With The New System

If everyone stopped buying ads for 1-2 weeks then ad prices would be universally 1, 2 or 4 credits - EVERYBODY could afford to buy ads. At the moment only around 55% of all members buy ads, with lower ad prices more members would be able to buy ads.

The lower ad prices would mean there would be less pressure to drop 300 every day. Right now only around 40% of all EntreCarders drop more than 50 cards a day, so the lower pricing would make advertising more attractive.

All this would need is some self-control to not buy ads above a certain price. We already limit ourselves via our available funds but that limit would need to be lowered consciously. This would also reduce the pressure to drop 300, a 100 a day could buy all the ads you would need. You would no longer need to buy credits. This would also have a knock-on effect on the ec harvesters.

The advantages, especially for the new blogger, are:

• Real visitors and less, if any drive by droppers.
• More time to concentrate on other forms of promotion.
• More time to create blog content.
• More time for those of you either with or who would like a life
• Genuinely network and find new interesting blogs.

The Ads

This brings me to something I mentioned in the forums, the quality of the ads themselves. First of all, the default ads are not really ads they are placeholders so that the newbie can actually get started with EntreCard. Next, an awful lot of ad designs really are bad and need to be changed if they are to attract non-EntreCarders.

Browse around, have a look at ads not from EntreCard users, see the difference? Do you click on ads if you don’t know where they go or why you are going there? If EntreCard is to be taken seriously along side other ads, something needs to change and that can only come from the membership and not the management.

Having a better ad will increase your CTR (click thru rate) thus increasing both the number of drops you get and the number of non-EntreCard visitors, but most of all it will show the blogosphere that EntreCard is a professional alternate to getting more traffic to your site.

If you haven’t yet upgraded to 2.5, you should check plugin compatibility

Changes

WordPress 2.5 and the Object Cache… discusses changes in the caching systems.

When improving a system not everything can stay backwards compatible, in the case of Wordpress the database has had some table changes.

If you develop plugins then you will need to read up on WordPress 2.5 Plugin Settings Pages Style Guide

Bug Fixes

Some are having problems uploading images, I have seen a few fixes, but here’s the most comprehensive solution to the problem.

If your blog uses the Popularity plugin, instead of waiting for it to be upgraded you can fix it yourself by going to line 59 in popularity.php:


require('../../wp-blog-header.php');


and then replace it with:


require('../wp-blog-header.php');


WP-Print does not work with v2.5 but you can, and really should, create a print.css file instead.

WP-Polls will not work with a fresh install of Wordpress 2.5.

Guides

Per User Custom Stylesheet in WordPress 2.5. If you have multiple authors, each one can have their own color scheme in the Admin area. Or you can try out the Fluency plugin which gives the Admin area a complete and useful makeover.

For those of you wanting to experiment with the new gallery features, here’s a guide from the codex.