Instead of stating there are “easy” tasks or “simple” changes to perform for your website, tell your web designer the list of changes and tasks required. Have them tell you what their thoughts are. If the designer quotes a price or additions your not comfortable with, find a second opinion. If you have the flu and your doctor tells you to drink a bottle of soda, most people would seek a second opinion.

Regardless of the work that needs to be done, don’t haggle to much over the price. If you required minor surgery, but were charged $1 by the doctor performing the procedure you may be skeptical. The same applies for web design. Even if you think the work may be simple, there’s plenty of factors you may not consider in the development of your website. If your web designer quotes a price outside your budget, find a new web designer, compared prices! You usually pay for what you get; a cheap fast web designer will probably provide a product you may have to pay another designer to fix in the future.

I did some investigation, and found I was not alone in my frustration, but a solution did not exist. While heading to my root domain worked (mywebsitename.com), mywebsitename.com/index.html did not, even weirder mywebsitename.com/index.php performed the job that index.html should have. To solve this problem, my first instinct was to try a simple redirect index.html to index.php by adding code into my .htaccess file. When I added the following code something interesting happened.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule index.html index.php [R=301,L]

This solution produced an infinite loop causing the server to terminate the request. This further perplexed me, I needed a solution without creating another webpage that was also SEO friendly. It wasn’t until I came cross this post, detailing how to redirect index.html and index.php to the home page that I found my answer. While the initial instinct was correct, the way to go about it was all wrong, to properly redirect a request for the index.html to the proper page (and make everyone happy), I had to use the following code:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html$ http://nexeusfatale.com/$1 [R=301,L]

By setting this condition, I prevented the server loop, redirected the request to the index.html to the root domain, informed search engines to properly update the missing webpage, and made everyone happy!

version .9.2 (4/8/09)

• Fixed a font size issue with <select> tags inside of posts
• Cleaned up CSS Code
• Removed Plugin Dependend Code
• Removed Images from Sidebar and replaced with text

Enjoy!

the next LVL is a theme I’ve been developing for a few months and is my first WordPress themes for public consumption. The theme was originally developed to be a CMS based theme, but in it’s evolution became something completely different. The theme is a two column, widget ready theme that is compatible with WordPress 2.7. There are a few elements that make this theme different from others:

1. the next LVL does not have the traditional website header, that has been shifted onto the right sidebar
2. Highly SEO friendly without the need for additional plugins
3. comes with a robots.txt  file to be used in the root directory of a WordPress install
4. A comical 404 page (feel free to use your own personal message here!)

This theme is the base of a few features I’ve been working on for future themes and future development. They include broader SEO options built into a theme, possible backwards compatibility with older version of WordPress, color changing and graphic changing options.

Currently the next lvl is in version .9.2 (think release candidate), last updated April 8th, 2009.

Recent Changes:

• version .9.2 (4/8/09)
  - Fixed a font size issue with <select> tags inside of posts
  - Cleaned up CSS Code
  - Removed Plugin Dependend Code
  - Removed Images from Sidebar and replaced with text
• version .9.1 (4/6/09)
  - Added a page navigation at the top.
  - Updates and removal of legacy code and images
• version .9
  - Out of alpha development, ready for public beta release.
  - New theme color

Download the current version of the next lvl here

Feel free to leave any feedback in the comments section (including typos and grammatical mistakes, I am notorious for those!)

Enjoy!

The most current version of Lightbox is Lightbox v2.04, but there is a Lightbox 1 which performs a similar task. The differences between the two versions is the use if the Prototype Framework and Scriptaculous Effects Library in version 2.

Using Lightbox

Using Lightbox is really simple but only works with images or text. It relies on the use of the rel tag in the <a> tag. Before using Lightbox, you must install it. To install lightbox (after downloading it and uploading the files to you web server), you must include its three javascript files to your header with the <script> tag.

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/prototype.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/lightbox.js"></script>


Next add the Lightbox CSS file by using the <link> tag or merge it with your current CSS file:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/lightbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

After installing and linking the necessary files to the pages you intend to use Lightbox with. This is done by adding the rel=”lightbox” attribute to your <a> tags. You can also use the title attribute to display a caption with your image. Here is how the code for the demo above looks like:

<a href="http://images.nexeusfatale.com/demo/lightbox-demo.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="Lightbox Demo Image"><img src="http://images.nexeusfatale.com/demo/thumb-lightbox-demo.jpg alt="Lightbox Demo" border="0" title="Lightbox Demo Image"/></a>

One option, if you are using a PHP generated page is to create a header file and use include() to have access to lightbox on every page.

Alternative Solutions

Lightbox is a really simple and easy way to add functionality to your designs. There are several alternatives to Lightbox that provide the same or expanded functionality and are more flexible with media (such as Flash objects or more dynamic photo galleries). Thickbox is a jQuery alternative, which works with single images and galleries, as well with AJAX, IFrame and Flash content.

Lightbox in WordPress

For those using WordPress implement Lightbox may present a bit of a challenge. There is however two plugin’s that you can use, the first is Giuseppe Argento’s implantation of Lightbox 2, which is merely a plug-in version of the Lightbox 2 code, I use this plugin on this website. There’s also Rupert Morris’s implementation of Lightbox 2 which is an updated code set that features some automatic features (i.e. automatic lightboxing of images, automatic titling, arrow key implementation) .

<ul id="recent-posts">
<?php $posts = get_posts('numberposts=5&offset=1');
foreach ($posts as $post): ?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

While this code does work, it can be problematic, the get_post() query overwrites the WordPress default variables. This means if you run any other loop specific code (i.e. the_title, the_content, the_date, etc.) they will all be affected and many not produce desired results. In my initial testing every page that used The Loop was getting it’s information from the get_posts() query as it overwrites WordPress’ default queries for pages, searches and archives. Thus they all displayed the same information.

After some searching I found a solution for the problem, creating a new WP_Query() object so that it doesn’t interfere with WordPress default functions. Here’s an updated example of the code presented above using this technique.

<ul id="recent-posts">
<?php $recent_posts = new WP_Query(); $recent_posts->Query('showposts=5@offset=1');
while ($recent_posts->have_posts()) : $recent_posts->the_post(); ?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>
If you want something a bit fancier, here’s how I created the recent posts section using the same technique.

<div id="recent_posts">
<h2>Recent Posts</h2>
<?php $recent_posts = new WP_Query(); $recent_posts->Query('showposts=5@offset=1');
while ($recent_posts->have_posts()) : $recent_posts->the_post(); ?>
<div class="recent_date"><?php the_time('m.d.Y') ?></div>
<div class="recent_post_title"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></div>
<br />
<?php endwhile; ?>
</div>
A deeper discussion in how to do this is on the Weblogs Tools Collection (where I found the solution). The lesson here is, in order to avoid conflicts with WordPress default functions, plugin, and countless other issues, create a new WP_Query(); object.