PapayaSoft Phuket web development

I quite like my current WordPress theme: Fresh from Wolfgang Bartelme.

But now that I am getting some trackbacks and pingbacks, I notice that the comment handling is missing something that I generally value in a blog. When listing comments, I prefer the real, human comments to be separated from the pingbacks/trackbacks. Although the pingbacks/trackbacks are completely important for their SEO value, I find that they can interrupt the flow of the conversation, disrupting the continuity. In my opinion, it’s better to list them separately.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to do. The theme file comments.php usually contains a loop that renders all the comments. The core of the technique is to use the WordPress function get_comment_type() to determine the type of comment, then build two distinct buffers, one for which get_comment_type() returns ‘comment’, another for all the others (the trackbacks and pingbacks).

More details – though using a slightly different overall approach – can be found at Ryan J. Parker’s blog which, ironically, uses a modified version of the Fresh theme and where I suspect that this very post itself will appear as a pingback, nicely separated from the real human comments.

Just noticed that the newly deployed Fresh theme claims to validate XHTML 1.0 Strict, but fails on the Pages (as opposed to posts) as a result of declaring two elements – the post wrapper <div> and the <h2> for the title – with the same id.

The theme is approx a year old, so I’m kind of surprised that no one else has mentioned it. Wondering if that makes me particularly perceptive. Or particularly compulsive? Or, horrors, particularly wrong?

I have posted a comment for iLEMONed, the theme author. In meantime, I have hacked my local copy with an obvious tweak.

2009-08-20, Update: No response from iLEMONed. Oh well, mine is hacked. and validates.

Now to tackle the invalid CSS produced by one of the plugins.

Onward!

Finally got around to redeploying papayasoft.com as a WordPress blog. Easier to admin and I really like the Fresh theme, originally by Wolfgang Bartelme, ported to WordPress by iLEMONed. It had exactly the color scheme I had in mind and only needed a few minor tweaks.

Sure, had to deal with all the plugin installation and configuration. And had to move at least some of the content from the old pages into new WordPress pages. But really, all pretty modest.

I will be chasing my web host to see if he can enable some kind of CGI-wrap that (like Pair.com employs) so that PHP can run as the account owner. Then, I would be able to use the WordPress auto-update process for both the core system and for plugins. It makes a huge difference in ease of use.

[ Update 2009-07-17: Host reports it's coming. Excellent. ]

More tweaks required, of course. After all, a website is never done.

Now just need to find the time to actually write.

Cheers!