Using the Events Manager WordPress plugin at work, I noticed that the event tag archive pages showed only current and upcoming events with a given tag. I wanted them to show all events, including past events, with the tag. I made a custom loop to accomplish this, within the Genesis framework. Create a file called taxonomy-event-tags.php in your Genesis child theme:

I had the idea earlier of displaying a pie chart of my blog’s categories, but didn’t see any WordPress plugins out there to do that. “Well, fine, I’ll write my own!” I thought — so I did. I submitted it for review to be listed on the WordPress plugins site but while it’s under review, you can download it from my Github page.

I’m going to New Jersey for the first time for work, and I’ll be up there about two and a half weeks. I was asked last week if I’d come along to help with the requirements gathering process for a new project, and I agreed, though I may freeze my tail off. There’s a lot of flying involved because we’ll be coming back to Lexington over the weekends, and we’ll be flying out of Cincinnati instead of Lexington. I’m borrowing a huge suitcase from a coworker since my one medium-sized suitcase won’t cut it for a week-long stay–you can tell I don’t travel much. I doubt I’ll have much time for sight-seeing since we’re doing eight-hour work days, but we’ll probably get to try some good Jersey food: we’ll do lunches with the client and I’ll get dinner with my coworkers.

I’m a member of the Quilting Bee and I use a very simple PHP script I wrote for displaying my quilt. I figure someone else might get some use out of it, so here it is for your coding pleasure:

I recently implemented a live search on the quotes page, so I figured I’d give a tutorial on how I did it. A “live” search is like a regular search feature, but if the user has Javascript enabled, the search will run as they type, instead of waiting for them to hit the ‘Submit’ button. There are a couple of advantages to this, one being that it’s a bit quicker than a traditional search because it starts working immediately; another advantage is that it might help you narrow down your search better (e.g. you initially want to search for ‘frogs’, but you get just ‘frog’ typed in and see results that interest you that wouldn’t have seen with a ‘frogs’ query). However, I think the main benefit from a live search is that it’s cool. :)

Lightbox is nice and all, but sometimes I find it clunky, particularly in Firefox when I have a lot of other tabs open. However, I don’t want to go the route of having an image load by itself in the browser, because it would be so much nicer to have it integrated into my layout. I could have a whole bunch of separate pages, one for each image, and do a full page load when a thumbnail is clicked, but that’s kind of a hassle. Well, with a simple PHP script and some AJAX calls, I can have my image load within the gallery page without a page reload.

Creating images on-the-fly can be a very useful skill. Using PHP’s built-in image generation functions, it’s pretty easy, too. This tutorial will detail how to have the titles of blog entries show up as automatically generated images.

So you want to display a randomly selected quote on your page, and you want to use PHP to do it; you’ll need PHP support on your server. An easy way to test this is to stick <?php phpinfo(); ?> into a .php file, upload that file to your server, and load it in your browser. If you get a huge table with information about your PHP setup, then you know you have PHP support. If you get a blank page, then you don’t have PHP. :(

A couple of reasons to use PHP in your site:

1. Separation of content from design–when you want to change the look of your page, you can update a few files and every page of your content will be updated with those changes.
2. You have more power than if you used some language such as JavaScript, because it doesn’t matter what the visitor has enabled in his browser.