The answer: like everybody else – Google Adsense. Still you probably have never seen a single ad on their pages… Here’s how they do it:

Cherish regular readers – they are your writers-to-be

If you’re a regular reader (let alone poster) on WordPress.com, cookies will prevent you from seeing ads. Regular readers don’t click ads anyway, they’re there for the content. Ads would be off-putting and keep readers from becoming contributors.

The small loss in revenue on regular readers is by far offset by the growth in “content inventory” if you can turn readers into writers. First build the community, then monetize. (I thought I remember Matt linking to a similar argument by the founder of Metafilter, but I can’t find the referring post anymore.)

Only show ads to searchers

Chances are you never visited Kris Hoet’s blog* – Kris is EMEA Marcom man for Msn/Windows Live. Although he has it mapped on his own domain crossthebreeze.com, the blog is hosted by wordpress.com. Yet if I refer you to his holiday report, you won’t see any ads either, even as a first time visitor, even if you delete your crossthebreeze.wordpress.com or crossthebreeze.com cookies (this cookie-killing Firefox extension will save you time).

You might not be a regular reader (yet), but you didn’t go there to see ads, you went there because I referred you to what you expect to be a holiday report. WordPress.com doesn’t want to spoil your first impression of Kris’s blog.

However, if you land there by accident after a Google search, things are different.

You’re quite likely not to be interested by his blog, but more by bars in Kota Kinabalu… The served ads (fitting your search terms even more than the content of the post) offer a convenient click away. (Notice how the “Ads by Google” caption is even more inconspicuous here, probably because of some preferred partnership?)

Exploit the masses, spare the geeks

Still don’t see the ads when you click through from the search page (after some cookie-crumbling)? Aha, but you’re using Firefox, right? (Or Flock, or another minority browser…)

Geeks like you are probably advertising-resistant, and notoriously loud and outspoken. Rather than facing criticism from troublemakers that don’t click ads anyway, WordPress prefers not to show them at all… Unless you fake your User Agent and do the same cookie-cleaning and search procedure over again…

Now that’s really all for the hoops you have to jump through, in order to enjoy the privilege of being served ads on WordPress.com!

Cash in on derived content: tag pages

Another stroke of brilliance are the WordPress.com tag pages. Tag pages aggregate (excerpts of) postings with a particular category or tag (see their explanation) across the WordPress.com network (whereas tag pages on self-hosted wordpress blogs are internal links in your blog).

See the tag page for “Emergent Church” as (arbitrary, I swear!) example . They’re a searchengine’ s Gefundenes Fressen: tags are typically the keywords you use in search queries as well, and here you have pages optimised for such a keyword, with lots of inlinks from relevant posts using that keyword as anchor text, on a high-authority domain. What’s more, since tag pages are the result of coincidental co-production, no community member will dispute the site’s owner’s right to exploit this no-man’s-land.

I used to see a lot of these pages in search results (especially for non-English queries) and I guess this has been a gold mine for a while. Google however is seriously pushing back tag pages nowadays (or maybe on over-optimised pages as well…). Tag pages can be considered search result pages by themselves… and who wants to see search results in search results? (See a similar argument on Technorati tag pages.) Still, they do show up, although you might need to fiddle a bit to get a first-page result:

Paid accounts profitable?

A lot of other community sites are using the same techniques, yet none pushing it as far as WP.com… Apparently the strategy is successful to that extent that I’m wondering it will ever be worth their time to offer completely ad-free blogging accounts. Would people be willing to pay the equivalent or more of the advertising income their blog generates – after all, they never see an ad on their pages themselves?

I guess people like Kris Hoet might well be interested for reputation reasons, but maybe this market is not big enough to offer paid, large-scale, low-cost blog hosting?

* I’m using Kris as my guinea pig here as a late follow-up to a discussion we had at a bloggers’ meeting a long time ago.

Using the latest release (recommended)

• Upgrade to or download the latest release. I can’t see any reason why, but if you want to keep the first beta, skip to the next section.
• Choose Insert… Tags in the menu or the right side action panel
• Choose “Customize Providers” in the “Tag provider” dropdown
• Click “Add” and fill out the form as indicated:
  
• Confirm your settings and choose your self-defined tagging scheme every time you add tags:
  
• You’ll see the tags embedded in your body text. Don’t worry, UTW extracts them from the text and puts them in the database, so they’ll show up as normal UTW tag links and in the tag maps you might have defined.

Using the first release

• You’ll need to install the Tag4Writer plugin.
• In Tools… Preferences… Plugins, you can set the options for the “Tag List Generator”, identical to the ones shown in the first section:
  • Custom Tag HTML Template: {tag}
  • Tag List HTML Template: [tags]{taglist}[/tags]
• Inserting the tags works in the same way
  

Resources

• Windows Live Writer Blog
• The fabulous (independent) Windows Live Writer plugins blog
• Whateverblog: one of the WLW developers
• Windows Live Gallery for Writer

* although it might slow down rendering your pages – consider WP-Cache in that case
** there’s also a second approach where you modify your xmlrpc.php file in your WP installation, and use the WLW post keywords (press F2 or View… Post Properties)

[tags]utw, ultimate+tag+warrior, wordpress, plugin, metadata, windows+live+writer, windowslivewriter, tags, tagging, xmlrpc[/tags]

On WordPress plugins

Plugins are php functions you can add to your WordPress install that modify output (“filters”) or to change behaviour (“actions”).  With the Plugin API you need to “hook” your own filters and actions into the WordPress flow, using the function: add_action (<your_function>,<wordpress_function>) Have a look at this 5–minute video tutorial on writing a basic plugin.  As an example:  I wanted my SiteDeals15 Released page to appear as a posting on both the blog and in the RSS feed (normally pages don’t show up in either of them).  So I wrote a  plugin to change both the title and the link of my post on Digg RSS feeds, and have it point to the page. Have a look at the plugin (as txt file): it just contains two functions and  “hooks”. 

How to chase a WordPress plugin bug

Find out in which “hook” the problem is.  In the WP-ShortStat, a text search for “add_action” shows there are 4 hooks:

wp-content\plugins\wp-shortstat.php(747): add_action('shutdown', array(&$wpss, 'track'));
wp-content\plugins\wp-shortstat.php(751): add_action('init', array(&$wpss, 'setup'));
wp-content\plugins\wp-shortstat.php(838): add_action('admin_menu', 'wp_shortstat_add_pages');
wp-content\plugins\wp-shortstat.php(974): add_action('admin_head', 'wp_shortstat_css');

Judging from the names, the most likely candidate is the “track” function that is called on shutdown: before finishing every blog page, WP-ShortStat writes a log entry to the database.  The “track” function starts with this condition:

if($wpdb->is_admin
  || strstr($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], 'wp-admin/')
  || is_404()
  || is_admin_page()
    )return; // let's not track the admin pages -- no one cares.

 If you play a bit with the code, it turns out that “is_admin_page()” is always true in WordPress 2.0.2!  That has to do with the definition of this function:

if( !function_exists('is_admin_page') ) {
 function is_admin_page() {
  if (function_exists('check_admin_referer')) {
   return true;
  }
  else {
   return false;
  }
 }
}


So here’s the problem: one of the ways to check whether the visitor is in the control panel and should not be logged, is a check whether the function ‘check_admin_referer’ is defined.  Turns out that, in WordPress 2.0.0, this function has moved from the file “wp-admin\admin-functions.php” (only included for admin pages)  to a file “\wp-includes\pluggable-functions.php” which is always included, so ShortStat thinks of every page as an admin page, and doesn’t log any request anymore.  I don’t know enough about Wordpress to find out there are more elegant ways to do so, but this particular bug is quickly fixed by replacing the  ’check_admin_referer’  condition by a check on “write_post”, which is still in the “wp-admin\admin-functions.php”.

And if you have read this far, you should have no more fear to write your own WordPress plugin and write something more meaningful than I just did :-)  

Update March 26d

I learnt via this trackback the problem had been solved before by the people from HappyArts.de (see the "older changes" at their WP-ShortStat project page). Their release also includes other bugfixes and localised versions of the plugin. Should have googled better before I started :-).

“… because the post hasn’t been published yet, when Google’s bot tries to crawl the page a few seconds later, it will receive a 404 error.”

Google prevents placing ads on 404 pages, as wel as pages hidden behind a login, so you might get banned from Adsense.  Or  if not, get poorly targeted ads on the posting when published.  Another annoying feature for stats junkies, are the invalid page hits.

There’s  a solution: insert a bit of javascript in the  /wp-admin/post.php  file and make the preview optional.  Quick and dirty (it’s not isolated in a plugin, so you’ll have to reapply it when upgrading), but effective.

Why?

Vanity might be a reason. Fooling yourself into thinking: “every posting should add something”. It should be original. It should be witty and well-written.

Because, after all, it is yours, and people will judge you on it. So you really still need to work on it before letting it out! And so you procrastinate. You don’t publish anymore. You postpone till next weekend. And then the weekend after that. And when a draft gets stale or obsolete because everybody has read and written on the same subject, you don’t even delete. Because you still might rework it, later. When there’s more time and new inpiration.

If you don’t recognize the state of self-deception described above, count yourself lucky. For the rest of us silly perfectionists and procrastinators, what follows is a guide to manage your draft postings. Oh BTW, you’re asking yourself how I finally managed to post this one? Really easy: following the advice of this essay on structured procrastination, I in fact should have been finishing on this other big posting the world was waiting for. But, well, finishing things is so hard… So in order to have an excuse not to work on it, I finished this one :-)

< !—– end of tongue-in-cheek-mode —–>

How?

What are the ways to manage your draft postings? Let’s start with the most obvious way: saved as draft in your blogging system

• This works fine for just a couple of posts. As soon as you have a considerable number, you need to be able to search through your drafts – WordPress doesn’t allow to do this, and I do not know of any other blogging engine who does.
• With longer posts, the typical edit textbox is a pain to use. Here some WordPress-specific workarounds, none of them perfect:
  • in the admin panel, make the edit box bigger to get a better overview: options… writing… Size of the post box (in lines)
  • since WordPress 2.0, there’s a post preview pane in the editing window, but it still takes a lot of scrolling down (and within the preview pane)
  • publish your post with a timestamp set in the future. You can have a look at the posting as it will be published, but it doesn’t show (yet) on the front page or in the navigation. Or you could publish as page (without including them in the navigation) to achieve the same effect. Neither trick solves the search problem however.

There should be better ways to keep an overview of, and search through your drafts, and more comfortable editing environments. Let’s have a look at some other tools I tried *:

• Collect snippets of text in your Gmail drafts folder
  • the in:drafts <searchword> search phrase solves the searching problem
  • the editing environment still is not ideal for long texts
  • you probably also have draft mails cluttering up the folder (logically, that’s what it’s meant for)
  • could be useful if you post to your blog via email anyway, but that seems more of a quick-posting style which is contradictory to the idea of keeping and working on draft posts :-)
• Mind mapping tools
  • a mind mapping tool helps you to organize thoughts and concepts (see earlier posting for an example).
  • so it can help you while preparing a text (which is why Mindjet promotes its MindManager tool to bloggers). But it doesn’t help you to get an overview on a collection of individual draft postings. And it is more suitable for the phase of brainstorming and collecting ideas, not so much for editing and finishing your postings.
• Online text editors
  • Jotspot, Writely, Writeboard, Zohowriter, Thinkfree, SynchroEdit, Goffice… a bunch of “collaborative online text editors” has sprung up and try to be the MS Office for the web (I tried them for a friend who wanted to circumvent corporate IT to work on texts with colleagues – I have a draft post with a comparison somewhere :-)
  • after a while, I gave up on using them: these tools have put a lot of effort in trying to imitate the Office and Windows interfaces (working with menus, pop-up windows…), which is just clumsy and uncomfortable on the web.
  • I found Writely to be the most promising and feature-rich at first sight, but the Writely code is not xhtml-compliant (e.g. tags instead of ) and postings from Writely to the blog lost their title ) I’m wondering whether pro blogger Steve Rubel (see his 10 blogging hacks) really uses it.
• Write and maintain your draft texts in a wiki
  • not a bad idea: wikis have search built-in, and by the nature of a wiki, editing should be quick and easy
  • you might have trouble copy-pasting from your wiki to your blog, because of differences in how they handle/produce html
  • if you want to get away from a web-based editing interface, a wiki is not a solution of course
  • like mindmapping tools, some would argue that a wiki is more suitable for the brainstorming phase before defining the scope of your blog posting.
  • an example: Dutch KM blogger Ton Zylstra has a WikkaWiki running on his laptop for “working out ideas, filing, keeping notes” (see his overview of information-processing tools).
• Desktop blogging tools
  • Instead of a web interface, you can use a desktop application that posts to your blog, here’s a quick list (from yet another draft posting :-) ):
    • W.Bloggar and Zempt are freeware oldies with which you edit the html code: only for masochists
    • the more recent Qumana and Zoundry Blog Writer are more sophisticated and very nice freeware aiming to create an advertising network through its userbase
    • you can get Ecto (Mac and Windows) and Blogjet (Windows only) for a moderate fee. They probably are very well worth their money if you spend a lot of time writing and want an intuitive and comfortable interface.
  • Apart from the first two, I find them more comfortable to work with than a web interface – and you can save your drafts on your hard disk and work on them off-line
  • but again, there’s no way to search trough your drafts, unless you use the text search functionality in Windows (or Mac, or…)
• Blog posting as an extension to your browser
  • the “social browser” Flock was hyped too early and failed the expectations, but the Performancing plugin in Firefox is a lightweight and very practical alternative – have a look at the features.
  • search your “notes”, switch between WYSIWYG, code and preview pane, maximize the editing window… really great! (the plugin saves your non-published notes on your harddisk in \Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{some profile identifier}\extensions\performancing-notes.xml)
  • what it still lacks in comparison with desktop blogging tools is support for image upload and for extended entries (separating the intro and the “More…” part of the text )

What

Finally, here’s the recipe I settled for (for now :-) ):

• publish snippets of text to a separate blog set up on a different subdomain or subdirectory (such as test.vanhecke.info, but with another name :-).)
• searching is the same as searching on any blog, and you see the text as it will be published
• the described desktop blogging clients and the Performancing plugin make it easy to manage multiple blogging accounts – when the text is finished, swith the target blog and publish to the actual blog
• configure the image upload for the test blog to be the same location as the actual blog
• if you want to keep your testblog private, don’t forget:
  • to put <meta content="noindex, nofollow" name="robots"> in your html or disallow search engines with your robots.txt.
  • switch off trackback and pingback

So, will it make me more productive? Dunno, but at least it made me write on technical solutions for a psychological issue. How more geeky can it get?

* (not necessarily alone in the context of blogging but for keeping notes and editing texts in general)

A very easy way to do this in the WordPress default Kubrick theme (or themes derived from it):

• insert <!-- google_ad_section_start --> at the bottom of header.php of your WordPress theme
• insert <!-- google_ad_section_end --> at the top of sidebar.php

Or vice versa, if you think your navigation is responsible for leveling down ads to your site’s lowest common denominator contentwise, and the myriads of worthless ads for free blog and photo sharing sites, decrease your sidebar’s importance by

• having the just inserted ad_section_end at the top of sidebar.php followed by <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
• closing that section again with <!-- google_ad_section_end --> at the bottom of sidebar.php

Or you might demote the comments by closing the ad_section and reopen a “weight=ignore” one before in comments.php etc…

Still this leaves us to wonder: wasn’t Google the company with those intelligent algorithms who could determine that, let’s say an identical bunch of links that appears on (almost) every page probably isn’t really fundamentally important for the content of one particular page? And that text in small font further down the html source probably matters less than the chunck of text that reiterates the title? Hmm… they’re not trying to fool us into playing the bad guy, are they :-) …

(via Jensense, the always very well informed expert on contextual advertising.)

• submit a word that is somewhat remotely connected to your blog (“Ghent“)
• click next till you find a pic you think is abstract enough to fit anywhere but still suggests some deeper meaning
• select a horizontal strip, hit the crop button, download the produced kubrickheader.jpg, overwrite your /wp-content/themes/Default/images/kubrickheader.jpg or /wp-content/themes/<your_own_theme>/images/kubrickheader.jpg
• attribute the author in the footer
• get discovered and exposed as an impostor: “Hey, I got at your site by coincidence* and I see my stoopid pic in the header. cool :-)“

* actually, he was egosurfing

WYSIWYG HTML editor

Most people are put off by the HTML markup in the default WordPress editor. So if you want non-technical people to use WordPress as a blog or light-weight Content Management System, this plugin can help. It replaces the WordPress “quicktags” with the TinyMCE editor. TinyMCE has the advantage that it:

• works in both IE and Firefox (see examples)
• is highly configurable (by editing the wordpress.js javascript file)
• can clean up copy-pasted MS Word Mark-up (although I noticed it’s not perfect)

Download: mudbomb.com. Normal installation procedure.
For further reference: an extensive list of webbased html editors

Update August 16

TinyMCE will be integrated into WordPress 1.6 by default

Display links, titles and description for any RSS feed

This del.icio.us plugin will do so. The plugin was written with a del.icio.us linklist in mind, but works for any RSS feed (at least the ones I tried ;-) ). The installation instructions require you to download the Magpie RSS library – I’m not really sure whether that’s strictly necessary in WordPress 1.5, since Magpie is used within WordPress itself (/wp-incluces/rss-functions.php). However, I assume WordPress uses a slimmed down version, since I could not find some of the options Magpie has. In order to correctly display French accents for example, I had to instruct Magpie to produce its output in UTF-8 (the charset of the blog it was implemented on). With the full library, this insert in the configuration section of /plugins/del.icio.us.php helped:

define('MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING', 'UTF-8');

Docs and download: Chris Metcalf’s Deli.icio.us plugin page. Comments at his blog.
For further reference: this generic “RSS link list plugin” builds further on the one I used, but uses another (and simpler: just a single-file) library – haven’t tried it though.

Show list of recent comments throughout your blog postings

Another very popular application, so there are quite some implementations: I tested a couple of them, but when I saw the screenshots of this Get Recent Comments by Krischan Jodies I knew I didn’t have to search any further.
Not only does it provide you with full formatting power and the very useful option to wrap long words at a number of characters (so they do not distort the typical narrow sidebar), it also lets you do this within the normal WordPress admin interface, storing your preferences in the database (instead of you having to edit config options in php code).

See docs and download. If you want to write a plugin yourself, its source code is probably a good starting point.

More plugins

can be found here:

• WordPress Plugin DB
• Directory on Plugin developers site
• Plugin overview on WordPress Codex
• Plugin page on old WordPress Wiki

An info box (my definition, Information Architects probably have a better word for it… Peter?) contains some background info you want to add it as a side note, separate from the normal text flow. You can achieve the effect in 2 steps:

Define containing css classes

First we want to have a css class wrapping the box, sizing and positioning it on the right side in the blog text.
Simply add this to the style.css file of your theme:

.entrytext .infobox
{
width: 200px;
position: relative;
float: right;
padding: 0px;
margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px;
border: 1px solid #06c;
}

Then define infobox header and body text:

.entrytext .infoboxbody
{
font-size: 0.75em;
padding: 10px;
line-height: 1.2em;
}
.entrytext .infoboxheader
{
color: #FFFFFF;
font-weight: bold;
text-align: center;
line-height: 3em;
background-color : #06c;
}

Create your custom “quicktag”

Of course you do not want to write

<div class="infobox">
<div class="infoboxheader">Infobox Title</div>
<div class="infoboxbody">Infobox Body text</div>
</div>

every time manually. In /wp-admin/quicktags.js you can copy-paste:

edButtons[edButtons.length] = new edButton(‘infobox’
,’IBox’
,’<div class="infobox"><div class="infoboxheader">Infobox:
Title</div><div class="infoboxbody"></div>Infobox Body text</div>’
,”
,’x’
);

to get your own IBox button

in between the similarly looking other definitions. The 5th argument makes the ‘SHIFT+ALT+x’ a shortcut key for inserting a dummy info box. By the way: the extra “H3″ button is the result of almost identical code:

edButtons[edButtons.length] = new edButton(‘heading_3′
,’H3′
,’<H3>’
,’</H3>’
,”
);

the only difference being that with <H3> and </H3> split over 2 arguments, the same button will open and afterwards close the tag, or wrap selected text within them immediately.

Some caution

Note that /wp-admin/quicktags.js is not included in your WordPress theme, and so can be overwritten when upgrading WordPress. So don’t forget to document this somewhere you can refer back to when upgrading. Hey… why not simply blog it?

Update June 15: feeds…

Doesn’t seem to be a good idea if you include your entire posts in rss feeds: Bloglines preview… Including css in rss feeds (or rather, in the html of each and every individual post) is probably not really what rss is made for, and using tables or inline css makes the widget far less attractive… Any ideas?

• copied the database
• uploaded the unpacked install files
• changed the db settings in /wp-config.php to the copied database
• ran / wp-admin/upgrade.php
• in the database, manually adjusted in the wp_options table:
  • siteurl to the new testurl
  • home to that same new testurl

… and I got a copy of the blog up and running.

Two nice results that struck me:

• the 13 tables were being reduced to only 9
• in /wp-content/themes/ there was a subdir with the newley created theme “european-democracy”, next to the “default” (Kubrick) and “classic” theme

This means I could now safely test and edit the files in the “european-democracy” theme (a copy of the default theme) via the “Presentations -> “Theme Editor” menu, or by downloading the files in Dreamweaver . The former installation of WordPress was a heavy hack, I wanted to do it “the clean way” now adapting the theme to the original look and feel step by step (filenames refer to files in the theme subdir: /wp-content/themes/european-democracy/). After going through the modifications described here, I was so pleased I applied most of them to this blog as well ;-) .

CSS and images

• most of the css information is in style.css , but the image css is contained in header.php (the reason for that being that the background picture depends on the presence of a sidebar or not -> hence some code is involved to check this)
• for my purpose, I could simply remove the css lines from header.php, because I wanted a permanent sidebar, and I didn’t need a background picture for page and footer
• the only image I needed were the header and page background, so I added to style.css :
  
#header { background: url("images/european-democracy_header.jpg"); }
#page { background: url("images/european-democray_page_background.gif"); }

  (note the relative url relative to the css file)
• the blog’s logo and description are inclosed in the headerimg tag, but since the picture already mentions the title, I commented out title and description:
  
#headerimg
{
display: none;
}

• Unfortunately, this makes there’s no link any more to the homepage in the header… My remedy: inserting a transparent image
  in header.php , I added this div:
  
<!-- modif pvh -->
<div id="header_click_home"><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home');
?>" title = "<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>"><img src="<?php
bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/1px_transparent.gif" alt ="<?php
bloginfo('description'); ?>" border="0" width ="780"
height="145" /></a></div><!-- end modif pvh -->

  into the header div, but before the headerimg div

CSS and width

• to change page width: replaced the nr of pixels for the #page element in style.css, I made it identical to the width of the header background img
• I omitted the width for the footer element, it didn’t seem necessary
• the left column is on the home page determined by the class “narrowcolumn” and the text on the right is in the div sidebar, so I played a bit with widths:
  
.narrowcolumn {
float: left;
padding: 0 0 20px 15px;
margin: 0px 0 0;
width: 580px;
}
#sidebar {
padding: 10px 0px 10px 0px;
margin-left: 625px;
width: 150px;
}

  I still don’t understand how IE deals with this… I you simply change the padding for #sidebar to “padding: 10px 0px 10px 5px;” the sidebar moves to the bottom, where as I thought padding shouldn’t influence the position of an element?!

CSS and colors

• changed background color to #fff (white in a few places)
• adjusted stylesheet link colors and indicated changes with /* modif pvh */

Adding the sidebar to single archive page

• in the stylesheet, I made .widecolumn identical to .narrowcolumn:
  
.widecolumn {
float: left;
padding: 0 0 20px 15px;
margin: 0px 0 0;
width: 580px;
}

• in single.php, replaced “<?php get_sidebar(); ?>” with:
  <!--modif pvh -->
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<!-- end modif pvh -->
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Metadata font size

• in order to make the metadata smaller:
  
.narrowcolumn .postmetadata {
padding-top: 0px;
font-size: .75em;
}

  Note that I added the fontsize to this combined identifier, not to .postmetadata in order not to change the font size of the metadata under a single post!

Truncated archives and search results

• I don’t like the way the default theme truncates the entries in the archives (with an auto-excerpt to a max of characters), I would rather retain the division between summary and full text the author already put in by using the <!–more–> tag
• Easy enough… in archive.php and search.php, change:
  <div class="entry">
<?php
//the_excerpt() //modif pvh
the_content()
?>
</div>

Moving post date

• in order to have the posting date under the posting, I changed a line in archive.php, search.php, index.php:
  
<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?>.
Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> <strong>|</strong> <?php
edit_post_link('Edit','','<strong>|</strong>'); ?> <?php comments_popup_link('No
Comments &#187;', '1 Comment &#187;', '% Comments &#187;'); ?></p>
• no need to change code to remove the date indication under the title, this could be done by selectively making the <small> tag invisible when preceded by the H2 and H3 title tag:
  
/* start modif pvh */
h2 + small, h3 + small
{
display: none;
}
/* end modif pvh */
  Update: hmm, as this Dutch manual indicates, IE doesn’t support “Adjacent sibling element-selector”!

Sidebar

• removed the metalinks in the sidebar by removing these lines from sidebar.php:
  <li><h2><?php _e('Meta'); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_register(); ?>
<li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>
<li><a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer" title="<?php
_e('This page validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional'); ?>"><?php _e('Valid
<abbr title="eXtensible HyperText Markup Language">XHTML</abbr>');
?></a></li>
<li><a href="http://gmpg.org/xfn/"><abbr title="XHTML
Friends Network">XFN</abbr></a></li>
<li><a href="http://wordpress.org/" title="<?php _e('Powered
by WordPress, state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform.'); ?>">WordPress</a></li>
<?php wp_meta(); ?>
</ul>
• made sure the links were displayed on the archives pages by changing
  <?php /* If this is the frontpage */ if ( is_home() || is_page() /*start modif
pvh */ || true /*end modif pvh */) { ?>
  in sidebar.php

Javascript to make external links open in new window

• really a great idea from Marko Dugonjic, so I adapted the header.php

Strange effects

• I had a some point replaced the #footer entries by:
  
#footer {
display: none;
clear: both;
}

  but the funny result was that in firefox, the border around the page, only came as far down as the right menu text… another weird effect of floating div’s…