No sooner have I completed the Blogging How To… than I realise that part of it might be inaccurate or obsolete. At the
Moment I can’t see what you can do in the Mobile Admin plugin that you can’t do in the WordPress App. I’ll give it a thorough look tomorrow.
I’ve finally finished the Blogging How To… at Sleep/Wake Home.
Now comes the difficult bit: persuading my family (who have never shown any inclination to enter the blogsphere) to act as guinea pigs, to make sure that I’ve got it right.
It’s a amazing what you can achieve after a good night’s sleep. Having spent hours and hours yesterday evening almost, but not quite achieving the thumbnail effect at the top of this blog’s single post page, this morning after a fresh look, I managed the full works in less than ten minutes
Taken from the perspective of someone who is very new to WordPress, you either have to have a tremendous amount of flair or be seriously bloody minded to contemplate editing someone else’s WordPress theme. I fall in to the later category. I decided that I’d like the thumbnails that appear against each post on the index page to appear at the top of the corresponding single post page.
It involved me working way through a huge number of php files and finally (after several years of avoiding the issue) getting to grips with php arrays.
It’s not exactly how I’d like it, the images don’t have the rounded edges etc. If I can figure out how that is done, then it’ll help with the production of Sleep/Wake Home
The GoogleBot has visited leaving a much better cached entry and he’s also visited this blog too (but hasn’t yet visited the wordpress.com blog that I’ve been using for my “how to create an iPhone blog” guide.
After a few days messing around with the blog it’s back to some serious work on Sleep/Wake Home. First off of the stocks is a review page for WebApps. Just a small tweak to the database file which holds the reviews and a couple of little changes to the site pages that loads them and there’s the beginnings of a whole new section. I’ve also made changes to the page coding (and the database) to allow for the App icons to be held elsewhere (e.g. on the WebApp web site for the Web Apps and on Apple’s site for App Store Apps. The main problem with this approach is that the file locations are difficult to find when updating from the iPhone itself. I have ways of doing it for WebApps, but I’m still struggling when it comes to App Store Apps.
I’m also working on a step by step guide to building an iPhone friendly blog.
In an earlier post I described how I changed tack with how sleepwakehome.com is put together because I was spending too much time on the technology and not enough time on the content.
The same thing has started to happen with this blog. I’ve now found a slightly better way to link back to the main web site, so time to move on.
I’ve found a different WordPress plugin/theme – WPTouch. This one is much nicer to look at, however it is even less iWebkit friendly, it immediately breaks out of the iframe, so I’m abandoning that idea. Producing a link back from the blog to sleepwakehome “proper” is a little troublesome at the moment. I can create a link OK, but it’s a little hard to find.
I’m still trying to sort out the fact that the blog breaks out of the iWebkit framework. I tried the experiment with an arbitrary web page inside the iFrame and it broke it, so nothing to do with WordPress. Had a scout round the iWebkit website and found nothing Looked at the javascript, but can’t see how to change it. Looked at the WordPress Mobile plugin – can’t figure it out. Tried to put a link from the blog back to the website, but it doesn’t appear in the Mobile theme. Headscratching time.
If there’s one thing above all others that demands patience when griwing a web site, it’s waiting for GoogleBot. In the case of sleepwakehome.com, the software robot last visited the site on 13th February. Unfortunately on the last visit the site was (figuratively speaking) in bits all over the floor and as a result the Google entry borders on the surreal. One of the reasons for writing this blog is that blogs are supposed to help with site traffic and the more traffic you get the higher your page rank will be.
And if course the higher your page rank, the more often GoogleBot will visit.
