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Archive for the 'Tips or Tricks' Category

Got Widgetized

I found out a couple of days ago that the theme I am using is not widget ready. Its pretty simple to find out, just go to Presentation tab in your Admin page and then click on Widgets tab. If your theme is widget ready, you will see the widget layout, page, if the theme is not ready you will see this:

You are seeing this message because the theme you are currently using isn’t widget-aware, meaning that it has no sidebars that you are able to change. For information on making your theme widget-aware, please follow these instructions.

The instructions were pretty easy to follow and now my theme is widget ready.

If you use Akon theme for WordPress this is all you need to do. The source of info is here, but I just wanted to give simpler instructions for the users of this particular theme.

  • Open functions.php in the ‘Akon’ theme folder and paste the following at the very top outside the <?php> tag:

    <?php
    if ( function_exists(’register_sidebar’) )
    register_sidebar(array(
    ‘before_widget’ => ”,
    ‘after_widget’ => ”,
    ‘before_title’ => ‘<div class=”title”>’,
    ‘after_title’ => ‘</div>’,
    ));
    ?>

  • Open sidebar.php in the same folder and paste this to where you want your widgets to show.

    <div class=”column”>
    <?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’)
    || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
    <?php endif; ?>
    </div>

    Notice that this is using ‘column’ class. If you changed your style sheet then edit the tag accordingly.

Now you can go and test this out. Note that you will need to mess around with CSS to get the widgets to match the look of your site.

3 responses so far

Slow Blog Solution

I set up another WordPress blog yesterday. Its not really a blog, its just a repository for articles that I have accumulated. I am strictly using this for Adsense revenue.

After setting it up I started loading it with articles. Everything was gravy until maybe an hour after the initial setup. The blog started to crawl. I mean it was completely unusable. The counter on the bottom clocked the page loads at around 75 seconds. What could be the problem? I started looking for a solution.

There were bunch of pages discussing the slowness in WordPress. Most of them were because of certain plug-ins. I didn’t install any plug-ins so that eliminated most of my searches. After another 10 minutes of searching around, I decided to play around with the new blog to see if I can come up with a solution.

Here are some things I went through:

  • Restarted httpd service – didn’t work
  • Restarted mysql service – didn’t work
  • Changed the theme to default – didn’t work
  • Slam my head on the desk – didn’t work

Having no success was frustrating me and I was seriously ready to just trash the whole thing and reinstall it.

Then, out of nowhere, I had a light bulb go on in my head. If I had no plug-ins installed on this blog, I have missed something very crucial. I didn’t install Akismet. In addition to Akismet blocking spam comments, the trackback spam gets eliminated as well, hence less connections to your blog…hence a more responsive blog. I went ahead and activated Akismet (it took about 5 minutes to navigate to the activation page!!!). Right when I pressed the activate button the blog started acting like any WordPress blog should, fast as hell! Thank you Akismet!

So, if you have never installed WordPress, or if you have installed some; always remember…ACTIVATE AKISMET!!!

28 responses so far

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