How To Archives

The main subject of this site: how to get something done, further divided by tags.

How to change “View with Piclens” message in NextGen Gallery

Alex Rabe’s NextGen Gallery plugin is certainly the best there is, even though I find it a tad too complex at times. I love it though, and I use it on all my sites whenever I want to upload a batch of pictures and insert them into my posts with little hassle and great convenience.

One thing that bugs me though is the message that reads

[View with Piclens] above my thumbnails, which gives the viewer a chance to see my gallery as a slideshow. It’s a great feature.

Trouble is, nobody actually knows what PicLens is or what it does – including myself, let alone my readers.

Lucky for us, it’s fairly easy to fix – let me show you how:

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How to create Rotating Ads on your site

I was looking for a solution that displays more than just one advert or banner in one spot. Say I have some space in my sidebar and I wanted to display some adverts there – but I don’t want them to be the same one all the time.

I’d like a solution that upon a page refresh gives me a random banner out of a selection that I can define.

Enter Datafeeder’s Random Ads V2 Plugin!

As if these people had read my mind, this amazing plugin does exactly what I had imagined in my dreams:

You can define several groups of banner codes (say one for vertical sidebar banners, one for pre-post horizontal banners, etc). You can add as many groups as you like, and add as many “code-snippets” as you like to each group.

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How to fix the “Press This” 404 Error

If you’re not already using Press This, maybe now’s a good time to start. Press This is a for you if you’d like to share excertps from other websites on your own site. It’s a simple Javascript bookmarklet that opens a new window with a link to the site you’re on. It then lets you add pictures, text and post it to your site – just as if you’re writing a new post. It’s genious! Find it under “Tools” and drag the link to your browser bar – no installation needed, it’ll only be a simple bookmark.

However, on some sites the new window brings up a 404 error, indicating that something’s amiss. Turns out that WordPress is getting confused about certain mod-rewrite rules or something… Whatever the reason: Fret not, there’s an easy solution to fix this (thanks to Blogmum and the WordPress Forum for these instructions).

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How to get advertising banners for your site

My experiences with both Amazon Widgets and Google Ads is simple: they don’t work – all they do is ruin my sites. I’ve not made a penny with them, keeping in mind I run about 20 sites which amounts to plenty of traffic. I believe we as surfers know what an “unhelpful” ad looks like … Read more

How to install MySQL on CentOS

Assuming you’d like to run WordPress on your very own vanilla CentOS system, open a terminal window and do the following: yum install php-mysql mysql mysql-server /sbin/chkconfig –levels 235 mysqld on /etc/init.d/mysqld start You have to be logged on as root to do this. The next thing you probably want to do is create a … Read more

How to replace a Header Image

Not every theme provides a convenient “upload header” option. That’s luxory really. But there’s a fairly easy way to replace every header image in every theme with one of your own pieces of art. Here’s what you do: Right-click on the image you want to replace and select Properties. This will give you an idea … Read more

How to increase your PHP Memory Limit

With certain plugins, you may encounter error messages that tell you your PHP memory limit is not high enough. It usually means: you need more! Like your computer being really slow when you run out of memory, PHP does the same thing, sometimes refusing to work flat out. That’s not so good. There are several … Read more