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How to change the WordPress Login image and URL

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Screen Shot 2013-09-06 at 15.54.53There’s a great little plugin called Add Logo to Admin by c.bavota which does a great job at letting you add your own logo to the WordPress login screen, and even to the top of your dashboard. But it’s another plugin.

If you’re building a theme for a client and simply want to replace the generic WordPress image, you can do that with just a few lines of code. Place them in your theme’s functions.php file:

//Change the generic login image
function custom_login_logo() {
  echo '';
}
add_action('login_head', 'custom_login_logo');

Discovered in Jo Lowery’s excellent course Dreamweaver and WordPress Core Concepts at Lynda.com.

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How to use jQuery in WordPress

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On a standalone (non-WordPress) project you’d import the jQuery library in the head tag, then call a jQuery function towards the bottom of your file. This approach isn’t working in WordPress. Since jQuery and many other useful libraries are already part of WordPress, there’s no need to link to your own copy. Instead, you need … Read more

How to detect screen width in CSS

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CSS-LogoHave you ever wondered how a website can look great on your desktop and appear reformatted on your phone? The secret sauce is done via CSS Media Queries.

In a nutshell you define your styles for larger screens, and then override those styles with more mobile friendly options if the screen is smaller. You can specify the exact width which allows even to detect if someone is holding their device portrait or landscape.

Let’s look at how this can be accomplished with CSS rules.

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How to disable update notifications in WordPress

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wordpress_iconsSometimes “new” doesn’t always mean “better” or “suitable”.

Sometimes we require older versions of plugins and I’d rather WordPress would not tell me that there’s a newer version available. After all, I might accidentally update a plugin – or perhaps my clients do, breaking the site or overwriting customisations.

Let’s take a look at how we can disable those notifications, both for single plugins and for the entire site.

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How to add a Custom Button in Plesk

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Plesk-LogoPlesk allows you to create custom buttons to the control panel, complete with logo and URL. Since Plesk 11.5 you can even choose in which part of the panel your buttons shall be displayed.

To do this, login as administrator and head over to

  • Tools & Settings
  • under Panel Appearance, choose Custom Buttons
  • click Add Link to Service
  • give your button a Display Title and enter a URL
  • select an image (I find 100×100 works well)
  • select where you’d like the button to appear from the drop-down

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How to display an RSS Feed in Plesk

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One of the many new features in Plesk 11.5 is that you can customise the Panel appearance for your customers even more than before. For example, Parallels allow us to display any RSS Feed in the control panel in the right sidebar. Adding it isn’t as easy as it perhaps should be. In this article … Read more

How to fix permission problems when restoring folders from Time Machine Backups

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Airport TimeCapsuleI had an odd problem the other day: I wanted to restore a fairly large folder from my new AirPort TimeCapsule. But the restore always stopped at one particular file, with an error message about permission problems.

The folder in question was about 4GB in size and contained just over 10.000 files in total. I was baffled! Time Machine had never failed me before, so what was going on out of a sudden?

Well I guess it’s a computer, and things just go wrong sometimes. Thanks to Apple Support this problem is now solved – and I thought I’d share the insight, both with you all and my future self.

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How to use yum-complete-transaction

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Tux-says-YUMEvery once in a while it can happen happen that use use “yum update” to update your Linux system.

Usually this works without a hitch, but you may have come across a message such as this:

Setting up Install Process
Resolving Dependencies
There are unfinished transactions remaining. You might consider running yum-complete-transaction first to finish them.
The program yum-complete-transaction is found in the yum-utils package.

But what does this mean, and how do we alleviate this?

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