Latest Articles

Use the navigation at the bottom to see older articles

How to style AutoFocus by Allan Cole

by

One of my all time favourite themes is AutoFocus by Allan Cole – it’s a superb portfolio theme that lets your pictures to the talking. Great for sites that show off images.

I wanted to use it over at Cloud-TV but thought that a different colour scheme would better suit my pictures – so I took some notes on how to amend certain aspects of the theme. You may find these useful if you’d like to style the theme to your own needs.

Please note that at the time of writing AutoFocus is at Version 1.0.1 – it is likely to be the final standalone theme and it’s no longer under active development. These tweaks will NOT work for Autofocus Plus or Plus Pro.

Read more

Pages: 1 2

How to style Misty Look

by

The other day Richard moved his blog from WordPress.com over to The Guru Network – welcome Richard 😉

He was using Sadish Bala’s beautiful Misty Look Theme and wanted to stick with it. However, the self-hosted version doesn’t quite look like what he had on WordPress.com, so here are some code tweaks to adjust it.

Please note that at the time of writing, the latest Misty Look version is 3.8RC – there may be a newer version with different code available. Keep that in mind when you’re trying to apply these tweaks 😉

Read more

Pages: 1 2

How to style WP Affiliate Platform

by

I’ve recently done some research on Affiliate Programmes that integrate with WP Ecommerce.

I came across the excellent WP Affiliate Platform from Tips and Tricks HQ – it works beautifully and is very easy to setup. At only $39 it’s a steal – considering how much business it can generate for you. Thanks Ruhul!

I wanted to make the front end integrate with my original site – which is just like tweaking a WordPress Theme. Let me talk you through it in this article.

Read more

How to amend an Application Vault Repository in Plesk

by

I’m currently building a WordPress Hosting Service where customers get hosting with WordPress pre-installed.

I also want to offer several pre-installed Themes and Plugins that I’ll deploy from the Plesk Back End using Application Vault.

WordPress is already available as a free repository, however it does take some time for new versions to be made available – and of course my Themes and Plugins aren’t there either.

So how can I amend or build a new Plesk Application Vault repository? Let’s find out in this article, in which I’m describing all my findings 😉

Read more

How to upgrade PHP on CentOS 5

by

With the recent end-of-life announcement it becomes clear that WordPress isn’t going to support PHP 5.1.6. for much longer anymore.

CentOS 5 however comes pre-compiled with PHP 5.1.6 and there are no plans to change this in the current version.

For simple folk like me it’s unimaginable to re-compile the entire OS from source or switch to a different distribution altogether. yum doesn’t help much by default – unless you’re looking in the right repositories.

Help is at hand, courtesy of the 1and1 Knowledge Base. Without further ado, here’s how to upgrade PHP on CentOS 5:

Read more

Linux Disk Space shown as Pie Chart

by
It's much easier to see a nice diagramme rather than a cryptic line of text from the command line interface

I’m managing a server for Loft London. They’re using it as FTP site for various clients, so I wanted to provide an easy way for them to keep an eye on how much space is used and how much is left.

I’ve done some digging and found this super handy PHP Pie Chart generator by Rasmus Peters. You can call it just like an image, give it some parameters and generate a very cool pie chart diagramme.

My challenge was to use it dynamically by calling the df command on th ecommand line and convert that into a pie chart. Here’s how I did it:

Read more

When Plesk fails to upgrade

by

I’ve had this issue before: you get a new server, the image is a few revisions behind the current release and your first line of business is to upgrade the system.

A few minutes later you check and find that Plesk refuses to start. Bugger. Now what?

My Customer Support Gurus always know what to do, but in an effort to not disturb them at night here’s what they did to make it all work again. These instructions work on a CentOS 5 system with Plesk 9.0.1 installed.

Read more

How to install Parallels Plesk on a new Linux server

by

So I’ve expanded my server arsenal to a fifith machine with Strato in Germany. Sadly they only offer an OpenSUSE installation bundled with Plesk (in German – unchangeable to English).

What I really wanted was another CentOS system though, which Strato offer – but without Plesk installed.

After a bit of hackage, I found out that it’s very easy to install Plesk from the command line via the Parallel’s Auto Installer.

These instructions should work on any distribution of Linux – just make sure you download the right auto installer package from the Parallels site (you need to create an account with them and log in for this link to work).

Read more