Prior to WordPress 3, if you wanted custom menus you had to code them yourself.  This generally involved editing your theme’s header.php file, knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, and probably SQL too.  Unsuprisingly, easy custom menus was a highly requested feature for WordPress 3 and it was delivered. Unfortunately, most themes don’t have support for [...]

More often then we would like to admit, we are unwilling or unable to submit our WordPress plugins back to the repository for everyone to use.  But how do you exclude your plugin from WordPress updates?  As usual, the answer is with filters.  Check out the code below to see how. function exclude_my_plugin( $r, $url [...]

One of the smaller (yet still welcome) features that snuck it’s way into WordPress 3 was custom backgrounds.  In most cases, this allows you to change the background picture and color of your blog (Note:  This may not work if your theme has a background already).  This is great, because you don’t have to know [...]

It’s not easy knowing what to write about.  When you run a niche site like this, it’s even harder.  One of the tools I rely heavily on to tell whether I should invest the time writing a post or not is the Google Keyword Tool.  The Google Keyword Tool allows you enter key words, and [...]

The default behavior in WordPress when an image is clicked is to open another page of your blog.  Sometimes though, you want a more elegant solution.  One of the more trendy ways to open an image of the past few years has been using something called a lightbox.  A lightbox dims the screen via a [...]

Note:  The full source code for this plugin can be found here. Every time you go to WordPress blog and see items in the sidebar, it’s likely that they are widgets.  There are thousands of them for download on WordPress.org, but what if you want to create your own?  How would you code it? That’s [...]

Since version 2.9 of WordPress, it’s been possible to have post thumbnails.  Once these thumbnails have been set, they can be used throughout your site whenever your post is called.  Using post thumbnails is easy, and so is enabling them.  It’s only a few steps, so let’s get started. Enable The first step to using [...]

I was recently checking out the new version of Digg, when I hit their error page. Nice job leveraging Oregon Trail guys.