Blog Potions

If you want to have your own domain and break free from domain extensions from free blogging providers such as Blogger and Wordpress, you have to have your own web or domain hosting solutions. I have covered enough topics on these, see my archives for detailed informations.

I have switched to many web hosting providers in a span of less than a year now and during those switches, I have noticed that only a few web hosts are accepting PayPal payments. So far I’ve only seen Dreamhost, Hostmonster and Bluehost accepting subscriptions payments through PayPal. Others are either requiring a VISA, MASTERCARD and AMERICAN Express among others. In short, it’s still necessary that one owns at least one credit to have their transactions and orders completed. A credit card has been now necessity if you want to have your online presence.

Having a credit is not easy if you’re employed or at least have a good credit history. And if my memory serves me right, having no credit history is pretty much the same with having bad credit history when applying for credit cards or any other type of financial applications (e.g. loans, mortgage, insurance, etc.). Some online credit card companies are offering those so-called unsecured credit in financial offers such as Small Business Loans.

Anyway, when you want to have your online presence, you should at least have one credit card ready, avoid overspending and pay on time to avoid bad credit history.

When I first tried Wordpress 2.5, I thought I messed up because I couldn’t make the Photo Gallery look like as how I’m seeing it from other bloggers. However, through constant frequenting at several forums, I finally found out that it was the image.php file that I have to tweak to make the inside gallery pages appear as it should. Now that I know what to do, my Wordpress Theme don’t have an image.hp file to start tweaking with.

How to make your theme Wordpress 2.5 ready?

1. Create a copy of your single pages and re-name it image.php.

2. Open the image.php file and look for something similar to

<?php the_content(’Read the rest of this entry…’); ?>
*This is supposed to be the code for the post content

<?php wp_link_pages(array(’before’ => ‘<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ‘, ‘after’ => ‘</p>’, ‘next_or_number’ => ‘number’)); ?>
*While this is supposed to be the Pages Navigation Links

3. Now you will replace both lines of codes with

<?php echo wp_get_attachment_image( $post->ID, ‘large’ ); ?>

<div class=”caption”><?php if ( !empty($post->post_excerpt) ) the_excerpt(); // this is the “caption” ?></div>

<?php previous_image_link() ?><?php next_image_link() ?>
*This is the code for the thumbnail navigation

4. Style them if deemed necessary.

5. Upload your image.php file in your theme folder and experience the magic of Wordpress 2.5 Gallery.

We’ve found another blog publishing Web Development tutorials like the Blog Potions. Stylish Design is developed and being run by Robert and Andrei who have both been in the art and advertising industry for eight years. Together (and along with a team of well experienced writers) they share insight on the world of art, culture and design.

Stylish Design’s primarily features web design and web development tutorials with extreme focus on techniques for search engine optimization, web directories, softwares and tools, CSS styles, website templates among others. The blog has been successfully running since February 2008.

Visit their web designing blog at www.stylishdesign.com, where web design and style have met.

The recent Page Rank Update has been a little favorable for me due to the following reasons: (1) one of the blogs which has been previously stripped off of a mediocre PR2 has been reinstated; (2) another was upgraded from a measly PR1 to a mediocre PR2; (3) a three-month old blog which was allegedly hacked having just 5 posts as of PR update was given a PR 2; and last but definitely not the least (4) this four-month old blog has been given a PR3 from zero.

If this isn’t something to be raving about, I don’t know what else is.

My Theory: We pay for education, we enroll in schools and universities not because we need teachers to teach us things and stack us with the right knowledge. Thing is, we never really needed them teachers. What we really needed is just someone, a curriculum, or a rule to guide us and keep us I focus with our studies. Because everyone is capable of learning things on their own, they really needed a curriculum to make us stay focused and prevent us from distractions so we could learn things in proper time and order.

Truth or not, it’s for each individual to decide. Opinions are by nature subjective.

A lot of my friends are asking how I learn web development from simple and static web pages to complex dynamic pages which are capable of user interactivity. Each time I got such questions, my response are all the same – I search the internet for some basic html lessons, looked at some interesting web sites and applied trial and error to create for myself a similar looking web page. Then I searched and applied and continued the processes and studied how to simplify complex and lengthy html codes by using dynamic scripts and other web development languages and techniques. The process has been quite long since I only started learning those things when I’m already working on a normal job so the study times were not as adequate as what I had when I was still a mediocre student.

Nowadays, in the age of modern technology, learning technical subjects (as web development) has never been so accessible. There already are hundreds of schools online which provides open learning where you could acquire technical studies without the hassle of going to schools everyday. They provide the curriculum, time frame for each course so you never need to worry about procrastination which is a huge pitfall when you’re self-studying subjects.

Kaplan Open Learning offers courses on Web Design and Business Degree Online among others.