There are many sides to Lorelle VanFossen. One is a public speaker, instructor, writer, and consultant on web writing, web design, and blogging, especially working with WordPress. Another is as a transient traveling the world as part of the duo team of VanFossen Productions, professional nature photographers and writers presenting workshops and programs on travel, writing, and nature photography.
Called a blog evangelist, on Lorelle on WordPress she writes about everything WordPress and blogging, covering more than you may want to know about how all this blogging business works. Taking Your Camera on the Road is dedicated to providing educational and experiential information on travel, nature photography, travel photography, and life on the road.
Real Blogging Tips are not easy to find on today internet, we live in wast world of technologies and is very easy to lose your self in the online articles garbage that ends NOWHERE! Today i will write about an true professional and blogging lover…Lorelle VanFossen.
Lorelle is a columnist for the Blog Herald and guest blogs and writes for many blogs, ezines, websites, and print publications. She travels extensively, as a web consultant and public speaker, and can often be found in airports, truck stops, outside shops, and prowling your neighborhood looking for an open WIFI connection to send off her next blog post. Returning to the basics, Lorelle VanFossen has put together hundreds of the tips you need to know before you start blogging, and after, in Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.
Here is my personal recommendaion, If you have a WordPress powered site, subscribe to Lorelle’s blog. Actually, if you don’t have a WordPress powered site, still subscribe. For me, she is the embodiment of the blogging community in every action she performs. Amazing people are always adored…and i adore Lorelle!
three column black letterhead theme by Hakan Aydın
Hakan is Introducing the 3c-black-letterhead. It is a modified version of Ulysses Ronquillo’s black-letterhead theme, which happens to be a modified version of Robin Hasting’s letterhead theme.
3c-black-letterhead is essentially a three-column black-letterhead theme. The only major addition is the left-sidebar (called sidebar2 in style.css). There are also some minor style/color changes. If you like the look and feel of the theme, download using the link below, and enjoy!
Widgets have come to WordPress! By installing the Widgets plugin by Automattic and using a widget-ready theme, you can bring the popular customization feature from WordPress.com to your very own, hosted WordPress installation.
If you are running WordPress 2.2 or later, you do not need to install the Widgets plugin!
Widgets are now part of WordPress core. You can proceed straight to the WordPress Widgets Blog to find some widgets to try out.
It won’t make you coffee, sing songs of sweet regret or sit at your bedside when you’re ill, but it might make life just a tad bit easier for you.
Think of it this way: Where WordPress is everything that goes on behind the scenes, K2 is everything that reaches the readers of your blog.
WordPress itself takes care of authenticating users, fetching and sending data to and from the database and provides you with the backend administration interface.
K2 on the other hand is the frontend of WordPress. It’s main concern is displaying the data fetches through WordPress in the right way at the right time. Furthermore, where more basic themes like Kubrick have little situational awareness, K2 cares about you and is always trying to make sure you are presented with exactly the tools and data you need.
So K2 is Kubrick 2?
In essence, yes. K2 was started by Michael Heilemann, who also wrote Kubrick, and it builds on those experiences.. But where Kubrick is a little naive in terms of knowing what its readers want, K2 goes out of its way to cater not only to the readers, but also the admins of the blog.
People has been asking me, “What plugins I used for displaying the images and digging the article?” Instead of replying everyone individually, I decided to create a page to share with everyone the Wordpress plugins I used, says an author from mangoorange
An large list of Faworite WordPress Plugins are listed at the post, but here are some of them that i can also personaly recommend:
Adsense Inline
For those who demands for adsense to be embedded into their blog post in i3theme, here comes the plugins by Phil online. I will be adding mine soon. Please support me at MangoOrange by giving the advertisement a thought.
Secure Contact Form
Always been wondering, how you want to add a contact form so that your reader can contact you without the hassle of firing up their Thunderbird and also, a more secure form that safe from all the spams. Try this out. It works for me. I might be release a CSS soon just for this contact form.
Paged Comments
It’s a good way to keep your comments tidy when you have a tremendous long list of comments. Check it out at the i3Theme and click Show All at the comment section. You will know what I mean.
Wordpress Database Backup
The easiest way to backup your WordPress database without a single knowledge of MySQL. Not only that, what I love the most is this email feature that will send it to my ~5GB Gmail as well as the reminder feature. The combination of it rocks. Now I just leave it on and on weekly basis, they will backup a copy right to my Gmail
When it comes to simpler user experience, having your form validation happen instantly on the same page is a lot cleaner than reloading pages and possibly losing some form content. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to use jQuery to do some instant checking on an example comment form.
For our example we’re going to add form validation to a comment form in the default WordPress theme. The process is much the same for any type of form validation however so you could easily apply this technique to a non-WordPress example. The theme we will add the validation to is WordPress’ Default theme that comes packaged with every install. So if you’d like to follow along completely, just head to Wordpress.org and download and install a copy on your server. If you are unfamiliar with WordPress’ comments form, you might also want to visit the NETTUTS tutorial - Unravelling the Secrets of WordPress’ Comments.php
Step 1 - Download jQuery & the Bassistance.de Validation Plugin
You can download jQuery at the website jQuery.com On the first page you will directly see “Download jQuery and a few different downloads. We are not going to mess around with the jQuery framework, so you can download the “Minified and Gzipped” version, this means it’s compressed. Next we need the jQuery validation plugin, made by bassistance.de. This plugin allows you to validate web forms, you can download it here. This file contains a few Javascript files, but we only need “jquery.validate.min.js” (also compressed) for this tutorial.
Step 2 - Uploading files
Now you should have 2 files, “jquery.validate.min.js” and “jquery-1.2.6.min.js”, we are going to upload this to our WordPress template directory. Because in this tutorial we are using the default WordPress theme, literally called “default”, the folder we need is located in /wp-content/themes/default/. To keep things organized we will create a new directory called “js”, this will be the folder with all the javascript. When you have the directory created, upload the files to the folder we just created. (/wp-content/themes/default/js)
Previously on NETTUTS, Philo showed how you can use jQuery to add form validation to wordpress comments that works without any page reload. Another great way of utlizing jQuery to enhance user experience is to not just validate, but to submit your form entirely without a page refresh. In this tutorial I’ll show you how easy it is to do just that — submit a contact form that sends an email, without page refresh using jQuery! (The actual email is sent with a php script that processes in the background). Let’s get started.
In this example, we have a simple contact form with name, email, and phone number. The form submits all the fields to a php script without page refresh, using native jQuery functions (native meaning, you don’t need to download any extra plugins to make it work.
The beauty of Box2DFlash, is you don’t have to understand how it works to use it. Still understanding it’s mechanics will give you a much greater controle.
Now to get right into it! First of all, in order to do anything with Box2DFlash you’re going to have to include most (if not all) of the files. If you have the 349KB folder “Box2D” in your project folder, then your includes will work just like this:
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.events.Event;
// Classes used in this exampleimport Box2D.Dynamics.*;
import Box2D.Collision.*;
import Box2D.Collision.Shapes.*;
import Box2D.Common.Math.*;
Easy.
Now you have to create a b2World object (source code of the class is in Box2D/Dynamics/b2World.as). The world object is the entire body of the engine. Everything is contained within it once your are done.
NOTE: The brain of the engine is b2BroadPhase.as and the heart is the Step() function withing the world object. Don’t go messing with the brain (b2BroadPhase.as) ever. You will totally mess up the engine.
The world object constructor requires 3 things:
1.) A coordinate system in the form of a b2AABB class object.
2.) A vector that defines gravity. That will be in the form of a b2Vec2 class object.
3.) A boolean variable that defines whether objects “sleep” or not. (I recommend you make it true, that they can sleep)
// Create world AABBvar worldAABB:b2AABB = new b2AABB();
worldAABB.minVertex.Set(-1000.0, -1000.0);
worldAABB.maxVertex.Set(1000.0, 1000.0);
// Define the gravity vectorvar gravity:b2Vec2 = new b2Vec2(0.0, 300.0);
// Allow bodies to sleepvar doSleep:Boolean = true;
// Construct a world object
m_world = new b2World(worldAABB, gravity, doSleep);
My examples are not my own here. The code I’m showing is an excerpt from the “Hello World” code they provided with the engine.
After creating a world object you have to bring it to life by setting its heart to beating:
// Add event for main loop
addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, Update, false, 0, true);
publicfunction Update(e:Event):void{
m_world.Step(m_timeStep, m_iterations);
}
Running the Step() function every frame will update all the Body Definitions you add to your world.
As of right now this world is empty though. In order to add balls and boxes and any strange polygonal shapes you can think of, we need to create Body Definitions for them.
A Body Definition consists of 2, 3, or 4 things.
1.) A Shape Definition.
2.) An (x,y) position.
optional:
3.) Rotation (in radians)
4.) A pre-made Sprite object.
In the example flash movie on the Box2DFlash you will notice that all the shapes are simple. That’s because everything is being redrawn every frame with only lines and no fill. That’s right, EVERYTHING is made in code. Nothing was drawn by hand.
If you want your game, or whatever, to have a little more character then that example movie, then you will probably want to associate hand made Sprites with your Body Definitions.
In the “Hello World” example, they use Sprites to display their objects. You could leave them invisible too if you really wanted. Either way they will still be accounted for in the calculations.
On to something very important. What is a Shape Definition!? We have 3 types of shape definition and they all extend the base b2ShapeDef class.
First we have the b2BoxDef class. The b2BoxDef has 4 important properties:
1.) Extents - this is a vector that essentially goes from one corner of the box to the exact center. In other words, half the width and hight. (box is a rectangle)
2.) Density - in the collision equations we use density * area = mass
A density of 0 (zero) or null will make the object static and it will never move in the case of a collision or gravity.
3.) Friction - this is used to calculate the friction between 2 objects… you should keep it between 0.0 and 1.0
4.) Restitution - this is the bounciness of the object. Should probably also stay between 0.0 and 1.0
The b2CircleDef has only one differences in it’s properties. Instead of Extents it has Radius, which is easy to remember.
The b2PolyDef has an array of (max vertices instead of Extents or Radius. These vertices are just b2Vec2 vector objects.
Now Adding a bunch of objects to our world should be easy:
Latest Entry
vertices instead of Extents or Radius. These vertices are just b2Vec2 vector objects.
