Email Immunizer

Email Immunizer is a subtle but effective Wordpress plugin that will hide email addresses on your site from harvesters by converting them to numeric character references. Upload it, activate it, then view the source of a page or post containing an email address - genius.

Fixing arrows in NextGen Smooth Gallery

In IE7, the left/right rollover arrows in NextGen Smooth Gallery don’t work properly (for me, at least). To fix them, add the bit of code recommended here to the end of your nggsmoothgallery/SmoothGallery/css/jd.gallery.css - that should do the trick. Took me a while to find this, which is why I’m posting it here.

NextGen Smooth Gallery: adding links to descriptions and ALT tags to images

See also my previous post on Smooth Gallery.

A feature of NextGen Smooth Gallery is the “info panes” that slide up at the bottom of pictures, containing text entered in NextGen’s “Description” boxes. These descriptions can be enabled to use HTML, for example to include a hyperlink in the description or to make a word or phrase bold, by editing line 98 in nggsmoothgallery/SmoothGallery/nggSmoothSharedFunctions.php from:

<p>'.$picture->description.'</p>

to:

<p>'.html_entity_decode(stripslashes($picture->description)).'</p>

HTML entered in a picture’s description box will now be recognised, eg

Description: text here <a href="http://www.google.co.uk">link here</a>

Note that the “Embed links” box in the Smooth Gallery settings does not need to be ticked.

Thanks to Hubba for setting me on the right track with this!

Next, to get rid of some HTML validation errors, we need to add ALT tags to the images. To do this, fill in the “Alt & Title Text” box in NextGen for each picture and, in the same file (nggsmoothgallery/SmoothGallery/nggSmoothSharedFunctions.php), edit lines 100 and 101, adding

alt="'.$picture->alttext.'"

to each. The lines will now read:

<img src="'.BASE_URL."/".$picture->path."/".$picture->filename.'" class="full"
 alt="'.$picture->alttext.'" />
<img src="'.BASE_URL."/".$picture->path."/thumbs/thumbs_".$picture->filename.'" 
class="thumbnail"  alt="'.$picture->alttext.'" />

There’s also a picture border lurking in this file which, if you want, can be removed by deleting

border: 1px solid;

in line 92.

Nice Wee Theme

Over on Nice Wee Sites we recently released the Nice Wee Theme for Wordpress, and it’s just been approved for inclusion in the Wordpress theme directory. It’s loosely based on the design of this site (but nicer) and has a customisable header icon and avatar, allowing you to tailor it to suit the style of your site. View the demo site or download here.

Update: This site now uses the Nice Wee Theme by way of a demo.

Nice Wee Theme

Some red things

Reds

NextGen Smooth Gallery for Wordpress

Smooth Gallery is a nice little addon for the NextGen gallery, but I had a couple of problems getting it to do what I wanted.

First of all I got the error message “Sorry, NextGEN Smooth Gallery works only in Combination with NextGEN Gallery”. To solve this, I renamed the nextgen-smooth-gallery folder to nggsmoothgallery and the plugin activated no bother.

Then I couldn’t find the admin panel for the gallery in Wordpress. It turned out to be in the Settings area, rather than the Gallery area. Duh.

Finally, my images were displaying with a black border and background and I wanted to change this to white. To do this, look in nggsmoothgallery/SmoothGallery/css/jd.gallery.css and change instances of #000 to #FFF (or whatever your preferred colour is).

And I guess you could also customise the arrows by uploading your own images to nggsmoothgallery/SmoothGallery/css/img, replacing fleche1.gif, fleche1.png, fleche2.gif and fleche2.png.

Now if I could just work out how to change the colour of the info pane…

Update: The info pane properties can be changed in the same jd.gallery.css file. For .jdGallery .slideInfoZone, change “background” from #333 to your chosen colour - simple as that.

Recent beach pics

All of the West Beach, Berneray:

Twisted

Berneray West Beach

Peaceful

Signs of autumn

Mmm, rosehips...

Toadstools

Hairy black caterpillar

Beached whale

Beached whale, Berneray

Beached whale, Berneray

Somebody’s birthday

It's Silversprite's birthday!