position: relative;

There are a number of plugins and tutorials for adding a gravatar image to the meta info for WordPress posts.  But my client wanted the ability for each other to upload/maintain their own images within their WordPress profiles. Here’s how I did it.

First  I installed the plugin Author Image – this places a simple upload box at the bottom of a user’s profile page. Nice and simple.

Next, I used the code snippet provided for the plugin and added it to the .entry-meta section beside the author link in my template page:

<?php the_author_image(); ?>

I styled it to make it smaller, but again this was an easy task. Next, I wanted to make the image link to the author’s posts page – that proved to be harder than expected, but eventually I got it working thanks to a post I found about an outdated user image plugin:

<?php
$author_id=$post->post_author;
$curuser = get_userdata($author_id);
$author_post_url=get_author_posts_url($curuser->ID, $curuser->nicename);
echo 'user_nicename ) . '" ' . '>';
the_author_image();
echo '';
?>

Easy to implement and my client’s authors can control their image from within their profile rather than having to update a gravatar.

Last week and today, I’ve been setting up databases for clients on a number of large hosts. I’m really amazed at the variety of upload speeds as I’m FTP’ing a big batch of files for each of them. Looks like the larger the company, the slower the service (these are all shared hosting situations).

Feeling even more pleased with Hostgator now. Even when I had shared hosting, FTP was never at a crawl like this one site I’m working on right now. I think 12 minutes is a bit too much to upload a fresh copy of WordPress!

This is such a cool-looking gallery – I haven’t had an opportunity to use this yet, but one of my potential upcoming projects may provide the perfect opportunity.

I like Social Media Widget, which I’ve recently started using. It has support for a large number of social media sites including FourSquare and Flickr. But something somewhere in one of the CSS files causes the icons to appear vertically rather than horizontally every time I upgrade this widget.

To fix this, I just added this code to my main CSS file:

.socialmedia-buttons {margin: 5px 0 0 0;display: inline;	}.socialmedia-buttons img {border: 0 !important;margin-right: 4px;padding-right: 0;display: inline; }

That seemed to do the trick and I don’t have to modify the plugin’s CSS every time.

I haven’t been posting much lately in my blog – mostly because I’ve been working hard to get a long-time personal project finished and out the door. Done!

Creative Register launched about 10 days ago and is now closing on 30 listings. CR is a directory for (and of) creative professionals living and working in Northern Colorado and Southern Wyoming in the following industries:

• Web design/development
• Graphic design
• Video
• Audio
• Internet marketing
• Social media
• Writing
• Interior design
• CoWorking spaces

…and I’m perfectly willing to add more categories as appropriate.

My main goal right now is to build up the database – if you’re a creative pro in N. CO or S. WY and haven’t yet heard about CR, I’d really appreciate you paying a visit and signing up for a free account. Paid accounts get more perks and are very affordable, but there will always be free accounts.

I spent yesterday at WordCamp Boulder, a fun event for WordPress designers, developers and bloggers. That was my first WordCamp and well worth the very small entry fee.

They had a genius bar where people could ask questions of WP experts. I spent about 2 minutes there and learned a trick that will probably save me 1-2 hours each time I set up a new WP installation for a new client project from now on.

Over the last year I’ve gotten comfortable with a set of plugins that I use for just about every project. And recently I attended a WordPress security seminar and a one-on-one security consult from WPSecurityLock – I learned much about securing a WordPress install and as a result added a few more plugins to my must-have list.

The problem is that getting those plugins installed and configured takes some time. I went to the genius bar to see if there was a way to make the process more automatic.

Here’s what I plan to do as a result of that 2-minute conversation:

• Create a dummy WordPress install on my production server
• Add in my chosen framework (at this point I like WP-Framework a lot)
• Install and adjust settings for my list of must-have plugins

Then when I start each new WP project, I can just export a copy of the dummy site’s database (after making sure everything is up to date) and use it for the new site.

This seems totally obvious to me now, but thanks to the genius bar I didn’t have to go through a lot of headaches to get here.

Yesterday I cleaned up my Blackberry curve to get rid of the ‘insufficient memory’ error and moved all my images and videos to a new 16gb media card. It’s running much faster today and I installed the WordPress app.

This is being posted from my BB using WordPress. What a great app – even better than I expected.

Sometimes an application may ask for an absolute path to a folder/file in your hosting account. Finding that can be hard – you often have to dig around on your host’s site or contact them for that info.

Here’s an easy way to do it: create a new .php file and upload this to the account.

<?php
$path = getcwd();
echo "Your absolute path is: ";
echo $path;
?>

Then just navigate to that file in a web browser and it will display your absolute path.