I have been tinkering with the idea of a professional redesign for some time now, I am capable of doing one myself but I’m too lazybusy! I think it would take me a lot longer than would be healthy anyway! so I am committed to spending up to 400 USD for a new design of FiddyP… You can help even if you’re not a designer yourself and get a $25 gift certificate to spend where you like!
I’ve seen quite a few designs that I like the look of so I thought I would share some with you and get some feedback!
My definite wants are:
- 3 columns
- 2.0 colours but not clinical
- unique sidebars that can be widget enabled
- incorporate my own 50p logo somewhere
- easy to read text
- a full 1024 wide theme, maybe with the main content resizable for bigger screens
- space for a promotion box or featured product
- all the files required for a 2.3 wordpress theme folder like 404.php and sitemap etc
This is the style of boxes that I like
Here’s a mocked up from an existing template in photoshop, the double span box on the top part of the sidebar should be repeated below the two widget enabled sidebars and a big footer to show other things like blogroll, archives etc. It looks like this:
A cross between the two would be perfect! What do you think? is my budget enough?
Here’s how you can help..
If you know a theme designer that does this type of thing, ask them to take a look at these two pictures and the needs of the site and give me a quote, either by commenting here or using the contact me page.
Get them to mention that you sent them here and if I go with that person, you get a 25USD gift certificate for an online store like Amazon or even one local to you.
It’s almost like a contest because you can get paid for participating even if it’s not you that does the designing! You’ll also get a chance to help out someone you know if they are a designer. I get a new site, they get paid and so do you. win win win 
just some testing of AJAX here to see if I can grab a last post from an author url while the user is still on the page..it’s a prelude to me adding some AJAX functionality to commentluv, below is a test version of the comment form once the comment authors site has been entered and they go to the next form field, the ajax should call a php file to find the title of the authors last post and put it in the pink box.
now all I have to do is find a way to make an event listener for the actual comment form author url field without adjusting the comments.php file….
Last post will be displayed here
My blog is 2 months old today and I woke up this morning to see a Google pagerank of 5 applying to this site!
Here’s a great way to add a shopping cart to your Wordpress blog so you can sell products directly from your site without the user having to go to an external site. If you offer products for sale on your blog, it’s much nicer for your customers to stay on the same site that they see the products on.
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CommentLuv gets CommentSmothered!
October30
I tried to respond to a comment on my CommentLuv plugin page this morning, and I was greeted with this error,
500 Error — Internal Server Error. There has been an internal server error
oh noes!! The site was working fine for the main index page but single posts kept on throwing up a 500 error
I had a quick search of the Wordpress forums and found a variety of posts from people experiencing the same problem, each one with a different solution. I went through each solution until I revived the site back to it’s normal functionality.. here’s what I did..
Some people had the problem because their htaccess file was not writable or their server had mod_rewrite disabled. I tried deleting the htaccess file and then going back to ‘options/permalinks’ and updating the permalink structure. The update went through with no problems (sometimes it will say “could not update htaccess” which means it is not writable by the server). The problem still persisted though..
I thought it might be a cache problem seeing as the CommentLuv page gets so many visitors (it has a pr5 too!), I disabled the cache plugin.
still no joy…
I thought it might be too much memory used (I was close) so I edited php.ini in the root of my hosting folder and put this line in.
memory_limit=16M
Not successful
I tried browsing to the CommentLuv page on my mobile phone once and it crashed with “out of memory” error and considering it has (atm) 199 responses, I thought that might be something to do with it. I know my stats sometimes give me a 500 internal server error when it takes a long time to load so that looked to be the problem.
I downloaded a plugin called ‘paged-comments‘ and installed it, I particularly like the way you can stop it from paging every post and only choose which posts need paged comments by adding a custom field to the post editing screen.
Sorted that out and tried to view the page, it loaded partly! almost there!
On the nearly loaded page there was an out of memory error relating to sh-autolink (a plugin which automatically makes certain words in to html links) so I disabled that and SUCCESS!
It all works fine now.
A combination of too many comments and a plugin that scans the whole text for keywords led to my 500 internal server error for Wordpress, it’s now fixed with a neat plugin and a quick removal of another. phew!
The CommentLuv plugin page is now up and working fine again, I never realized that it would get so much attention when I first drafted it. Thanks everyone for using CommentLuv!
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