Tag Archives: Wordpress

Colorlabs Wardrobe WordPress Theme Giveaway

Posted by Steven Swafford on December 26, 2011
Update: If you were not selected as a winner stay tuned in February as I will have another giveaway.

On January 1, 2012, I will giving away this theme. Wardrobe provides exceptional control for all aspects of your e-Commerce website. Whether you’re already running an online fashion store that needs updating, or planning to build a new WordPress-powered online store, the Wardrobe theme will be incredibly valuable to you. The pre-made template makes the job of putting up an online store easy without much complication.

Wardrobe has a simplified design with clean graphics and good use of color that shift the visitors’ focus to the products. Uncluttered design that makes great use of white space making it easier for the user to understand how to navigate and use the site.

Wardrobe Theme Project

Features

  • Automatic thumbnail resizer: Theme is powered with a script that automatically generates thumbnails from your post images. This will save you time and make your web site easy to re-design.
  • Theme administration panel:Manage important theme elements from a dedicated panel and be free from the hassle of editing codes. Here you can integrate your web site with AdSense, Analytics and Feedburner in a few clicks.
  • WordPress threaded comments:Optimize user discussion on your web site with WordPress threaded comments. Say ‘goodbye’ to hard-to-follow comment posts and ‘hello’ to neatly organized comment threads.
  • Cross-browser compatibility: Coded and designed according to web standards. This ensures complete accessibility and compatibility in modern internet browsers, such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome and many others.

Contest Rules

Entering the contest is simple. All that is required is to follow @raddevelopment and leave a comment on this blog post that ranges between 100 – 200 words as to why you’re deserving of the free copy.

At the time of the drawing, January 2, 2012, Radical Development will select one random winners so be sure to follow the rules to win!

Summary of Rules and Regulations

To enter to win a single copy of the Colorlabs Wardrobe WordPress Theme, $69.00 retail value of prize, no purchase is necessary. Contest closes at midnight of January 2, 2012. If you’re selected as a winner, you must provide a valid email address.

Complete Rules and Regulations

  1. This contest is open to residents of the United States of America, except employees of Radical Development who is sponsoring the Promotion and their affiliates.
  2. The chance of being selected will depend on the total number of eligible entries received. If the selected entrant cannot be contacted by the email address provided in the comment within 10 days of being selected, he/she will not be eligible to win the prize and an alternate entrant will be randomly selected.
  3. The prize is not transferable or convertible into cash or otherwise and must be accepted as awarded.
  4. The right is reserved to terminate or withdraw this contest at any time without prior notice.
  5. This contest is subject to all and Federal, State and Municipal laws and regulations. Void where prohibited.
  6. Radical Development and its affiliates accept no liability or responsibility in connection with injuries, loss or damage of any kind arising out of this contest or prize. Entries not meeting the guidelines or irregular in any way will be considered void.
  7. There is no technical support from Radical Development nor Colorlabs and Company.
  8. Good luck.

WordPress Functions Hack To Open External Links In A New Window

Posted by Steven Swafford on January 5, 2011

Are you wanting to a mechanism to open all external links on your WordPress site in a new window? If you’re not familiar with functions.php as with anything make a backup before you begin any modifications and store this backup in a secure place. What functions.php does is let you create functions you can reuse. It works similar to a plugin, being loaded when the WordPress theme is first loaded. You can then use the functions inside for anything you wish. Just take the following code and save it inside your local functions.php:

function open_external_links_in_new_window()
{
echo "<script type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[";
$blogdomain = parse_url(get_settings('home'));
echo "
function CreateNewWindow() {
if (!document.links) {
document.links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
}

for (var t=0; t<document.links.length; t++) {
var all_links = document.links[t];
if (all_links.href.search(/^http/) != -1) { // Catches both http and https
if (all_links.href.search('/".$blogdomain['host']."/') == -1) {
// all_links.setAttribute('target', '_blank');
document.links[t].setAttribute('href', 'javascript:window.open(\''+all_links.href+'\'); void(0);');
document.links[t].setAttribute('target', '');
}
}
}
}

function addWinLoadEvent(func)
{
var oldonload = window.onload;
if (typeof window.onload != 'function'){
window.onload = func;
} else {
window.onload = function(){
oldonload();
func();
}
}
}

addWinLoadEvent(CreateNewWindow);
";

echo "//]]></script>nn";
}

There you have it. One word of advice, Be sure this is the desired behavior your seeking. While you may want your visitors to stay on your site many individuals do to appreciate the decision of a new window being opened being made for them.

Theme Giveaway: Weekly By Theme Junkie

Posted by Steven Swafford on September 15, 2010

Okay all of you theme junkies, no pun intended. Today I secured the theme Weekly from Theme Junkie and I thought that I would give one person a chance to win this theme. Should you be interest the rules are very simple. Leave a comment explaining why you want this theme and be creative. Don’t just say because I like it. On 1 Oct I will select a winner based upon the comments received solely at my discretion. Again, the more creative you are with your comment the better your chance.

Features:

  • Newly Designed & Easy-to-use Theme Options(New!)
  • Unlimited One/Two Column Category Boxes on Homepage(New!)
  • Switch List View/Grid View of posts(New!)
  • Custom Numeric Pagination (No Plugins Needed!)(New!)
  • Custom Archive Page(New!)
  • Image/Text Logo Switcher + Custom Logo Support
  • Author BIO box for single posts
  • Localization Ready
  • Automatic Thumbnail Creation (No Custom Fields)
  • Thumbnail Dimensions Configuration via Theme Options
  • Advertisement Management(5+ Ad Spots to Monetize Your Site)
  • Header/Footer Code Integration
  • Built-in FeedBurner/Twitter/Facebook Support
  • Custom Page Templates (Full Width, Archives, Links, Redirect)
  • Custom Breadcrumb (No Plugins Needed!)
  • Custom Flickr Widgets
  • Threaded Comments
  • Widget Ready
  • Gravatar Ready
  • Dropdown Menu Navigation
  • Cross-Browsers Compatibility (IE6/7/8, Firefox, Safari…)

WordPress Themes Roundup

Posted by Steven Swafford on June 23, 2010

If you’re looking for a theme to refresh that tired look of your WordPress blog then take a moment to look at these resources. While there are a number of different theme flavors out there both free and commercial only you can decide what best suits your needs. I must say if you find a commercial theme please purchase it and support the theme owner. While many if not all theme owners work out of love they still must eat. I have tried a number of themes myself and I keep coming back to my personal favorite Hybrid and the child themes. The author of this theme is very responsive to the community and continually is making improvements.

Theme Hybrid

[browsershot url="http://themehybrid.com/" width="595"]

Pixel Theme Studio

[browsershot url="http://pixelthemestudio.ca/" width="595"]

Theme Junkie

[browsershot url="http://www.theme-junkie.com/" width="595"]

GabFire Themes

[browsershot url="http://www.gabfirethemes.com/" width="595"]

WP Bandit

[browsershot url="http://wpbandit.com/" width="595"]

PageLines

[browsershot url="http://www.pagelines.com/" width="595"]

WooThemes

[browsershot url="http://www.woothemes.com/" width="595"]

Theme Forest

[browsershot url="http://themeforest.net/" width="595"]

Web Hosting Gone Wrong: Webhost4life

Posted by Steven Swafford on June 20, 2010

As you may have noticed last Friday evening my website was extremely slow and when it loaded it resulted in error after error. As soon as I saw the problem I begun to investigate the root cause in order to determine the best approach to resolve the issue. To my surprise WebHost4Life whom I am now calling WebHostNot4Life had migrated my site and database to a new server. Typically a move to newer hardware represents a positive aspect but in this case WebHost4Life completely failed at the task, in fact a quick search of Google yielded a number of customers experiencing similar problems as myself and in some cases a complete loss of data. It makes one wonder if this company no longer cares about quality or is simply unqualified to perform the job. Turning to Twitter I noticed a number of others in the exact same boat as myself.

As I mentioned earlier last Friday around 6:00 PM I noticed the problems with my site. After a few hours trying to resolve the problem I contacted technical support to let them know that I learned that my site had been migrated to the new platform and the database was a mixture of outdated content and configuration that spanned weeks if not months. The same held true for the physical file system content. For the life of me I just could not understand how they could have made such a massive mistake. At this point begun a 24 hour period of trying to get technical support to fix what they had broken.

Round One 18-Jun-2010:

tech: Hi Steven, my name is Tech. How are you today?
steven: seems my site was migrated and I can no longer log in via FTP and the site is throwing errors.. http://radicaldevelopment.net/
tech: I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
steven: I just fixed the FTP issue. Need you help with the site
tech: Please make sure to use the following settings in the FTP client software to connect our server through FTP:
tech: 1. FTP server is: ???.webhost4life.com
tech: 2. Host directory: /
tech: 3. Username: FTP username
tech: 4. Password: FTP password
tech: 5. Port: 21
tech: 6: login type: Normal.
steven: : I just fixed the FTP issue. Need you help with the site
tech: Okay.
tech: You need to update the scripts available in the file ‘functions.php’ to fix the website issue.
steven: how
tech: You need to fix this issue from your end. You can contact the script vendor to get help with editing the file ‘functions.php’.
steven: wait.. this only occured after you folks migrated my site. why now am I on my own??
tech: May I place you on hold for 4 or 5 minutes, while I check this for you?
steven: sure.. I am trying to log into my site now to disable the plugin that seems to fighting me
tech: Okay.
steven: why is the site so SLOW?
steven: and what you all migrated contains files that came from weeks if not months back. It differs than what was on my site as early as today
steven: OMG! even the database is wrong. There are plugins there that I removed a long time back!
tech: Okay.
steven: Please tell me what I had in place at midnight last night on the old server is still there
tech: Thank you for your patience, I am still testing the issue, I will be back with some more information in 5 more minutes.
steven: sure
tech: Thank you for holding.
tech: Steven, it appears that the files have not been migrated properly to the server. I will run a tool from back end to migrate all the files and database to the new server.
tech: I ran the tool from back end. It will take couple of hours to move the database and files to the new server.
tech: Did you receive my last message?
steven: please be sure it is the database a file content as of midnight last night. I must say this is very disappointing and I expect that the second attempt at migration goes without fail. Speaking with others I know with webhost4life this seems to be an ongoing problems as many folks have had numerous problems after the migration. May I expect what you just ran will be complete at 12:15 CDT?
tech: Yes

At this point I had no reason to believe that the two hour window would resolve the issue as technical support had always resolved any issues quickly in the past. Little did I know that this time would be very different.

Round Two 19-Jun-2010:

tech: Hi Steven. My name is tech #2, how are you today?
steven: My site was improperly migrated and at 10:00pm on 6/18 I was told in two hours it would be corrected. It has not. Please advise.
tech: I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
tech: Can you please provide me the exact URL, with which you are experiencing the issue?
steven: http://radicaldevelopment.net/
tech: Okay.
tech: May I place you on hold for 4 or 5 minutes, while I check this for you?
steven: the database and content is out of date for one. Whatever was migrated was old and weeks and weeks old.
steven: sure
tech: Thank you for holding.
tech: I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
tech: I have checked the website and noticed that it is coming up. I can see an error message at the top of the website. Also, can you please let me know whether this is the old contents?
steven: the error is due to the database is out of date with the wordpress functions and etc. There are themes and logs on my site now that have not been there for weeks. Whatever was pulled from the old server is not was was online as on 6/17
tech: Okay.
steven: it is SLOW as well… I do not want to go over all of this again. Here is what the tech stated hours ago.
steven: tech #1: Steven, it appears that the files have not been migrated properly to the server. I will run a tool from back end to migrate all the files and database to the new server.
tech #1: I ran the tool from back end. It will take couple of hours to move the database and files to the new server.
tech: I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
tech: I was able to duplicate your issue. In order to investigate further, I need to escalate the issue to one of our technical specialists. You will be able to view the activity and the status of the ticket in the Support Console of the account.
tech: You can check the status of the ticket at:
tech: http://www.webhost4life.com/member/sconsole
steven: why did this process not fall under a QA review? I should not have to spend my time on this..
tech: Yes, I can understand your concern but there seems to be some other issue with the website.
tech: One of our specialists will contact you as soon as possible.
steven: Please put in the notes that what needs to be migrated is what was in place on 6/17. I do not want to explain this problem again for a third time.
tech: Yes, sure.

Well now the problem has begun to be so severe that it was escalated. Maybe now something will get resolved. Oh, did you notice that I have been apologized to four times now? At this point it was after midnight and decided to go to bed and let the technical folks work their magic.

Round Three 19-JUN-2010:

No that I woke up well rested it was time to check and see if my issues had been resolved. To my surprise the ticket from the previous night had no indication that anyone even begun working on it. Therefore it was time for yet another online chat with the live support and here it how that went.

tech #3: Hi Steven, my name is tech #3. How are you today?
steven: what is the status of 7175624? The problem is not resolved and nothing reflects status in the ticket
tech #3: I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
tech #3: I have noticed that you have updated the ticket. I will ask our engineers to resolve your issue at the earliest.
steven: It is 18hrs now and counting that my site is down and failing to work because of folks on your end. This is unacceptable and the support thus far has been a failure. Please do escalate this
tech #3: Okay.

For those of you that are counting that is a grand total of five apologies and still no fix in sight.

My Next Step

Since I backup both my database a file content myself I decided to transfer my domain to another host and within three hours I had completed this transfer, restored the database, and uploaded the file content. As I was doing all of this I wondered why WebHost4Life technical support was so incompetent that they could not had done the same. Remember that they had a 24 hour window and did absolutely nothing to correct the problems that they caused.

The last step was to contact WebHost4Life sales and terminate my account. I was asked why I had elected to terminate the account and after I explained the problem the sales representative offered me a discounted rate if I would stay with them. I found this so funny that I laughed and replied why would I pay a discounted rate for service that clearly is not working.

At the time of this post my website is sitting on a new host and the best advice I have for anyone thinking of using WebHost4Life is don’t! I have no idea what has happened with this company but it is not what it once was! I have heard that is was sold and tech support is now outsourced overseas. If this is the case then it may explain the crash and burn that I recently experienced.

Are you currently a customer of WebHost4Life or have you decided to take your business elsewhere? I am interested in hearing your story so please leave a comment.

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