Panos

Stats, wordpress way

Posted by Panos ⋅ December 20, 2012 ⋅ 10 Comments

The wordpress.com theme showcase site is a brilliant invention: it allows you to read about all the available themes, see them in action, and filter them or sort them in various ways. But when you sort them by popularity, strange things happen…

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Disabling Infinite Scrolling

Posted by Panos ⋅ June 5, 2012 ⋅ 52 Comments

Up to a few months ago, all wordpress.com blogs displayed a specific number of posts on the main posts page: the default was ten posts, and you could freely change the number. But one fine morning Wordpress decided that you shouldn’t have that right; theme by theme, they started adding the annoying feature called infinite scrolling. Continue reading →

Sidebar at the bottom and related layout issues

Posted by Panos ⋅ May 19, 2012 ⋅ 66 Comments

The main posts page of your blog is structured as a series of sections containing other sections, each one with its own layout and styling. Each section is defined by a pair of div tags: an opening one and a closing one. If a solitary div tag is accidentally introduced somewhere in a post or in a text widget, the structure of the page gets messed up from that point on. Continue reading →

Wordpress going to the dogs

Posted by Panos ⋅ March 22, 2012 ⋅ 137 Comments

If you had a problem with your wordpress.com blog, you could contact staff via the Support contact form. Up to about a year ago, support tickets would usually be answered within a day or two. With the steadily increasing number of wordpress.com blogs, this service gradually deteriorated. What would the logical step be? Hire more staff, I’d say. Well, welcome to wordpress ‘logic’. Continue reading →

There we go again…

Posted by Panos ⋅ February 25, 2012 ⋅ 186 Comments

Matt, the founder of WordPress, has his own way of dealing with negative feedback and objections. Namely, he can’t.
The latest incident involves the newly introduced infinite scrolling feature. But first, some notable previous cases.

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Inserting Calameo docs

Posted by Panos ⋅ February 19, 2012 ⋅ 8 Comments

You can insert Calameo docs, by turning the original embed code into the appropriate shortcode.
(For more on this, see The gigya shortcode: inserting Flash. Also note that Calameo provide their own “Wordpress” shortcode, but that shortcode doesn’t work.)

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Athens By Night

Posted by Panos ⋅ February 12, 2012

Athens, outside parliament, 12 February 2012

Athens, inside parliament, 12 February 2012

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Introduction to HTML for wordpress.com users

Posted by Panos ⋅ February 5, 2012 ⋅ 6 Comments

This article is for users who aren’t familiar with HTML and inline CSS yet, and probably find them intimidating. I hope you’ll find it encouraging to know that when I started blogging I knew absolutely nothing about them myself, and when I was first shown HTML and CSS I ran away in terror…

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Inserting Picasa slideshows

Posted by Panos ⋅ January 26, 2012 ⋅ 11 Comments

If you have a Google account and create albums in Picasaweb, you can insert them as slideshows in your blog, by turning the original embed code into the appropriate shortcode (for more on this, see The gigya shortcode: inserting Flash).

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Full-width header image in Imbalance 2

Posted by Panos ⋅ January 18, 2012 ⋅ 91 Comments

The newly added Imbalance 2 is an unusual and interesting theme. Its main posts page normally displays post excerpts in four columns. The header area of the theme is also unusual: instead of displaying a full-width image and a horizontal menu, it conforms to the four-column concept of the main page. You can change that via coding in a Text widget or if you have the Custom Design upgrade. Continue reading →

Inserting Webshots slideshows

Posted by Panos ⋅ January 12, 2012 ⋅ 12 Comments

You can insert your own or other users’ Webshots slideshows, by turning the original embed code into the appropriate shortcode (for more on this, see The gigya shortcode – inserting Flash).

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