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inFocus WP Theme: Customising WP-PostViews and Efficient Related Posts Plugins

By Steve
In Blogging
15Min read
i

Since switching to WordPress I’ve been using the WP-PostViews and Efficient Related Posts plugins. Although the inFocus theme I use now comes with its own popular posts and related posts widgets I much prefer the functionality of the aforementioned plugins.

For example, WP-PostViews displays popular posts based on post views whereas the inFocus version uses the number of comments to determine a post’s popularity. And while there appears to be little if any difference in how Efficient Related Posts and the inFocus version determine related posts, the latter does so on-the-fly whereas the former pre-determines them, thus reducing the load on the server.

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WebTreats inFocus WordPress Theme: Customising the Display of Post Excerpts

By Steve
In Blogging
5Min read
W

Since switching my blog from Blogger to WordPress I’ve been struggling with a new design. I’m pretty savvy with the coding, but if it’s one thing I’m not it’s a designer. Reluctant though I was to use a pre-built theme template I came across the one I’m using now and couldn’t resist. It’s simple yet elegant and in my opinion far superior to anything I’ve seen both in design and functionality.

Of course a template can’t cater for everyone’s needs and I’ve amended the code a bit to suit mine. One particular change I made was the way in which post excerpts are displayed. The theme uses the the_excerpt() function which either uses an explicit excerpt or the first 55 words of the post if one is not provided. I much prefer using WordPress’s <!––more––> quicktag in my posts in conjunction with the the_content(‘Read More’) function.

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Accessing localhost and Virtual Hosts Across a Local Network

By Steve
In Local Server
4Min read
A

I have several computers on my local network each with a local server environment provided by XAMPP. As it stands, the local server on each computer can only serve pages stored on that machine. This means that if I have a local site on computer A that I wish to access on computer B I have to replicate that site’s entire folder structure on computer B and on all other computers I want to access the site from.

No big deal really as I currently use ChronoSync to synchronise my site’s folder structure across computers. However, it is possible to have any computer on a local network serve pages that are stored on another computer on that same network. Here’s how.

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