Customizing Thesis with Hooks and Custom Functions
I recently wanted to make some quick customizations to one of my blogs. I’m using the Thesis theme which is pretty killer if you like to tinker to get things just the way you want it.
Thesis is an extrememly customizable WordPress themes. The secret is that all your customizations are kept in a separate custom folder.
THere is also a Hook system that allows you to add Functions that “hook” into various points of your pages and posts.
For example, to add some links before your header, you can create a custom function that outputs your links:
// Add custom links in the header
function header_links() {
?>
<p id="header_links"?><a href="#"?>Facebook</a?> | <a href="#"?>Twitter</a?> | <a href="#"?>RSS</a?></p?>
<?php
}
add_action('thesis_hook_header','header_links');
References:
- Here is a visual list of the hooks available in Thesis: Thesishooks.com
- A more thorough explanation and the source of the example code you see above: ThinkDave
* This post contains no affiliate links. It’s all free info folks!
PPC-Coder: Decision 2010
I know what you’re all wondering. Will it be Miami? Cleveland? or New York?
The answer is, Ottawa! Sorry to bait you, but I’m no basketball superstar just your average office coder. The decision I’ve been working through these past few weeks was whether I should stick to my day-job and try to work on affiliate marketing in the late hours of the evening or, go against conventional wisdom, and quit my job and try to live off my reserve money while building my affiliate business. Last week, I decided it was time to hand in my resignation letter.
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How to scrape websites with scrape.py
I am predicting that the real “killer-apps” of the internet of will be in web-aggregators. The problem of information overload is getting worse and worse we need more solutions that can gather data together and filter out the noise. Look at a site like, Affbuzz.com, no longer do you have to visit every single site you want to follow; everything is gathered together for you. The problem is how do you grab all the data to put into one place? For blogs, you can use RRS feeds but for cases when you don’t have nice clean APIs or data feeds, there is no real alternative than getting your hands dirty and doing some scraping.
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How to become a millionaire in three years – for programmers
This is worth reposting. A few other people already posted posted about this so I’m going to try to elaborate on some of these points and how I see them applying to programmers.
- Market Oppurtunity – After years of reading The Business of Software forums it was very apparent that the first market that programmers look to is super tough and relatively small developer tools market. There are much bigger (and better) fish out there.
- Inequality of information – Know any people that want to learn some basic programming?
- Leverage skills you know – ding ding! Learn to be more productive, hire contractors, use frameworks, outsource. Since you already know how to write code you can tell other people what you want and can evaluate if what they give back is clean and usable.
- Look in obscure places – BingoCardCreator and TablePlanning Software anyone?
- Surround yourself with smart people – This sounds great is theory but you need to find people that are smart and get things done.
- Charge for something – Jason Fried and the 37 Signals people are big proponents of this and I can’t agree more. If you’re making something of value than you are entitled to ask for money. To succeed in the charge-nothing, ad-supported model you need takes a very compelling product that is a kin to winning the lottery.
- Information Products are valuable – People are willing to pay for valuable content. Even if you’re not into writing you can build things to help curate.
- Your primary metric shouldn’t be dollars -
- Get as many distribution channels as possible -
- Go with your guy and do not care about fameballing -
- Be an unrelenting machine – algorithms! automation!
- If it’s a mass market “trend” that’s all over the news, it’s too late -
- If you do focus on a dollar amount, focus on the first $10,000 -
- Be a master of information -
- Get out and be social – Take some time out to meet new people.
- Make waves, don’t ride them -
- Say no way more than you say yes – Your time is your most precious asset. Use it wisely and work on things that will endure and grow.
- Be so good they can’t ignore you – A common complaint I hear is that “It’s already been done”. I used to complain about that too. Luckily, I had a friend set me straight and kick that excuse out of my mind. There’s always room for improvement and to be better.
- Always keep your door/inbox open -
- Give yourself every oppurtunity you can -
- Give yourself credit -
- Look for the accessory ecosystem -
- Stick with it – It’s a long hard road to being independent. I’ve been dreaming about working on my own for a long time and had my fair share of doubts and fears but I knew this is what I wanted.
- Make the illiquid, liquid -
- Productize a service -
- Look For Something That Is Required Or Subsidized By Law -
- Make Sure You’re Robbing A Bank -
- Don’t Be Emotional -
- Don’t leave things up to chance – Test everything!
- Raise Revenue, Not Funding -
- Don’t Get Comfortable – When ever I talk to friends about starting companies or doing side businesses I can see their eyes widen and mind spinning. Inevitably, lunch time will be over and they go back to their cubicle and to their old routine of 9-5ism. If you want more than the 9-5 salary what are you doing about it TODAY?
- Look for those who are comfortable -
- Don’t Skimp on the Important Things
- Companies Spend Just as Much or More On Services as they do On Software-
- Keep the momemtum going
- Listen (or read the transcriptions of) to Every Mixergy Interview You Can
- Last, but not least: Learn How To Filter
Pretty print your JavaScript with Closure Compiler Service
Background
Closure Tools is a set of tools from Google to help Javascript programmers. There are currently 3 tools available:
- Closure Compiler – a javascript compiler to optimize your code
- Closure Library – a javascript library to save you time (not as good as JQuery, though)
- Closure Templates – javascript templating system to help you output HTML
8 Awesome Online Graphics Tools
Need to do some quick graphics work but don’t have access to Photoshop? No need to shell out lots of dough, try one of these free online tools instead. I was surprised at how much amazing things you can now do in a browser. Read more
Pomodoro: A simple technique to getting things done
The most important thing we have is time so I’m always on the lookout for things to improve my productivity and efficiency. I was reading an article about how our society becoming increasingly distracted and read a comment about something called, The Pomodoro TechniqueTM. Read more
Setting up Drupal multisites on cPanel
This is a follow-up to my post on how to set up Drupal multisites on your local development machine where I explain how to use Drupal’s multisite feature during development.
In this quick post, I’ll explain how to set up some Drupal multisites when you’re on shared hosting. I’ll assume you’ve creating your databases and file structure as described in the previous post. Now, there are many ways to arrange your multisites on your hosting account but the main thing you need to do is to set all your domains or subdomains to the same document root. Read more
See over 70 split-testing examples!
Looking for great examples of split-tests? Visit whichtestwon.com.
+rep for Mr. Green‘s better produced post, 58 Split Testing Case Studies, that shares the same site.
