Don’t you love my new blog digs? I actually won a blog design from Shera at Sweet ‘n Simple Design! Isn’t it gorgeous? I think I’ll finally have to stop changing my theme weekly. Maybe you’ll actually recognize my blog! So a huge thank you to Shera! And her designs are incredibly inexpensive too - like a gorgeous premade template (one of a kind) for $40! Ha? Told you.

Ya know that aweful habit of picking at dry cuticles?  pick pick pick The neatest thing ever is that vaseline -ya know, that cheap greasy stuff, cures it almost instantly!  I am looooooooving this!

And some of you will recognize this old blog design.  I just reeeeeeally didn’t like that last one - way too impersonal.   So, I’m working on my very first wordpress theme!  I am loving it, but am getting frustrated with Internet Explorer.  What I didn’t know until recently is that it is not compliant with the standards of web languages for design and writing.  I use Mozilla Firefox which does actually follow the rules.  There are so many people around the world all using the same internet that the w3c came up with standards.  It is great, but IE doesn’t follow the rules!!  So my design works great on all the standards compliant browsers.  But I’m still tweaking it, and writing a new style sheet for those of you who still use IE.  If you do, stop it!

Download Firefox here for free.

Have a great Monday too!

Cathy

This is a bit for the techy mommies out there.  Specifically the Wordpress techy mommies.

For this site, I needed a special template for the recipe category.  So all posts in the Recipe Cat’ are directed to a pretty recipe template (Category-20.php). HOWEVER, since sub-categories like breakfast or desserts are not part of the parent category “recipes”, they are redirected to the regular template.  Darn!

So this piece of code will take the category, and it’s babies and direct them to the special template you’ve created.  See this for more instruction on creating custom templates.

Place the following code in the functions.php file. When this function is called in the category template, it will search for a parent category, and then return the ID, if it exists. If there is no parent, it will return the category’s own ID. (credit to:Sivar)
//returns a category's parent id if there is one
function get_parent_category() {
foreach ((get_the_category()) as $cat) {
if ($cat->category_parent) return $cat->category_parent;
else return $cat->cat_ID;}
}

Then, place the following code into the category.php file. The “20″ is my recipe category’s ID. Insert your custom template’s category ID. (credit to: Otto)

<?php if (get_parent_category() == 20) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/category-20.php');
return;
}
?>

And the coolest thing happens: When someone looks for a recipe, they are directed to my recipe category template. And when they look for a subcategory of recipes - like main meals or beverages, then they are again directed to the recipe template! I feel as though I have mastered fine art when a code bit actually works! woo hoo!

You can contact me if you need more help with this and I’ll see what I can do - no promises!

This little bit of code entered before the loop as shown, will produce a list of post titles (10 of them)alphabetically.

<?php $posts = query_posts($query_string .
'&orderby=title&order=asc&posts_per_page=10');
if(have_posts()) : while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

A little geeky bit for ya website-designer mommies out there - this is the coolest site where you can try out fonts and it will spit out the css for you!  http://typetester.maratz.com/

BTW, it is actually not too difficult to get into learning this web-designing bit.  I can play around and even do it on my own time!  I got out this afternoon by myself and got a couple books from the library on it, so that I can have the reference in print - I’m still a pen and paper type girl at heart.

Have a good Monday, girls.

Cathy