Blog Design

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After a couple of weeks of messing around, i think i’m nearly happy with the look of the blog
The benevolence theme is looking good, and the plugins are working – at last
I struggled with gravatars, but after messing with the CSS and PHP stuff i simply could not get Skippy’s plugin to work
So, after a lot of messing around, posting on both the theme designer’s site and the wordpress support forum, I got no replies
My good friend Stretch suggested i try the official Gravatar plugin from gravatar.com again, as he also had problems with Skippy’s plugin on his blog

After a few parse errors, i finally got it to work. The CSS still needs sorting, but it’s actually displaying the gravatars
The blog finally looks like it’s usable, so there should be more to come

Edit Apologies for the main page completely breaking – that was due to a bit of html lazyness on this post – it has now been fixed

10 thoughts on “Blog Design”

  2. Safari 312.3.3 Mac OS

    Stony, how did you solve the size thing over at my blog? Adrian has just registered and he is having the same problem as you did, the gravatar image posts at 80 X 80 pixels and the it does not resize itself. I thought you had solved it by going into your user settings in my blog and pasting in the gravatar image source URL so that is exactly what Adrian did, but it did not fix anything and it’s still way too big…

    Anything else he can try?

  3. Safari 416.13 Mac OS

    Yeah, you’re onto the right track – you just need to do one last thing
    At the end of the URL for the gravatar i added, without any spaces or quotes:
    “&size=42”
    I got this from looking at the source of your blog and taking the img src tag for stretch’s gravatar as an example (i had to change the html brackets to bbcode brackets to make it work in the code below):
    [img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=1db36324d1ba64becea49fc0756e313d&rating=PG&size=42
    &default=http://mhc.insidestretch.com/wp-content/gravatars/blank_gravatar.png&border=000000' alt='a gravatar' class='gravatar'
    I just ignored all the ratings settings and took out the default location because it’s not needed

    One thing you could try to stop it happening is have a look in your plugin settings (Site Admin->Options->Gravatar) and see if it has cached the gravatars as local. I believe that this is where the cause lies

    Let us know how it goes

  4. Safari 312.3.3 Mac OS

    Ok will do but I think that Stretch’s host, DreamHost, has disabled caching for security reasons… This is the error message I see ever since I installed the plug-in:

    WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
    allow_url_fopenis DISABLED on this host.
    Gravatar caching has been disabled.

    I briefly thought of trying to circumvent this or asked Adrian to see if it was possible but changed my mind.

    Anyway, I’ll delete Adrian’s gravatar… Like I did yours but on my end it doesn’t change anything at all. The gravatar seems to stay the same size… 😕

    But just in case it would help… 🙂

  8. Safari 416.13 Mac OS

    Excellent stuff – good to hear it worked
    As for my blog – I think it needs a bit of direction – it’s a little bit random right now
    Just noticed that i never took out the float:top; on the css for the gravatar – just gonna take that out now cos it looks weird with the white at the bottom – hopefully it will still work now
    *edit* it doesnt seem to have made any difference – must be the way the gravatars sit. Oh well, not to worry

  10. Safari 417.8 Mac OS

    Hi there TreeFrog – apologies for the delay in your comment appearing – the blog’s set to moderate all comments from those who haven’t made a comment here before or who aren’t members
    Glad you enjoyed having a read

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