In some Wordpress Blogs the in the sidebar the category listing are long and take up lot of sibebar space.Here’s a trick that can be used to span the category listing into 2 columns saving more sidebar space.

1.Old Style 2. New Spanning Style

To get your category listing like that of (2), follow these steps

1. Open your themes style sheet and add these lines
   

   .widget { padding:0 0 10px 0;}
   .widget p { padding:2px; }
   .widget h4 { margin:0 0 10px 0; text-transform:uppercase; color:#D90202; font-weight:bold; font-size:10px; border-bottom:1px solid #4cb6fc; border-top:1px solid #4cb6fc; background:#cdeafa; padding:8px 15px; }

   .widget ul { list-style-type:none; padding:0 0 0 10px;}
   .widget li { font-size:12px; padding:6px 0 6px 12px; no-repeat; background-position:0px 12px;}

   .widget li a { font-size:12px; color:#333333; }
   .widget li a:hover {color:#0070b2; }

   .widget.tags { text-align:justify; width:226px; overflow:hidden;}
   .widget.tags a {color:#808080; }

   ul.right {float:right; width:132px;}
   ul.left {float:left; width:120px;}

   .c {clear:both;}

2. Open your sidebar.php and add for the following lines
   

   <div class=”widget”>
   <h4>Categories</h4>
   <?php
   $cats = explode(”<br />”,wp_list_categories(’title_li=&echo=0&depth=1&style=none’));
   $cat_n = count($cats) - 1;
   for ($i=0;$i<$cat_n;$i++):
   if ($i<$cat_n/2):
   $cat_left = $cat_left.’<li>’.$cats[$i].’</li>’;
   elseif ($i>=$cat_n/2):
   $cat_right = $cat_right.’<li>’.$cats[$i].’</li>’;
   endif;
   endfor;
   ?>
   <ul class=”left”>
   <?php echo $cat_left;?>
   </ul>
   <ul class=”right”>
   <?php echo $cat_right;?>
   </ul>
   <div class=”c”></div>
   </div>

3. You can use 4 variations of depth by changing the value of depth in the 4th line of Step 2 to 0,-1,1,2
   
   0 - All Categories and child Categories (Default).
   1 - All Categories displayed in flat (no indent) form (overrides hierarchical).
   1 - Show only top level Categories
   n - Value of n (some number) specifies the depth (or level) to descend in displaying Categories

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CCleaner has become very popular in helping get rid temporary and junk data in our systems,But did you know that just erasing data, ie., just deleting them or even for the sake ” Shift+Del ” deleting can also be recovered using simple tools.

To do away with such problems CCleaner has 3 Secure types of file deletion methods other than the regular Fast Deleting.

1. 1 Pass Simple Overwrite.
2. DOD (Department Of Defense) 5220.22-M ( 3 Passes )
3. NSA 7 Passes

Passes means the number of times your data is overwritten with random alpha numeric values so that the recovery process gets even tougher.

Open CCleaner — > Click Options to The left and then the Settings Tab

Remember that the Secure File Deletion can get Slower as the number of passes increases.

Recently a user asked me if there was a way to enable preview of PSD ( Adobe PhotoShop ) in Windows Vista. After a bit of googling I found Preview Handler.This tool lets the user preview the psd file without opening the Photoshop Application.

Preview handler is the latest methodology in Microsoft Windows Vista™, which provide a rich, interactive, and read-only preview of a file without having to launch the associated application. The in-place interactive previews of the file are available in the Explorer windows, common dialogs, and search results. The core feature is integrated into Windows Vista Shell which allows developers to extend this functionality by writing managed code add-ins i.e. preview handlers for custom files.

Features :

• A "readonly" preview of the file will be shown in the preview pane.
• Image "Dimension" and "number of layers" in the PSD file will be shown in the "tooltip".
• Resolution, Color Depth, & Compression information of the file will be available to the user.

Preview Handler : HomePage

Most of the themes available now a days are wigitized but there are a few really good ones that are not wigitized.In this tutorial I’ll show how you can wigitize a WP Theme, which can make it really easy to manage the sidebars of a WP Theme.

To check if your theme is widget ready or not just head to Design -> Widgets.

Which means your theme is not widget enable.

Follow these steps to enable widgets for your theme.

1. Create a file functions.php in your theme directory.
   

   <?php

   if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )

       register_sidebar();

   ?>

   If you want 1 side bar

   [ OR ]

   <?phpif ( function_exists('register_sidebars') )register_sidebars(2);?>

   If you want multiple sidebars.You can replace 2 with any number.

2. After doing that go to Design -> Widgets and you can find this
3. Now displaying the sidebars in your theme, open your sidebar.php present in your template theme, look for the unordered list like in the example below and add this text right after the <ul> tag.

   <?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')

        || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>

4. And finally close the if loop with the endif before the closing unordered list tag</ul>.<?php endif; ?>
5. For example like this

<ul id="sidebar-right">

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')

     || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>

                <li><h2>Categories</h2></li>

        <?php wp_list_categories(); ?>

    <?php endif; ?>

</ul>

NOTE : If you more than one sidebar, the you have to give the sidebar number in the function like this

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')

     || !dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : ?>

Here the 2 is the sidebar number.If there is no number mentioned then the first sidebar is used.

UPDATE : Wigitize the footer

TechUpdates in the comments asked whether the footer can be wigitized.So here’s how we can wigitize the footer

Step 1: open the functions.php that we created above and add the following lines after the register_sidebar() or register_sidebars(2)

    register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottomleft"));

    register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottommiddle"));

    register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottomright"));

for Example :

<?phpif ( function_exists(’register_sidebars’) )

register_sidebars(2);

register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottomleft"));

register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottommiddle"));

register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottomright"));

?>

Step 2 :Open the theme folder and look for footer.php

          In the file look where the footer div block starts and add these lines

<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’)|| !dynamic_sidebar(’bottomleft’) ) : ?>

<?php endif; ?>

The footer div block would look start with something like this

<div class="footer-box">

If the footer has some functions by default, you can leave them as is.The wigets will replace the default.

For Ex.

<div class="footer-box">

<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’)|| !dynamic_sidebar(’bottommiddle’) ) : ?>

<ul>

<?php get_recent_comments(); ?>

</ul>

<?php endif; ?>

</div>

Did you ever know that the Windows Date and Time Application that shows the time in the system tray in windows connects to the Internet to synchronize with the Internet time server.If you want to stop Windows from doing so, follow these steps

1. Double click on the clock in the windows system tray.
2. A new Windows Date and Time properties window opens
3. Click the 3rd tab that says Internet Tab
4. Deselect the option as shown in the image below.

If your the kind of of person who wants to stop unnecessary applications from connecting to the internet, then you might want to try this.

Linking to internal posts is good for SEO but can be at times really a pain if you don’t know the permalink of the post, you will have to search through the published posts list to find out the permalink of the post.RB Internal Links can really ease the way you link to old posts from newer posts.

RB Internal Links is a wordpress plugin lets you easily link to posts and pages within their wordpress blog without having to enter the full URL , It uses wiki style tags to define a link to the post or page.The wiki code can be inserted manually or by using the wysiwyg plugin.

INSTALLATION :

1. Download rb-internal-links plugin from here.
2. Upload the “rb-internal-links” folder to your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
3. Activate the plug-in
4. Browse to Options > RB Internal Links to take a look at preferences

Note : For this plugin to work you need the Rich Editing Enabled and wysiwyg enabled in your wordpress installation.

To manually link a page/post:
At the place you would like the link to appear write

<!`--{post id="post-slug/post-id" text="link text"--`>

removing the tick (`) if you copy pasting from here.

Using the tinymce wysiwyg editor:

• Make sure you’ve ticked “enable wysiwyg editor” on the plugin preferences page.
• Select the text for which you want to link.
• A new icon will appear on the wysiwyg toolbar, it looks like a page with a link over it Clicking on the icon will pop-up a toolbox. [ Image 1  ]
• Select the category the post you need is in or alternatively, choose pages for a list of pages
• Click on the post or page you wish to link to  [ Image 2 ]
• Fill in the optional properties for the link  [ Image 3 ]
• Click “Insert Link”

                                                 Image 1

                                             Image 2

                                              Image 3

WP 2.5.1 does not show the post id’s, so only the post-slugs can be used, which can also be a bit a bit hard to find.I feel the TinyMCE WYSIWUG Editor is the better way of using this plugin.

I think this plugin should be a part of Wordpress, I hope this makes it into the upcoming versions of Wordpress.

RB Internal Links  :  Homepage