joeedmon

Another trick is to upload your .htaccess file from your local computer via FTP, even though you can’t see the one on the server. This is dangerous if your host has written something special to the file and you overwrite it. It sounds to me though that you are past that stage.

Try 755, some hosts block acces to files that have 777. “.htaccess” is considered a hidden file. My .ht file permissions are 644 and my WP install has no problems writing to the file.

Your FTP client might have settings that allow you to show hidden files. In WS-FTP look for “Remote File Mask” and put “-a” into the field. Filezilla has a menu item under the View menu for showing hidden files.

I’ve also found that I can edit .ht files through the site control panel, even when the host doesn’t allow FTP access to these files.

Admin Bar Plugin
Page Navigation
Search Pages
Reduced Rewrite
Customizable Post Listings
Optimal Title
Post teaser

It’s more than 5, but I have more than 1 blog.

Hi Drex,

I’m not an expert, and I don’t even pretend to be one on TV. Here are a couple of things that could have gone wrong. WP might not be able to access your MySQL setup. Either the username/password combination is wrong (check your wp-config.php file), or the username you supplied does not have privileges to create tables.

Another issue I’ve hit on is cookies. Go through your cookie exceptions file and delete all the cookies for your website, check both “www.yourdomain.com” and “your.domain.com”. BTW, sometimes the cookies are also listed under “https://www.yourdomain.com”.

I can’t help much beyond that, hope you find something works. I do love your site name, wish I’d thought of that.

Sort of funny how life works. While taking apart your style sheet I saw some stuff and wondered why in the world you had put that in. So, without a second thought, I removed it. Then I removed the various hacks. It wasn’t the hacks, it was this block of CSS code:

a, .boxtip, .boxes, .boxright, .boxleft, .boxwide, .boxblue, .boxquote, .bluebody, p, li, li li, li li li, ul, ul ul, ul ul ul, h3, h1, h2, h4, h5, dl, dd, dt, blockquote, .boxleft p, .boxright p, .boxwide p, .boxright ul, .boxleft ul, .boxwide ul, .tiptitle, .tipbody, .tipbody ul, .bluetitle, .bluebody ul, span {position:relative}

If I knew you I would lecture on the dangers of willy-nilly throwing stuff into a stylesheet, but I don’t, so I won’t. I will just say that you do a lot of default setting that doesn’t do you any good. I do apologize for any previous snarkiness I might have had also.

What I meant previously about styling your headlines, is that your HTML and CSS would be much cleaner if you styled the bluebox like this:

<div class="boxblue">
<h2>Read a Book</h2>
<p>We have ...

Instead of:

<div class="boxblue">
<div class="bluetitle">
<span>Read a Book</span>
</div>
<div class="bluebody">
We have ...

At positioniseverything.net (a link I just stole from another thread) they explain that:

True, IE/Win does enclose a float within a container ‘automatically’, but only if the container element has a stated dimension, and in any case it’s a W3C spec violation. This illegal behavior can also be ‘toggled’ on and off by links within the container, if ‘hovering’ alters the link background or several other properties. Quite a mess.

They then go on to state that Mozilla is sensitive to these kinds of things. You have hovering specced in your CSS. Turning hovering off might solve the problem.

Give me a few minutes and I’ll get you info about what I deleted in your stylesheet. I don’t have the originals and need to recreate what I did.

Here is a quick and dirty code sample for a table. I haven’t checked it out, so I’m sure there’s some stupid mistake (maybe even 2 or 3) in it somewhere. Also note that for clarity’s sake I have removed a lot of code that is normally in there, like the date and other meta information. It should be easy to put that stuff back in.


<table>
<tr>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<td>
<div class="post">
<h1 class="storytitle" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>
<?php the_content(__('(more...)')); ?>
</div><!--post-->
</td>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<p><?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>
</tr>
</table>


Inside the loop…

WordPress is very easy to setup and use. If you follow all the directions you really can be blogging in 5 minutes. It’s when you want to do something special that you need to learn stuff.

The Loop is the PHP code that displays your blog posts. It is just a loop that runs as many times as the number of posts you want to display.

The file that contains the Loop is title “index.php”, but it’s not the file that you found. Assuming you are using the default install, you will find the file you actually need at “/wp-content/themes/default/index.php”. The wp-content folder should be sitting at the same place you found the first index.php file (don’t alter that file by the way).

I’ll come back a little later on with some sample code you can use to create your table. By the way, this can probably be done in CSS, without tables, but I’ve had enough bad experiences in CSS that I wouldn’t attempt it.

I got a version of your site downloaded about 45 minutes ago and started picking apart the HTML and CSS.

Your HTML is fine, it’s the CSS screwing you up. The first thing I found was that Firefox didn’t like the “float:right;”. Which isn’t the problem, Floats normally work just fine in FF. So I went deeper into your CSS. It appears that all of the browser hacks you have are causing the problem. When I removed those, the link worked fine.

Which presents a little of a conundrum, remove the hacks and screw up some people, or leave them in and screw up others.

My solution would be to redo your CSS. Going through your CSS, it appears to me that there is a lot of bloat. Your CSS is well over 500 lines and the complexity is way more than you need. I think that if you clean up your CSS and simplify your coding you won’t need the browser hacks. On my sites I stay away from the browser hacks. There isn’t anything high-tech on your site that requires a mass of hacks (and if there were I’d recommend doing a redesign anyway). Where you are using DIVs and SPANs to style headlines and text you should simplify and use Hn & P tags.

Your site looks interesting, I’d like to blog it when you get it finished.

Also check out the Rewrite Plugin. It still needs to be able to write to your .htaccess file, but it does the whole rewrite thing differently.

One other thing you might want to do is to take a look at your .htaccess file. Download it using ftp and open it up in a text editor. There should be a section called “# BEGIN WordPress”. If not, then WP isn’t able to write to the file.

Hi Smoolean,

We solved that problem on our website with the following:
<div class="header-link"><a href="/"><span></span></a></div>

The above line of code needs to sit inside the DIV for your banner (or header). Here’s what you need to add to your stylesheet:

div.header-link a {
display: block;
height: 72px;
text-decoration: none;
}

The height would be whatever you want the heigth of your banner to be. It makes your whole banner clickable, rather than just having a link off to the side. I don’t know if this will meet your needs, but it sure made me happy when I found the code (43folders.com).

Hi Texan,

I checked out your errors, there isn’t anything major. To be truthful, and even a little brutal, your errors are a result of sloppy code writing.

You are using “transitional” for the page type, so you can’t get away with all the things you used to be able to get away with. Your HTML tags and elements must be in lower case, the values must be enclosed in quote marks, and tags must be nested. You can’t have <p><b>Nice text here.</p><p>More text</b</p>. You need <b> tags inside of each set of <p> tags. You are also trying to use tags that just don’t exist.

The error result explantions are quite clear. If you can’t find someone to do a quick clean up of your code, you might get a book on writing HTML or visit a couple of online tutorials.

Good luck.

3 things:

Your server must support mod_rewrite.

Your server must allow you to use a .htaccess file and allow it to be writable

Somewhere in the Codex it says that you need a link structure that is more than just the name of the post. If you meet the other 2 requirements, then try including an some additional parameters, such as date, category, or whatever. It specifically states that some sites using only the post name will have the problems you are mentioning.

We’ve been experimenting with pretty permalinks on a new site we’re setting up and have settled on just using the post number: “www.ourcoolsite.com/15/”. It’s not pretty, but it’s not ugly either.

Should be real simple to setup using a table and cells. There would be 1 row, and every post would be a cell. Outside the loop you would place your table and row tags. The TD tags would be inside the loop.

I’m sure this could be done in CSS also, but probably a lot more difficult and harder to make work across browsers.

You will want to limit the number of posts that display, the setting is in the options somewhere.

I like it. It’s stylish, but the style doesn’t get in the way of the function.