The illustrious Content Gallery Plugin for Wordpress blogs has recently issued an update. The plugin is now named Featured Content Gallery Plugin. That’s a very nice name, but with the name change comes a little scare if you are unprepared– updating to the new name knocks out the plugin’s effectiveness on your blog. In other words, after you update, the plugin won’t work right away. There’s something else you have to do after you update this plugin, before it can get going again: you have to go into your Theme Editor and rename the code– you must tell the theme to point to the Featured Content Gallery plugin, not the Content Gallery plugin. Here’s the quick and easy way to do this:
>> Update plugin.
>> Go to your Theme Editor.
>> Find the code for the Content Gallery plugin (it’s usually in the “home.php” file but your location may vary depending upon where you have the plugin inserted).
>> Find the code that says:
<?php include (ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content/plugins/content-gallery/gallery.php’); ?>
>> Replace it with this:
<?php include (ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content/plugins/featured-content-gallery/gallery.php’); ?>
>> Save.
>> Check your website and refresh. You may need to clear your cache to see the change.
I don’t know why these instructions were not clear on the Wordpress plugin gallery site, nor the plugin homepage. I had no idea you had to change the code– I merely updated the plugin, only. So I freaked out after updating the plugin, because when people viewed my home page, all they saw was a bunch of scrambled code nonsense where the Gallery should be.
Hopefully, this will spare plugin users the agony of an ugly home page and the scrambling for a fix. Hope this helps.
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Tags: plugins
Live and learn. And I usually learn the hard way, lol. Nothing like experience to aid a little lesson along.
I’ve discovered that toggling on and off the hotlinking features in my cPanel (where I host my blogs) messes with my blogs’ permalinks. This seems to be a common problem. What happens is that the hotlinking changes the coding to the .htaccess file of your blog.
For your information: “hotlinking” is the term we use for the stealing of bandwidth. Let’s say you upload a photo of your weight loss pills to your web host’s server, in your image folder. You then post the photo onto your blog. That photo is being hosted by your web host, at your expense. (Sites like Flickr and Photobucket host your photos for free). Hotlinking is when a person takes the url of your photo from your web host, and puts it on their website. The “energy draw” for the photo at your site and at the thief’s site is coming from your web host and thus using up your bandwidth– a service you are paying for. You are being robbed. You can prevent hotlinking by turning the feature on at your web host’s cPanel, but you risk changing your .htaccesss file, and ruining your permalinks. (Basically what toggling the hotlinking feature does is it deletes the line “RewriteEngine on” line from your .htaccess file. Adding this back in to your .htaccess file will restore your permalinks.
But you DO want to stop the hotlinking of your images. So I found some sites with information about it. Mind you, I am still learning about the process! But so far, preventing hotlinking is working for me for one of my blogs. I just have to get around to adding the code to the rest of my blogs’ .htaccess files.
Using .htaccess to Stop Content Theft
Protect Your Images with .htaccess
Remeber– ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS back up your files before changing them. Your .htaccess file is crucial to the functionality of your blog. Don’t mess with it unless you know what you’re doing and until you’ve backed it up.
Tags: hotlinking, htaccess, permalinks
Many Blogger blogs have the Blogger NavBar– that horizontal bar at the very top of Blogger blogs. It’s not changed in many years– it’s either black, blue, silver, or tan, and gives you the ability to browse other Blogger blogs (NOT a recommended habit, by the way) or to search the current blog. I believe its usefulness has passed.
Most new blogs now have their own search feature, and I do not recommend surfing Blogger blogs (too risky for malware). And besides, the old Blogger NavBar looks soooo tacky. It’s the same old bar that’s been up there for more than five years.
If you want to hide the NavBar, it’s as easy as putting in a “do not display” command in your HTML code. Here’s a great tutorial video I found at Blogger Templates:
Remove Blogger Navbar – video powered by Metacafe
Hope this helps! Let’s make the blogosphere a prettier place! 
Tags: code, html, navbar, templates
