You can download version 1.1 of the theme here.

For some reason, the category links at the top of each list of three articles was linking to the incorrect category. I think I had something amiss with “the loop.” (Doesn’t everyone, though?)

Anyway, it’s fixed now, and you can download the newest, latest version, Version 1.02, right here.

Related Posts:

You might remember a short time ago I wrote about the fact that you had to have Yet Another Related Posts Plugin installed in order for this theme to function correctly, at least as far as single posts went. Well, that’s no longer true.

It bugged me, and I knew it wasn’t the best situation, so I searched around and found the amazingly helpful Theme Options Panel Framework, written by Jeremy Clark. After playing around with this and trying various things, I figured out a simple, if non-elegant, way to have the plugin be optional and the theme still fully function. This is an improvement, to say the least.

In the new version of the Options Panel (which lives in the “Appearance” tab), you’ll see a choice for whether or not you have the YARP plugin installed. All you have to do is put a “y” or “n” in the text box, to indicate whether or not you’ve installed the plugin. Note that because I’m not very advanced at all this yet, you must type in a lowercase “y” or “n.” An uppercase “Y” will default to “n,” which is what anything other than a lowercase “y” defaults to, for what that’s worth.

And once you do that, you should see the corresponding result in your single posts, either the nifty box with the related posts listed and the Facebook/Twitter links above it, or nothing at all. Simple, I know. But for me, simple is difficult.

You can download the new version of the theme here.

Archive Page Template:

Unnamed Tabloid comes with a template for an archive page, called archives.php. This is a custom archive page that displays your posts by month and also as just a list of all your posts in descending chronological order. It looks something like this:

I’m actually not all that thrilled with it, so I hope to improve it in future releases of the theme. But, be that as it may, if you want to use the theme’s custom archive page in its current form, here’s what you need to do:

• Make a new page. You can call it whatever you want, though “Archive” or “Archives” seem appropriate to me.
• Under “Page Attributes >> Template” on the right-hand side of the page-edit screen, choose “archives” from the dropdown list of templates.
• Publish the page.

That should be it. You should have an archive page that displays the way I’ve outlined above.

Using Images in Posts:

You shouldn’t have to do anything fancy as far as images in posts go, but just know that I’ve modified the way images look, especially ones with captions. Basically, I took away the border and decreased the font, and tried to make it a bit more newsy-looking.

In terms of size, I find that for individual posts, a width of about 190 pixels or so looks the best with the rest of the layout. (You can see an example here. This post has an image inserted into it with a width of 190 pixels.)

But, of course, this is just my opinion. You can certainly go bigger than 190px wide and it won’t kill anything, as you can see here.

Related Posts:

This is no longer true. See this post.

This is kind of important. The way the single.php template is set up (the template for single posts), you need to have Yet Another Related Posts Plugin installed. Otherwise, the single.php file will generate an error and won’t display your post at all.

The related posts are displayed in a neat little list within individual posts, and they can also be displayed in a list below each post (you can set your options in the plugin’s settings panel). Within a single post’s body, the related posts look like this:

Now, I realize that for some of you, this might well suck, in that you may not want to install the plugin, and you may not want to show related posts at all anyway (“Related posts? Who cares?!” This is an example of what you might be saying.). I am working on the code to make it optional for you to include the plugin, and it will probably end up being one of the options you can adjust in the options panel in future releases of the theme. But for now, you need to have it. Again, you can get it here.

Twitter/Facebook Share Widget Thingee:

Just above the related posts box, you will also notice a small widget that displays links allowing readers to submit the post to Twitter or Facebook. It looks like this:

Personally, I find this to be a helpful feature, and I probably included it because I use it myself on my satirical news site, and I like having it there. Plus, most news sites seem to have some version of this functionality on their article or post pages, and I’m basically imitating a newspaper layout.

Again, I realize that you may not want such a thing. As of now, it’s in the single.php file by default. In future releases, you will be able to easily opt out. But for now, just be aware that it is there by default.

The “More News” Section:

When I explained how to format the front page’s layout using the options panel, I neglected to talk about the bottom half of the front page, namely the More News section. It looks something like this:

Not mentioning it earlier isn’t really a big deal, as you are not required to actually do anything to get it to work. The More News section will simply display the latest three posts from the categories you selected to be featured on the top half of the page (the above example isn’t really accurate because the site it’s taken from only has one post in each of its categories).

So, if you selected a post from Category 3 to be the primary featured post on the front page, and posts from categories 1, 2, and 5 to be secondary featured posts in the center column, then the More News section will display the most recent three posts from Category 3, Category 1, Category 2, and Category 5. As of now, you cannot change which categories are displayed in the More News section. This may well change in the future.

I think that’s it for now. I’ll probably think of more later.

Okay, so once you get through the front page layout options on the options panel, you’ll see a section marked “Header and Footer Links.” Like so:

Your options in this section correspond, not surprisingly, to the links that live in the header and/or the footer. Here is what your footer looks like:

See all those fun links in the left and center column? Well, those links will be automatically outputted by the theme, once you enter the information about where they should link to. (Also, the links to your About page, Contact page, etc… won’t say “Unnamed Tabloid,” obviously. They will correspond to your theme’s name.)

So… you are first asked to enter the link to your mobile page. All you do is put in that url, and the link will be set up in your footer, just like that.

And it goes on down the list like that, including links for your Twitter page, Facebook page, RSS feed and Email Subscription link in the second column.

A nice thing about the email subscription link is that it’s built-in to the front page’s sidebar also. By default, once you enter that email subscription link in the field provided, your front page will display a nice, big link to it, that looks like the one highlighted below:

That link will be there — you don’t have to do anything (and it won’t say “Unnamed Tabloid” — I swear).

I realize now that calling this section of options “Header and Footer Links” is a little misleading, because most of the links actually live in the footer. But in addition to the email subscription link, the RSS feed link also lives in two places. One in the footer, and one in the horizontal navigation menu that appears on every page, as highlighted below:

And that’s about it for the Options Panel. Again, any questions or comments, please let me know.

Firstly, you can choose which articles are displayed on the front page, and in what order. You can also choose an image to be featured on the front page.

This is what the front page looks like (or at least the top half of it – would that be “above-the-fold” in newspaper-speak?):

You’ll see the primary featured article in the left column, and above it the featured image. It would probably make sense to have the featured image be related to the primary featured article, but I leave that up to you.

In the second or middle column are the three “secondary” featured articles. (“Secondary” was the best name I could come up with for these articles.)

So, to start with, how do you tell Unnamed Tabloid what article you want to be the main featured article, and what image?

When you load the theme, a menu item will appear on the left side of your dashboard (along with all the other menu items), called “Unnamed Tabloid Options.” Click this option and the options panel for the theme will open up for you in all its glory.

Your first option will be to fill in a category slug for the primary featured article.

You enter the slug of the category that the featured article comes from. The theme will pull the most recent article from the category whose slug you enter. (For more information on slugs and categories, look here.)

And that’s all you need to do for the featured article. Just enter the slug. The theme will output the article’s headline in a large and beautiful font, and the article excerpt below it.

For the featured image, the theme needs some more information.

First, you need to enter the url of the image (most likely the image exists in your media library, right?).

Next will be the image width, in pixels, and then the image height, also in pixels. The recommended size for the featured image is 340px by 250px or so. The height isn’t as important as the width. If you go much over 340 pixels wide, it’ll kind of “break” the design of the page. If you go too many pixels under 340, you’ll be leaving a lot of white space that might not look too good. But that’s also up to you.

The last piece of information the theme needs is the image’s alt text. If you want more information on what an image’s alt text is, and why it’s important, look here. (Note: There’s no caption option for the front page’s featured image.)

So that’s it for the left side of the page, the primary featured article and image.

Now for the center column, where you can feature three more articles, one from whichever category you’d like (or two from the same category, for what that’s worth).

You’ll need to enter the category slug for the article you want on top of the column, then the middle, and finally the bottom, just like you did for the primary featured article. The theme will automatically display the most recent post from the category the slug corresponds to, as well as a link to the category page above the article link, as highlighted below:

That’s it for the top half of the front page, the featured content. Any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to let me know.

The next post, Part 2, will focus on the rest of the options, which are mainly important links that can be automatically displayed once you enter them into the options panel.

I’m announcing the release of The Unnamed Tabloid theme, my first full-fledged WordPress theme. You can download it here. I have submitted it to WordPress’s theme directory, and if it gets accepted, I will post the link to that page as the main download page.

There is a live demo of the theme available here, with sample posts and whatnot. Also, my satirical news website, The National Protrusion.com, currently uses the theme. So you can see it in use there as well.

Unnamed Tabloid is customizable, especially regarding the front page. I will be posting tutorials and instructions on how to use the options panel and take advantage of the customization opportunities, and also on how to use images with the theme, and other details along those lines.

As this is my first real WordPress theme, obviously there will be issues and things that crop up. Please let me know any questions or comments here or by contacting me via the contact page.

More soon.

I love Instapaper. I don’t use that many applications, really, but I use Instapaper all the time. This might be because I like to read news articles and certain blog posts pretty much every day, and many news sites are designed so you are assaulted visually while trying to simply read one of the articles on the site. Instapaper is an application that lets you tag articles or web pages to “read later.” Those articles get collected at your Instapaper account page, and you can go there whenever you want and read just the article – not all the crap and flash and ads and poor layout or whatever it is about the original site in question that bothered you.

For instance, I read Glenn Greenwald all the time, pretty much every day. But Salon.com has pop-up ads and a kind of weird design that makes me a bit insane. So with Instapaper, I save the article for later and read it without all the clutter. It’s perfect for just this type of situation.

But, me being me, I was always a little bothered at how much whitespace there was in the default Instapaper single article page. It felt like something could be done to make it more official-like, make the content look more like a news article. (Why I’m obsessed with making things look like news articles, I do not know.) So I figured I’d take a shot at making a user script for Firefox that includes a stylesheet for Instapaper that I would like, and that I would use myself. (Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that lets you load javascript files called user scripts to affect the performance or look of items on the web. For example, there are several user scripts that take the ads out of Gmail, so you won’t see them when you log in anymore. You have to install Greasemonkey to load and run the scripts, but it’s not hard to do. And anyone can make a user script. There are hundreds upon hundreds are available at userscripts.org to study and get ideas from.)

I called my user script Instapaper Times, and I think it came out all right. Below is an example of an article saved to Instapaper and utilizing the Instapaper Times script:

Mind you, this is my first user script, or any script, of any kind. So it’s definitely a work in progress. I’m sure there will be changes. I’m already thinking the text should be larger on the article page. But we’ll see what happens with it. Hopefully, other people will like it and use it, too. You can find it here, at the Greasemonkey site. Let me know what you think.