Things are finally getting to a point of slowdown…somewhat anyway. Still very busy at work and at my personal business, but finally getting unburied to the point that I actually had time to write this. I do miss it, and there have been so many things happen and change. So many new blog start-ups, a lot of people struggling like me to find the time or post as often. I’ve done my best to still read here and there but I’ve really in the end have had to just read a few of the *favorites*.

So how do you unthaw a dormant blog, especially one this dormant? I’m not really sure to be honest. Hopefully I still have some of my good readers here and there.

Things to say or things I have not commented on yet:
No more Nice4Rice!!! Yeah, I know, its really old news by now, but I have not been blogging. That is definitely a blog I miss. I definitely understand Spud’s reasonings, but that type of article writing and his absolutely great reviews, I will sorely miss.

I do still plan on creating more PHP Hero cards. I am still a very active PHP programmer, although I have not been able to touch the notes in forever. I mentioned the next upcoming card being one to honor Ed, but then to go without creating one, what kind of a** am I? Just a busy one, I apologize. That will still be the very next card I create, and then, after that, you will see the very first PHP Hero card for a lucky lady…I can say no more…

I still struggle with keeping a blog that is a WordPress blog. It really makes no sense for a php developer to do so, I guess in the end it is just a convenience factor. A matter of convenience in regards to making it easy to post as well as just my pure laziness of not wanting to migrate to something else. Perhaps if I had more time I would look into the other options out there. WordPress really has the ability to be something so much greater, I really wish they would take in all the advice and ideas in a non-hostile manner. I definitely understand why WordPress is number 1 – I just wish the responsibility they have as being the most popular would lead them towards some very needed improvements.

My family is doing quite well. I have the greatest times with my Wife and kids. Really, every free minute has been going towards spending time with them. And it has definitely been the most valued moments in my life.

I hope all of you out there are doing great and if you are reading this, thank you very much for hanging out there, keeping subscribed, or just stopping by. I appreciate all of you probably more than you know.

So, first off, a big sorry to the masses that read this blog. Especially you 118,207 readers out there that have figured out a way to subscribe without it being tracked by feedburner and somehow bypass google analytics when you visit, but I still know you are out there. I have taken a great deal of time off from blogging so I can devote every free moment I have with my family and its new addition. Things are great at home and just catching up on everything at work after my leaves and such.

So, turns out, I’m a nice guy, after all, Polli of Polliwog’s Pond seems to think so. She even gave me a fancy shmancy “Nice Matters” award. You can read about it here: Crash … Aaa-ah!. So some link-love back to you in return – Thank You Polli for the award and the mention on your blog!

Back Story:
Polli contacted my via my contact page asking for some PHP help. Her needs were very minor that I would feel guilty charging her for any of the help I offered. However, I did agree to a price first, and just ended up not charging her in the end. That way, it gives her “fun money”. You know, that money that was budgeted for something else, so you don’t really expect to be able to use it, but then you get to use it on whatever you want. Polli is a mom of 6, so I told her to take that money and go have a fun day with her kids instead. I hope she took that chance after such a hard time recovering her wiped computer. I’m anxious to see if the edits I helped her with work out and see them in action on her site.

So lets dive into my little world and find out some more about me…

So we all know that WordPress had a recent update that was also required to fix some security issues. One of the issues that caught my eye was the fact that the default theme had a security vulnerability. After reading that I decided that although I did update WordPress and the problem default theme files, I wanted to get off a theme that potentially could have other security issues if they are just now catching this one. My theme was not strictly the “default” theme, I had done a few appearance changes here and there that made it my own, however, all that back-end code was still the default theme.

So, me still never having any time to design my own theme, I decided to work with a theme of a designer that I have a lot of respect for. I decided to work with the GlossyBlue theme designed by Nick La, located on his N.Design Studio website. It gave me a great “template” to start off of to make it my own. He has such a great set of icons (small gifs) within his themes that just make your page look great.

Making it My Own:

So as you can see by that example picture above, the left side is what this theme looks like by default and after all the image and css changes, what I have made it look like. All and all it was about 45 minutes worth of work to “Reformat” it to my liking. For such a drastic color change there were quite a lot of image adjustments and edits that I had to perform as well as quite a bit of standard css edits. Really not a big deal though. Even though it was already a great design to start from, I do like it much better now! One of the things I just had to do right away was clean up that HUGE HEADER!

So after all the image and css edits, I plugged in all the plugin coding where needed for all the plugins I use. Bob’s Simplistic Navigation suited this theme quite well since there were no single navigation page links coded into it. So always remember, if there is a theme that you come across that you really like but aspects of it do not fit you, well if you know some basic coding you can really dig in and “make it yours” like I have done here.

If you have not already been to Nick’s N.Design Studio website, you are really missing out. This guy is an amazing graphic artist and to top it all off, takes the time to show you some things you can do. Check out his tutorials that he offers and browse other parts of his site. With his more recent iTheme WordPress Theme becoming so popular (you can see it on Saman’s site), he had troubles keeping his site up after all the Diggs.

So you tell me, what do you think about the new ReformatThis look…thumbs up?…thumbs down?…comments?…compliments?…original better?…free money? I will take either or all…

I requested my plugin to be added to the WordPress Repository back in April when I created it. I heard back yesterday that this request was approved. Upon hearing that, I decided to upload my plugin to the official repository and now “Bob’s Simplistic Navigation” is available straight out of WordPress Repository! I am hoping that this will very likely up its exposure and usage. Its so great that such a simple plugin can be so useful to many people.

Or you can go view the WordPress pages for it by clicking this image below. So go on and check out the WordPress plugin page, if you look real hard, you may notice I mentioned a few people in the plugin documentation:

A New Honorary Blogroll Inductee…
Cast down ye peasantly squire attire young one, for you have been welcomed to my table of Knighthood. I’m sure you always wondered what you would look like with mid-evil armor.

2Perfect is amazingly participative on many a blog. He has put his input in on my blog many a time, added me to his favorite blogs, and also participates on a couple of my Knights ["friends"] blogs all the time as well. He does truly honor me and more importantly, this community of ours.

So…BJ…2Perfect…it is my honor to honor you. I knight’th thou’th Sir BJ “2 Perfect” Nodora of Canada. A place of honor will always be held here for you.

My Honorary Blogroll is just that, a thing of honor. It is the way I can honor my readers and community with the greatest thing possible, a permanent linkback. I am constantly keeping my eye on all comments, actions, and linkback posts that involve this site. If I feel truly honored, than I return the favor by honoring you! Thank you all so much for stopping by!

I am not a true King and although I knight you, it is only valid in the state of unconsciousness. Whenever you are in the state of unconsciousness, feel free to pretend you are a knight and while you are at it, feel free to pretend that I am a King. In fact, I like that. Offer becomes invalid when receiver enters the state of consciousness…

Guestblog Post Link:
Get New Readers and Keep Them

Read it and be sure to comment in, let me know what you think…

I’m Freaking Jones’n!
Wow, you start twitching a little bit when you go a little while without posting! I have just been so incredibly busy at work and at home (more work) that I just have not been able to fit in any blogging time. We have opened up a new branch at my employer, plus my company has a good sized project going. So I basically go to work, work for 9 hours, go home, and work another 3-4 after I lay down my youngest daughter. So basically looking at coding or other I.T. work for about 12-13 hours a day

So instead of you all thinking I dropped off the face of the earth, how about I just write this quick message and say “I miss you”

I’ve read many blogs lately that have removed Kontera links for a various amount of reasons. Primarily the biggest reason being the links not having anything to do with the content. There are also a few blogs that say the amount of links sway readers from the content. I’m not sure if any of these bloggers gave the time they should of for Kontera to settle in.

I have to say that I was getting close to agreeing with all of these people and coming very close to removing it off of this blog. But suddenly, after being installed for a couple weeks, it starting working as you think it should. Every day that goes by, I personally think that it works better than it did the previous days. And what I really like is that lately it seems to be linking to less phrases as it hones in on what your blog is truly about.

To me blogging is about blogging and any income derived from it is an extra bonus. If the community that makes this blog possible hated those links, I would do something about it. But there has not really been any kontera-link-hater comments. I even changed the color of my kontera links to try to improve the reading experience.

I think in order for Kontera to be successful on your site, you need to be patient. What do you guys think about the Kontera Link issue?

*Update – 2007-06-06
In the end, really, Kontera served no purpose on my site. Not really profitable and my blog is not about profit anyway. So like many others, I have removed it. I just found the chosen links to be annoying and not related to the content. I gave it the time, and in the end, not happy with it. Goodbye Kontera…

Wow does that thing come down fast with all the trains. I am so thankful! As of 10 hours ago my rank is: 28,863. I see this new rating and I just feel nothing but happy. Blogging is really a great thing! The lower ranking does wonders for your site, that is very true. However, that is not what I am so happy about. Its very nice, but what I love most is you, the readers. Its great to have an excellent rank that may bring more readers your way, but it means most to me that you take this time out of your day, stop by here, and take a look at my [2 cents]. I value you all so much and this community is really the best!

Thank you all for participating! If you ever have any suggestions, questions, comments, or nonsense on top of mine, please just post’em. I am indebted to all of you and if ever I can help you with anything that I am capable of helping with, please just let me know!

PureBlogging.com recently held a blog review contest and my name (via a number) was randomly chosen as the winner! I am so excited about this! I’m usually not a very vain person, so if I ever buy something for myself that is nice, chances are it took months to years to save up for. I have wanted an iPod Nano for a very long time, so to win one, means so much! Its really kind of funny, at the time I wrote the review for PureBlogging, I was doing it free of charge to basically anybody that asked. David stopped by my MyBlogLog page to let me know that he was running a little contest. I jumped at the chance because it was a nice little side item on what I would have done for him anyway.

I really like this contest that David setup & I am very glad that he contacted me about it. Not just because I won, but because it helped me find his site. I think his posts are always valid and worthy content, so it is definitely in my google reader. You can tell I am truly hooked to a blogging site when I subscribe to the comments feed as well, and yes, I have subscribed to that too on David’s site. What I really like most is David did not just use this contest for linkbait, but he also took in the suggestions given to him in the reviews. He already redesigned his logo and changed his tag phrase. These are 2 things that I suggested to him in my review. He took in what we all wrote and acted upon it, that is really something! I feel like I’m on top of the world right now with this turn of luck and I have truly been honored to receive this prize so…

A New Honorary Blogroll Inductee…
In the face of danger, all he did was laugh. He showed his bravery by starting a contest where the risk was high. For this great feat of courage and honor bestowed upon me, I knight’th thou’th Sir David “PureBlogging” Culpepper of Mississippi. I honor you with this David, not because you prized me with an iPod, but because you have shown great honor. I am humbled by this great act, no matter who would of won. A permanent link on my site is all I can do to say Thank You!

My Honorary Blogroll is just that, a thing of honor. It is the way I can honor my readers and community with the greatest thing possible, a permanent linkback. I am constantly keeping my eye on all comments, actions, and linkback posts that involve this site. If I feel truly honored, than I return the favor by honoring you! Thank you all so much for stopping by!

Don’t think giving me iPods will buy you an Honorary Blogroll spot, it will not, although, you are more than welcome to try That and loads of cash will always be worth a shot…but I can not promise anything…

So as a parent, you get to say awesome things like that all the time. Over the last 2 months my youngest daughter has just become affixiated with Winnie the Pooh. So of course my Wife and I try to get a couple things for her here and there that are related to Winnie the Pooh. But I find myself saying the funniest things. I think the best one was Last night when I asked my daughter if she was “brushing her teeth with Pooh”? We purchased a Winnie the Pooh toothbrush for her this weekend. But it doesn’t just end there, you get to say things like “Do you have Pooh on your ball?” or “Is that Pooh on your sock?”. If you figure out how to say these things at the right time, you get some really weird looks come back your way if you are out in public.

*Personal Side-note:
I really love being a Dad! I could not picture my life any different. I have a level of pride that I think could never be broken, but it only grows every day. I am just so so proud! Everything I do is always about trying to make a better life for my family and making sure that my kids have a good life. I have another little one on the way and I can’t wait!

Today it is my honor to welcome Kelly of KellyCho.com into my Honorary blogroll. Kelly, an amazingly active blogger, has honored me many times over. She has tagged me and/or backlinked me on more than one occasion and even has added me to her blogroll. She has been active on my site since pretty much the beginning. Honor calls for honor so it is my turn to return some honor back to you. Besides, I personally know that Kelly is super-psyched about all the benefits that come along with being an honorary blogroll member of my blog. Read more on that towards the bottom.

And here is the best part, the first female knighting ceremony of my blog’s history! So did you know that a female knight’s surname is a “Dame”. If you are the wife of a knight, than your surname is “Lady”, but to be a female knight you are titled “Dame”. If you didn’t already know that, you know that now

Are you ready Kelly? Tingling with anticipation and excitement? Forever waiting for this moment to come…Kelly, I knight’th thou’th Dame Kelly “Star Gazer” Cho of California.

My Honorary Blogroll is just that, a thing of honor. It is the way I can honor my readers and community with the greatest thing possible, a permanent linkback. I am constantly keeping my eye on all comments, actions, and linkback posts that involve this site. If I feel truly honored, than I return the favor by honoring you! Thank you all so much for stopping by!

*this planet that I know of refers to the planet Mercury just in case you were wondering. All jewelry discounts apply to any items purchased at a jewelry store located on the planet of Mercury. This is a limited time offer and therefor may be discontinued at anytime. I have to throw that last sentence in or else all of you readers will devise a plan on opening up a jewelry store on Mercury and then getting Kelly, Saman, & Nick incredible discounts. Thats right, I knew exactly what you were thinking

“Uh Oh!” as my daughter would say. I was tagged to write a poem, yes thats right, me. Kelly Cho tagged me in her poetry post that was originally started by Stretsh’s meme to see how poetic bloggers are. Lets see, its been somewhere around 10+ years since I had to write a poem, so lets see if I can put something together here. This will be an original piece, and I do mean piece, by RJ “Bobs” Matthis. I definitely know I am not a poet, but lets see if I can have fun with this anyway

The PHP Tree…

From your roots that were planted by Rasmus Lerdorf
To your expanding branches fed by Coder’s hard work
Oh why do people refuse to use strtotime()?
The correct function for the job makes your app sublime

Using substr() I can return chosen partial strings
Or I will start a while() loop that returns many things
Always use a switch() statement if options are many
Too many elseif() statements will drag you down plenty

Filter the input and always escape output if User Entry
Security is most important, not just complementary
Preventing MySQL injections is a very important thing!
So always be sure to use mysql_real_escape_string()

My PHP Tree, how beautiful are your functions
Since finding you I have never felt any compunction
Using your objects & functions makes me a happy fellow
Oh PHP, you have had me ever since typing echo()

by RJ “Bobs” Matthis

So thats it, that is my poem. Basically the logicalness you would expect from a programmer, you’re just lucky I didn’t throw in some binary chains (010101010101) in there somehow. So if you are interested in sharing your poetic spirit, I would like to tag the following 3 people: Saman, 2Perfect, & Melanie

I’m guessing MyBlogLog is getting so much traffic at the moment that all their fun little items are starting to crash. I’ve been to a couple websites and the recent readers widget is failing to load which is causing a huge delay in page loads. Because of this, I have decided to temporarily remove the widget from my sidebar.

I also noticed that even the avatars are having trouble loading. Definitely a busy day at MyBlogLog! But as some would say, traffic crashes can really be a good thing! It means you are successful.

So I decided that I would add a few more possibilities of bringing in some income from this blog today. To me, this is just a side feature of what I am blogging for. I’m blogging for my readers and for myself. The opportunity to make money from it is just a side bonus!

Although I have added more ad links and such on my site, I think I did it in a very non-obtrusive way. If you are in single view, each post will have a google adsense banner placed at the bottom of it. On the main screen, every other ad will have a google adsense banner at the bottom. Other than that, all I did was I increased the number of monetary links in my Credits & Plugs sidebar section.

Please let me know if you find any of this to be annoying or if you have any comments or compliments about these changes at all. After all, I’m more interested in you than I am anything else.

Shawn Knight has started up his own new version of Mr Gary Lee’s Technorati Train. This new “train” will pretty much work exactly the same with the exception of it will involve MyBlogLog communities rather than technorati favorites.

I have to participate in something like this. And you definitely should too! The number of backlinks that these train lists bring in is just phenomenal! I’m going to tag 3 blogs and add it to this list, but don’t let this stop you. I really wish I could add more than 3, but that would not be fair to who this gets passed on to. If you do not ever get tagged, feel free to start up your own branch of it, just follow the directions below. These things bring back amazing traffic and backlinks to your site.

Please feel free to use the “MyBlogLog Bandwagon” graphic I created above in your post about it. I think this quick graphic turned out pretty good!

***Start Copying Here:***

Here are the rules:

1) Write a short introduction about how you found this list and include a link back to that blog.

2) COPY the rules and ENTIRE list below and post it on your blog.

3) Take “My New Community Members” and move them into the “The Original Community Members” list.

4) Find 3 new blogs, join their MyBlogLog Community and add them to the “My New Community Members” section. Remember to also add the “Join the Community” link next to your new blogs. ( Example: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/ReformatThis/ )

5) Join as a member to each Community listed here by clicking on “Join the Community”. The goal is that all of the new Members listed will join your community, and you should do the same!

My New Community Members
2Perfect – Join the Community
PureBlogging – Join the Community
Dietriffic – Join the Community

The Original Community Members
Shawn Knight – Join the Community
Reformat This – Join the Community
Kelly Cho – Join the Community
Ms. Danielle – Join the Community
The Man of Silver – Join the Community
Nate Whitehill – Join the Community
Leo Chiang – Join the Community
Garry Conn – Join the Community
Samanathon – Join the Community
Mr. Gary Lee – Join the Community
Feats of a Chilean Dot Com Entrepreneur – Join the Community
Jon Lee – Join the Community
Everyday Weekender – Join the Community
Bryan’s Rants – Join the Community

***End Copying Here***

Previously I had a blogroll category called “Friends” with just 1 entry, Saman Sadeghi. Don’t let that just 1 entry fool you, I have at least 3 times that many friends

Actually, I just don’t have that many friends that blog, so instead of having that category, I decided to remove it and add Saman to where he belongs, my honorary link list. I feel that if you have a category called “Friends” and it only has 1 entry, this can fall into the “scare factor”. You know the whole this guy only has 1 friend, must not be interesting! So since that is not the case, I decided to pitch that category, I highly suggest you look that way at your site all the time, look for anything that may scare away a possible future reader.

The simple fact is I would not be blogging today if it were not for Saman. His blog captivated me so much and introduced me to this great blogging community. I do not mention Saman’s site all the time just because of how great a friend he is, its more than that, his blogging site truly does have nonstop great content. Whether it be from him, his fellow authors, or the community that has developed there, it is a very entertaining blog.

So Saman, I knight’th thou’th Sir Saman “-athon in a thong” Sadeghi of Colorado. Feel free to use the title wherever you go, even England!

My Honorary Blogroll is just that, a thing of honor. It is the way I can honor my readers and community with the greatest thing possible, a permanent linkback. I am constantly keeping my eye on all comments, actions, and linkback posts that involve this site. If I feel truly honored, than I return the favor by honoring you! Thank you all so much for stopping by!

All members of my honorary blogroll get 20% off their purchases at a store that does not exist! 15% off all parking charges at a parking lot that does not exist and to top it all off, buy 1 get 1 free on all shoe items if I were to sell shoes, but I don’t.

It’s already been mentioned on a couple other sites, I really need to mention it on my own
One thing you may notice on my site reviews is I may call out the fact that there is no way to navigate forward and backward through your single posts. To me, when reading blogs, I really appreciate a way to navigate through your posts without having to go back to the main page, scroll down, and than continue reading the next. To me, it just has to be easy to get to the previous or the next post. This especially makes it easy on your active Commentators to travel from post to post and keep actively commenting on your site.

I noticed that there are a good amount of great looking themes being produced these days that look great, but do not include these links. I know that a lot of bloggers out there are not necessarily coders, and may not no exactly how to add nav links in the posts easily. So I decided to create a plugin to make it very easy to do. If you are currently using a theme that does not include nav links, I highly suggest you add some. My plugin makes it very easy to do! You can even include them multiple times if you wish! If you look at my site, currently I have the links at the very beginning and at the very end (when you are in the single post view of course). Both of these link sets are generated from my newly created plugin.

This plugin also works great on themes that perhaps do have nav links coded into it, but maybe just once and you would like to have more.

My WordPress Plugin is located at this page:
Bob’s Simplistic Navigation

If you use the plugin and like it. I would love you to add a mention about it in a post with a linkback to the plugin’s page.

Thanks for stopping by today and please let me know below if you have any questions or comments about it at all. Have a great day!

Stop the Presses!
I was going to post a different kind of announcement today, but that has to take the backseat to some exciting news! I just found out that I received my first site review! And better yet, it was by the site Nice4Rice.com. The review of my site, the photoshop chipmunk creation of my head, and the joking about my critical side can all be seen here: Reformat this Bobs.

I have found that I have really become very passionate about blogging and the overall blogging community. So to be honored with a review meant so very much to me. I’m sure my Wife could tell you that I was jumping off the walls when I found out about it. I really like Nick’s writing style and his type of reviewing that is all his own. The man focuses on the content and does a great deal of research for his reviews. I am very glad that he took notice of my site. Nick, if you ever want a review of your site, just ask….although as you know, I can be critical

So please be sure to stop by Nick’s site and Please Give Me Some Rice! By giving “rice” and participating on Nick’s site, you may end up getting noticed and getting one of these excellent reviews written about your site too!

So today marks the inaugural entry into my Honorary Blogroll. An Honorary Blogroll is something I have planned since the start of this blog. Just a way for me to say “Thank You” in the biggest way possible in the blogging world, with a sidebar linkback. I shall exercise entry into this blogroll when warranted and of course, my site’s first review is a definite yes! So without any further ado, I knight’th thou’th Sir Nick “Spud Oregon” Ramsay of Japan and congratulations, you are the first entry into this new blogroll.

So I just spent about 10-15 minutes going through everybody who has added me as one of their favorites in technorati. Wow this Technorati Train thing really took off! This one simple train took my blog from a 350k technorati ranking to an 88k ranking last I checked.

I have to let you know though, it has nothing to do with the actual favorites themselves. As Nick “Spud Oregon” Ramsay has pointed out in his post: Technorati Favorites. Its not about the favorites, its about all the back-links that are being created by this train.

I got in on the train fairly early, so I can rest assured that my name is being spread around quite often as long as it keeps going. With the combination of that and the favorites themselves – Well – I didn’t let that stop me from still trying to be active. Why did it take me 10-15 minutes to go through all those that favorited me? Well that because I went through every user and every blog of that user. They all now have me favoriting them, not just the blog from the train, but every blog of that users. If by chance I missed you, please post a comment here to let me know. Heck that comment even comes with a free back-link

Huge Piece of Advice:
For those who have not started any Technorati Train action of their own, you really should. Look at the numbers above, it really does help. If you would like to continue the train and create your own branch, just simply follow this link: Technorati Train. It has all the directions there.

Please feel free to use the little title image above that I created in any of your Technorati Train posts.

I’m so new to WordPress that I had no idea that it threw in the NOFOLLOW tag in all the comments by default. Its funny, I have read many articles about how bad this is, but never even checked my own blog site. I just never thought that would be something WordPress would have coded into by default with the Akismet plugin available by default. Its funny that they do that isn’t it? Here is a great tool to keep out SPAM – but just in case – here is the NOFOLLOW tag for that .0001% that gets through. The community on your site is far more important that that very obscure .0001%. So I have removed the NOFOLLOW tag and I would very much like to credit Saman’s post titled “Say Goodbye To The NOFOLLOW Tag At Samanathon.com!” and/or “I Follow List” for pointing this out to me.

If you are interested in getting rid of the NOFOLLOW tag, be sure to check out Saman’s post about him removing it from his site. It will give you the information and links that can make it happen for your site. Blogging is about community and sharing what you build. If you have not already removed the NOFOLLOW tag, you really should.

Also, once you favorite everyone, make sure you actually click the Add to my Favorites button!!

***Start Copying Here:***

Here are the rules:

1) Write a short introduction paragraph about what how you found the list and include a link to the blog that referred you to the list.

2) COPY the Rules and ENTIRE List below and post it to your blog. To avoid duplicate content and increase the amount of keywords your site can accessible for, go ahead and change the titles of the blog. Just don’t change the links of the blog.

3) Take “My New Faves” and move them into the “The Original Faves” list.

4) Add 3 Blogs that you’ve just added to your Technorati Favorites to the “My New Faves” section. Remember to also add the “Fave Me” link next to your new blogs (i.e. http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=http://www.yourfavesdomain.com)

5) Add Everyone on this list to your Technorati Favorites List by clicking on “Fave the Site.” Those who want good kharma will fave you back. If not, you will for sure get the benefits of faves from the bloggers who continue this list after you.

My New Faves

Kelly Cho – Fave the Site
Shawn Knight – Fave the Site
Tyler Ingram – Fave the Site

The Original Faves

Bobs [ReformatThis] – Fave the Site
Everyday Weekender – Fave the Site
Armen’s Blog – Fave the Site
Gary Lee – Fave the Site
Dosh Dosh – Fave the Site
Nate Whitehill – Fave the Site
Ms. Danielle – Fave the Site
Jeff Kee – Fave the Site
Scribble on the Wall – Fave the Site
Jimi Morrisons Head – Fave the Site
Jon Lee – Fave the Site
Samanathon – Fave the Site
Eat Drink & Be Merry - Fave the Site
The Man of Silver – Fave the Site
Hannes Johnson – Fave the Site
My Dandelion Patch – Fave the Site
Nathan Drach – Fave the Site
SiteLogic – Fave the Site
Julies Journal – Fave the Site
Stephen Fung – Fave the Site
Ed Lau – Fave the Site
QMusings – Fave the Site

***End Copying Here***

I liked this plugin so much I just had to fix it and use it!
Brian’s Threaded Comments is such a powerful tool to be used on a bloggers site. It really encourages interaction between yourself and all of your Commentators as well. In fact, on Saman’s site I was able to get into a great Haiku/Zen fight with Natron that was easily readable thanks to this plugin. I have seen the successes of it many times over on many blogs including the great Saman Sadeghi and the great John Chow.

So what on earth is my problem with this plugin? Well its really very simple, I’m a “tabber”. When I fill out a web form, I use my tab button to tab from one field to the next. I fill out my name, press tab, fill out my email, press tab, etc…. Well the problem with Brian’s Threaded Comments is once you hit tab after the Comment box, you are sent to the top of the page rather than being sent to the Add Comment Button.

Example:

The Problem:
Is actually very simple. When putting the code and output together, Brian assigned a tabindex to the four text input fields, but not the button. So your browser being the good little trooper it is follows in the tab order given, then resets back to its default for the remaining items. Your page itself is typically the first tab, when you override that, it waits its turn and than takes the soonest opportunity. Thus, that is why right now when you tab from comments hoping to be sent to the button, you get sent to the top of the page.

The Solution:
Or should I call it “a solution”. There are many ways to fix this, but perhaps the easiest way is to just assign a tabindex to the button. What you want to do is find the following line in your custom comments.php code:

<input onclick="if(typeof(onAddComment) == 'function') { onAddComment(); } else { alert('ERROR:
It looks like the website administrator hasn\'t activated the Brians Threaded Comments plugin from the plugin page'); };" name="addcommentbutton" type="button" id="addcommentbutton" value="Add comment" tabindex="5" />

Due to limited space, the above wrapped, but this will be just one line in the code (unless your coded editor wraps text). The location of it will most likely be different for everyone as we have all added custom code for avatars and such, but for me, this was at line 203. So my guess is it is in that general neighborhood for you too. As you can see by the code example above, I just added tabindex="5" at the very end. That fixed the tab order issue and now all the “tabbers” like me will love posting on your site again!

*Update – Turns out I was not the only one who was annoyed by this error. Ryan J Parker had also written a post about it too, it can be found here: Fixing the Tab Index with Brian’s Threaded Comments

Saman really went above and beyond. Earlier today I noticed that he wrote a blog introducing my blog to his community! Saman has interesting perspectives and great technical writing abilities. Because of this, his community has grown quite a bit. So for him to introduce me to that community is a huge deal and I am very very appreciative!

With more visitors coming to this start-up site comes some responsibilities. First off, I have noticed, when you comment on a site, whether you are doing it for promotion of your own blog site or you truly are passionate about the given subject, you still like to get “credit” for these comments. So I have added the Top Commentators” plugin to my site. Currently, I have it set to tally on a monthly basis and show the top 10. I have actually upped it to the “all” setting now. I’m looking at it from the non-scare factor. If readers see such low numbers, they may be scared away. So until my site starts to see a lot more participating traffic, I’m going to leave it at “all”. If my traffic and comments show a great increase, than I will definitely have it cycle more than that in the future as my friend Saman does.

I have also shifted the items in my sidebar around a bit. I think it is just right to Prioritize and give credit to those who stop by your site. So I wanted to make sure that the Top Commentators and Recent MyBlogLog visits are at the top of the page. Because without a doubt, it is the bloggers that make other blogs successful!

Speaking of giving credit! It has only been a short time since Saman wrote that blog, and already both Shawn Knight and Culture Shiok!, members of the Samanathon.com community, have stopped by to welcome me aboard with comments!

Thank You Saman!
Saman’s most recent technical article was entitled “Windows Hack: Delete The eBooks Folder Forever!”. You will find his site full of useful information like this. When it comes to Saman’s site, it is actually hard to pick just a few articles to write about. He has so many great ones and his site keeps you very entertained!

Thank You Shawn!
Shawn just recently wrote a great article titled “Blogging for Money: My Thoughts”. Its very interesting to see his perspective on this. I think I am in the middle here too when it comes to this subject. Sure I would like to blog to make money, just not only blog to make money! Its a great read – check it out. Shawn, you have been added to my RSS list buddy!

Thank You Culture Shiok!
This man does not seem to blog as often as the usual blogger, but don’t hold this against him. He is very active in the blogging community and is constantly commenting on other bloggers sites. In my way of thinking, that is one of the best bloggers you can find on the net – you want to make sure you say something nice about a guy like that – so maybe he will come back

So I have decided something. If I wait to blog until I have designed my own site from scratch, well, I will never ever blog. I code all day at work, than I come home and code some more when I can for my company. I have a large back log of coding I still need to do, so why I add to it?

Therefore, I just made a couple tweaks to the default WordPress theme. I liked the theme itself (except for the extremely large header), but I still have to have a few personal touches that I can call my own. So I designed up my own custom header real quick (you will notice that it is much smaller) and played around with some of the css styles to make it more “what I would have done”. Which basically just comes down to smaller headers and footers.

I think as default themes go, WordPress has an excellent one. I was amazed by how easy it was to start right off the bat! I was so impressed by it, that I have no problem keeping it as the one I use.

So anyway, since I’m no longer waiting, I have also added some more content. You can see on the right side I have 2 about pages. I have added a great deal of content to both of these pages.

If you are even reading this, you are either Saman, or somebody who came here from Saman’s site. I’m new enough to not have been spread around much, so any traffic that I get, I know that I can pretty much say 98% of it comes from Saman’s site. So first off, thank you very much for stopping by! I hope after doing this for a while I will have some great content, and hopefully will keep you stopping by!

If you are that 2% that came here from some other route, you need and I mean need to check out Samanathon.com. Saman’s website is packed full of great blogging articles and has a community involved with it that will welcome you right in. Follow that link, and it will hook you too!

But keep an eye out for me in the future. I plan to start posting some good content. But at the moment, I want to prioritize design. Once I have custom designed my own WordPress Template, I will start blogging away.