brainshitting - Luis Alves's Website - CSS and XHTML Expert. Portuguese Wordpress Designer. Info, hints and help for webdesigners. Loose toughts and ideas.

I got a new iMac 27” Display but I still wanted to continue using a SyncMaster 2243NW as a second Display so I can increase my work area.

In the first day I have connected it to the mac, everything was ok and the SyncMaster was using the native 1680×1050 resolution and was being recognized by the system as Syncmaster, then all of a sudden after a mac restart it went back to 1600×1200 and the system recognized it has VGA Display and there was no chance to choose the 1680×1050 resolution. I spent a day and a half trying to figure out the problem. Restarted the computer… switched monitor cables, etc. Incredibly when I switched the cables for the first time, the monitor was again using 1680×1050, but after another restart the problem came back… switched cables again and couldn’t make it work, it was driving me nuts.

I’ve read a few forum posts where I found people with the same problem, I even found one guy that claims to have ruined 4 monitors after connecting them to a mac using snow leopard.

Today I found a solution that is working for me. I have installed an application called DisplayConfigX that allowed me to choose/force a custom resolution for the Syncmaster and it worked. So if anybody out there is also going insane because of this… install it. SwitchResX may also work, it didn’t worked for me.

Picasna not updating images
Picnasna is not refreshing the album

I have found a lot of this posts looking for help with the picasna plug-in for wordpress, so I have decided to write about it.

Picasna is a great plug-in to do a great gallery of pictures or a portfolio for your wordpress website. The only problem that I found is that after uploading some new images to your picasa album, sometimes they don’t appear in the published wordpress album right after.

So, the solution for this is to press the up key in your keyboard after the album is opened in wordpress (full screen), this way the cache is updated and the new images appear.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/picasna/

This is a brief tutorial to explain how you can force the footer to stay in the bottom of the page with just CSS.

I have tested it in Firefox Mac / PC, Safari Mac / PC,  IE7 and IE8. Does not work for IE6 and bellow.

First – In your CSS you have to set the html and Body to 100%

html, body {
height: 100%;
}

Second – Wrap all the content of your website except the footer div in a div with the following code:

#wrapper {
height:auto !important;
margin:0 auto -50px; /*this value is the footer height)*/
min-height:100%;
}

Third – create the CSS of your footer

#footer {
height: 50px;
}

Place your div #footer after the wrapper and that’s it.

In wp-includes you’ll find the file bookmark-template.php.This will be done with the tag $cat->description. go to line 227 and change this line:

$output .= "$title_before$catname$title_after\n\t<ul class='xoxo blogroll'>\n";

to:

$output .= "$title_before$catname$title_after\n\t<p>$cat->description</p>\n\t<ul class='xoxo blogroll'>\n";

You can change the place where the description will appear and the html tag that wraps it, for instance:

$output .= "$title_before$catname$title_after\n\t<ul class='xoxo blogroll'>\n\t<h3>$cat->description</h3>\n";

Reading text on the web is a bit harder than doing it on some paper publication. A correct line-height set to paragraphs in CSS is a major help we can give to website readers.

So what line-height should I use?

A good line-height is a value from 150% to 160%. Serifs may require the higher value on this range since visually they occupy a little more space.
Cheers!