If you have a mixture of static pages and WordPress-built pages on your website it can be quite useful to display an excerpt from your blog on a static page, for example your homepage.

The following guide shows you how simple it is to show an excerpt as well as control how much of the excerpt to display. To do this you will need to make sure the static page is a PHP page (I.e. has a .php file extension). (more…)

If you want to display a number of photos on your website, jQuery Infinite Carousel is a very good option. This carousel works really well when you have a list of images on your page, but it threw up a number of problems when calling images dynamically on page load (I.e. your latest Flickr Photostream or set). (more…)

I recently wrote a tutorial on using SimplePie to parse your Google Reader shared items Atom feed (or any other RSS/Atom feed for that matter). However, after implementing it on this site (in the sidebar here) and testing it for a month-or-so, I’ve found page load times are very slow whenever SimplePie parses the feed and updates the cache. I had it set to request an update every hour (3600 seconds), which in hindsight is probably too often for my needs. (more…)