If you’ve been developing themes, or taking a go at modifying your own, chances are you’ve run into the Wordpress Template Tags page. This part of the Wordpress Codex lists numerous functions you can use to customize your themes quickly and easily, even if you’re just stepping into the wonderful world of modifying your blog, it’s worth a look.

Among other things, it allows you to add category lists, show comment ID-s, show comment authors, display next image links, add a dropdown box of categories anywhere, useful, and basically “drag and drop”. There is however another great Wordpress reference which is a bit more obscure, but also contains a huge load of functions for some other tasks you might have around your site. The Wordpress Function Reference section of the codex lists at least 250-300 functions for pages, authors, plugin usage, comments, users, etc, in short, encompassing the whole blog platform, as opposed to more blog post oriented functions in the Template Tags section.

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Tags: functions, template tags, wordpress
Categories: Web Development

In my limited experience with newspapers, I got the sense that they are not the ones leading the technological revolution. Today I found out that The New York Times has just released an Adobe Air application called The New York Times Reader, for reading their famous newspaper on your desktop. Since “real life”, non-tech companies tend to favor technology at least 20 years old this initiative comes as a breath of fresh air (no pun intended), especially since it is really well implemented, it looks and feels great.

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Tags: adobe air, new york times, newspaper, nyt
Categories: Online Services, software

Evernote used to be a quite little commercial app which a few people knew about. It wasn’t bad, but then someone thought that there was much more potential in a market dominated mostly by OneNote. So they went free and since then it has been booming for Evernote, their newest release will let you use your favorite notebook app on your BlackBerry!

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Tags: blackberry, note taking, notes
Categories: Mobiles, Tools

I absolutely love all kinds of icons, and not long ago I found a very quick way to make my own simple Adobe-Suite-like icons. All you need is Adobe Air, and an app called Air Icon Generator. The app is from the same people who gave us Bookmarked Generator, and works with the same style, although with quite a bit more efficiency. You can churn out 4 different sized icons for as many formats as you want, I created about 10 in 2 minutes.

All you need to do, is fire up the application, select your style (Adobe style, or Web 2.0 star style), enter your text, up to four letters, select a background color and click generate. The shading is done extremely well, no matter what color you choose your icon will look good. This really is a great way to create file extension icons, especially if you use a lot like php, css, js and so on, you can get much better stuff the the original system ones.

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Tags: adobe air, generator, icon
Categories: The Web, Tutorials Advanced, Uncategorized, software

If you’re into browsers, browser tech and mashups, chances are you know what Uniquity is. In a nutshell it’s a mashup service which lets you navigate and manipulate the web in more natural ways. It’s quite hard to describe if you haven’t seen it, think of the awesome bar in Firefox and multiply it by 10, but apart from searching and gathering data it allows you to manage task lists, edit webpages locally and so on, tons of cool features.

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Tags: mashup, Ubiquity
Categories: The Web, firefox

If you think you’ve got what it takes, why not write a book? Oh yeah, it’s takes a load of time, a huge load of marketing effort, and even more money to get enough published to start selling. It’s also risky, since you could be throwing money out the window if people don’t buy your book. Lulu gives you extremely good tools to publish your own book, and since they offer printing on demand, you won’t have to pay a dime until someone buys your book, even then, you only pay for printing, plus a little bit. All in all it’s the solution for bloggers, aspiring writers who want to show off their skills in the “real world”.

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Tags: books, diy, publish
Categories: Online Services

It seems like I’m the resident Google Labs reporter here at gHacks, but truth be told, they have been rolling out some cool features! Their latest is the ability to search Google inline from Gmail. Enabling the feature ads a Google search bar to the left sidebar in the Gmail interface. If you search from there, the results are presented in a pop up window much like the chat window, and top three results are shown (you can navigate to the others).

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Tags: gmail, gmail labs
Categories: Email, Google