Today I removed the “Link Exchange” page on Virtual Console Mondays and replaced it with a contact page. I think this will work out better all around, because users will be able to send me mail even if it doesn’t have to deal with a link exchange. I decided on using the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP WordPress plugin to create the contact form. Although this plugin was a bit awkward to edit for my needs, it only took a little bit of time to understand how the plugin works. I was also amazed that one of the themes that came with the plugin worked quite well with the site and only needed a small amount of CSS editing.

There was a tiny bug that I had noticed at one point in time but completely forgotten about. What happened was that when you clicked on the “comments” link from a page with multiple posts on it you weren’t taken directly to the comments section of the post but instead just taken to the top of the post.  I don’t know if I had caused the bug to crop up or if it was there from the beginning, but after a quick look at the code and a bit of typing it is now fixed.

After realizing that Luigi rarely ever gets noticed I decided to make a header for my Virtual Console site with him in it. I didn’t want to change anything about the header, so I just removed Mario and put Luigi in instead. I then realized that I’d rather have both headers for the site, but just make it randomly select one so that there would be a 50/50 chance of seeing Luigi in the header.

It took me a little while to figure how to do this without adding another WordPress plugin so I started looking into some php, which by the way I know very little about; I eventually came up with this solution.

First I put this into the header file of the template:

<?php
$random = mt_rand(0,1);
?>


Then all I did was edit the CSS file so that I had two different entries for the two different headers, which look like this:

#masthead0 {
background: url(images/masthead0.png);
width: 600px;
height: 150px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 0;
}

#masthead1 {
background: url(images/masthead1.png);
width: 600px;
height: 150px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 0;
}

Lastly all I had to do was change the DIV code for the header a little bit, which it now looks like this:

<div id="masthead<?php echo($random); ?>"></div>

So basically all this little hack does is add either a 0 or a 1 to the end of the id name, thus it will either be id=”masthead0″ or id=”masthead1″ respectively. All and all an easy little way to make a random header without the need of any plugins. To increase the number of possible headers change the 1 in the first bit of code to a higher number.

See it in action over at my site about the Virtual Console, just reload multiple times to get the second header image to show up.

Today I was checking on the web stats for Virtual Console Mondays and realized that Google had finally given it some PageRank.  Currently it only has a PageRank of 3, but it is a good start and I figure that since I don’t have a whole lot of websites linking to me I have done pretty good.

Also the website has been slowly crawling up on the first page listing for a set of keywords that I really want a high listing on.  The other first page listings that I have obtained for the site are holding their place right around the first five listings, so I’m quite happy about that as well.  To tell the truth I haven’t really done a whole lot of work to get these high listings the main thing I did was use my head and tried to write good relevant content and it seems to work pretty well on its own.

Over the past week I’ve been working on some slight tweaks to enhance the user experience.  The first bit was to distinguish comments made by myself from other users comments, so that my replies are visually identifiable.  Secondly I removed several of the “top sites” only leaving what I thought are the better ones.  Also the remaining “top sites” were added to the bottom of pages that do not include the side bar, this is so that the true number of visitors will be recorded better.  I also added a background to each individual post that changes depending on which console the game is for.  Lastly I ran the CSS file through a optimizer, which reduced the file from 14kb to 9kb.

Hopefully these additions to the site will only increase the experience and will not affect load times or readability for users.