With me starting a new school this will probably mean that the other site that I spoke of (the poetry site) will probably go back on hold. This will actually be nice because I’d really like to wait until the CMS that I want to use comes out of beta. Other than this the only thing new with the Virtual Console site is that I updated all of the video demos to a resolution of 640×480 so they should look a bit better.

Some may remember the original domain name that I was going to use, but I will no longer use that domain name for the idea.  I have picked out a new domain name, though can not register it because it is take, but it will expire in a few months and I hope that I’ll be able to pick it up.  If the domain gets extended I’ll just have to come up with a new name or try to purchase it from the owner.  So this means I’ll have a good several months to work on this idea, which is good because I figure I’ll have a good amount of work to get the site how I want it to look/work.

If this site actually comes to light and it ends launching, I’ll have a lot of work to do post launch because I still have to figure out how to market it just right for the projected audience.  I think the beginning will be hard, but if I can manage to get a community to grow out of it then I’ll be pretty well set.

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.

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.

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