History of Obviously Wrong Published Statistics: Part I

I love Boing Boing, but a statistic they just published as a headline has got to be the height of sensationalist ignorance. This is the title:

60% of World's Paintings Come From One Village in China

The "one village" is called Dafen, where there are factories of artists who paint "counterfeits, replicas and nothing close that would be considered art." Are they saying there is someone who counts all the paintings in the world, knows where each painting in the world is painted down to the village level, and then produced this statistic? Boing, Boing, give me a break.

Link to article.

How to Add Sidebar in Single Post Pages With PlainTxt Wordpress Theme

The PlainTxtBlog Wordpress theme is one of my favorites. However, under the hood, it's totally confusing for new users. I was trying to figure out how to get the sidebar to appear on Single Post pages, which are the permalink pages that people mostly come across from a search engine. The sidebar just wasn't there--so frustrating. I'm not sure why the author left it out.

I actually contacted the author for help and thanked him for the wonderful theme. He responded that he does not supply support for his themes (understandable) and directed me to the readme file, which did me no good. After about a month of searching, I think I figured it out. Here's what you got to do.

First, go to your Wordpress theme editor and access the single post php page (it will be called single.php). Go to the bottom of the code and add the following line just before the code. Now, go to your style.css page and delete this line:

body.single div#container,body.page div#container{margin:0 0 2em;}

Now, click on a permalink (single post) page and the sidebar should appear.


*Update* In some versions of the PlainTxtBlog style, the sidebar is suppressed in the style.css page by the display:none attribute. Open the style.css page, do a search for sidebar, and find the style instructions that say display: none. Remove the body.single sidebar text from that set of instructions. The sidebar should now appear on the single page.

Does the MacBook Support Quartz Extreme?

Yes, the MacBook can run Quartz Extreme, both with OSX 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard). Apple has more documentation on the system requirements to run Quartz Extreme and Core Image graphics here.

Wordpress Tip: How to Show a Complete Post in Category Archive View

On a another blog I run in which I use the PlainTxt Wordpress theme, I noticed that often Google would link to a category of my site, but when you navigated to that part of my blog, all that would appear were partial posts with no graphics. It looked crappy, like the searcher accidentally clicked on a spam blog or something. I wanted to fix it. Unfortunately, it took me a couple hours to figure it out.

The answer lies deep in the bowels of the Wordpress code in the archives.php file. In the code there is a call for something called "the_excerpt," which strips down each post to the barebones and removes any graphics. To get your Wordpress blog to show the full post, graphics and all, simply replace the_except with the_content. Check it out, the full posts.

Now hopefully people who navigate to your categories view will stick around a little longer after thinking they have the full site available to them and not a bunch of spam.