Still working on the site. It seems to be shaping up well. For the curious, I’m using a hybrid WordPress and static XHTML site architecture. Basically my site root (pipwerks.com) is static XHTML, and my journal section (pipwerks.com/journal) is a WordPress installation.
This makes it tricky to maintain consistency between my custom WordPress template and my Dreamweaver template (yes, I use Dreamweaver, although I wind up coding most of my pages by hand). It’s a bit of a pain, but I really didn’t want to work in a pure WordPress and PHP environment. I only intend to use PHP for a few pages.
Which brings me to… displaying WordPress blog content in a PHP page outside of the WordPress installation. I wanted to show my latest blog entry (or an excerpt) on my homepage, but as I mentioned, the WordPress installation is inside a subfolder. I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. A few google searches later and I ran across this [link no longer available], which got solved my problem in two minutes flat. Sweet. 🙂
I also added some Google ads and Amazon book links. I’m not convinced anything will come of it, but I figured I’d at least like to know how the system works and how to get ads up and running.
The Amazon ads posed a particular problem, as the original style of ad I chose (the tall iFrame with pricing info) killed my XHTML validation. Ugh… no way around it, other than to change ad types. I wound up opting for the simpler image-only ads, which still needed tweaking to pass validation (no “/>” on the image tag, no alt tags, etc.).
I only have a few small tweaks to the structure and layout before I really start digging into the content. I’m excited, are you? 😀