Wordpress's bug caused my blog's sidebar disappeared

Today, I found my sidebar on my blog (www.joehe.com) disappeared. At the beginning, I thought it was because of my current themes, but after changed several themes, this issue still existed. I set up an apache server on my local machine, and install Wordpress on it. I found the theme that I current used on my blog is perfectly displayed from my local machine. Then I started to investigate this issue. I found the sidebar was not actually disappeared, it was just placed on the bottom of the page, since the index page is so long that I did not see it at the first glance. I compared the code of my current page to the code of normal page. Finally, I found it was because of one of the post which contains < div id="main_r" > where I should use "& lt" and "& gt". This cause this problem since the browser think there is a < div id="main_r" > in the code of the page but has no < /div > to close it。If Wordpress can check if the post contains symbols like "<" or ">" before the post can be submitted, this could reduce this kind of errors. BTW, my wordpress version is 2.7.

Source: http://www.joehe.com/2009/01/wordpresss-bug-caused-my-sidebar-disappeared/

A good wordpress plugin for google ads.

Yesterday, I spent whole night on looking for the best plugin for Google adsense ads. I had downloaded 5 plugins named: Adsense-integrator, Adsense-manager, All-in-one-adsense-and-ypn etc. Thanks Wordpress for easy installation of plugin, I can try them all easily. After installed and tried them one by one, I found Adsense-integrator is the best one for me. It does not need too much even a little PHP programming knowledge. You can just simply fill out the form provided by the plugin and press a button to update pages, then you can see your ads ideally appearing in your posts. Actually, I don't need any tools/plugins to help me to put Ads on the sidebar, it is easier to add Ads onto the sidebar manually by modifying the code. I am sure Adsense-integrator is what I want.

Wordpress vs Mambo

I have build two websites with CMS package. One is Mambo, the other is Wordpress. They all are good systems but with different features.
1: Wordpress can only be used on blog website. Mambo can be used on some other website.
2: It is very easy to install Wordpress. It only took me 5 minutes to install on the server without any problems. But Mambo took me 30 minutes or longer.
3: Wordpress has Chinese package and support Chinese very well. It is a little bit painful to use Mambor to build Chinese website, but works!
4: It is quit easy to change template in Wordpress system. You only need to unzip the template files and move them into the specified directory. Changing template in Mambo is a little bit complicated and difficult, you have to upload files from the backend and you will encounter problems most time.
Conclusion, if only want to build a personal blog, I strongly recommend using Wordpress.

Also published this article at: writinghood.com