dannytalk ™ A Danny Ng Blog

Ok, I’ve finally managed to spend a good portion of my Saturday evening tweaking, testing and configuring this new theme locally. Seems like I’ve ironed out most of the bugs I encountered earlier and viola, this theme is finally live!

Since I couldn’t be bothered hacking the social bookmarking plugin using jQuery, I decided to look for a plugin that uses jQuery already. SocioFluid is a great social bookmarking plugin that uses jQuery. It has a cool feature which is similar to your navigational bar on mac computers.

I’ve also added adsense in the header and within the posts in hopes of generating some dollars from this website, but mainly to try it out and see what it is capable of since I’m working in the search industry. It’d be quite a handy piece of knowledge to have and master :)

There are also 4 125×125 banner ads available for advertising, so feel free to contact me if you’re interested. Most likely I’ll charge a flat rate rather than CPM/CPC models as I couldn’t be bothered going through tracking systems.

If you do encounter some strange or unexpected behaviours on the site, please let me know and I’ll fix it. Obviously I’m unable to go through each post and make sure they all look correct.

Tell me what do you guys think. Is it better? Worse?

Better I hope :)

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Above is the new theme I’m working on to integrate with my current setup. The theme is called epsilon by web2feel. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it up by the end of the week.

It utilises jQuery which causes conflict with the social bookmarking plugin which uses the Prototype framework. I might have to write my own plugin or modify the plugin to integrate it with jQuery. Haven’t had much experience with jQuery but it seems to be a popular javascript framework. Would be a good chance to learn it.

Also this template seems to seamlessly integrate Google Adsense into it, which is something I’ve been meaning to play around with more but haven’t had the time.

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If you’re trying to do some testing on your existing Wordpress website locally (using something like XAMPP) using the same files and database but find that it keeps 302 redirecting to your website rather than running it locally, you will have to configure your Wordpress options to set your home and site URL to your local address.

Since you can’t even access your Wordpress admin interface because of the redirects, you’ll have to configure this on the backend, your database.

Run your trustworthy phpMyAdmin or your favourite SQL client, connect to your local database and browse to your Wordpress database (this is usually prefixed with wp_). Then browse to a table called wp_options or wp_kicpl0_options and look for a table field called siteurl.

The current value of this field should be your website. Edit this field value to your local address (i.e. http://localhost/wordpress). Remember NOT to use a / at the end. Save this.

The next field to edit is called home. If you can’t find this field on your current view in phpMyAdmin, it’s probably on the next page of fields. Edit this field value to the same value you used in siteurl. Save this.

Once you’ve edited both fields, just simply type in your local address again in your browser and you should be running your website locally instead of being redirected to your online website.

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I got bored so I decided to create a spreadsheet and a graph to calculate the percentage of income tax, how much you earn after tax and the percentage of tax you’re paying against your pre-tax income.

The graph above displays these information with salaries ranging from $10,000 to $300,000. These calculations do not take into account any offsets but are merely simple calculations.

You can see the tax percentage spikes up around the $40,000 – $100,000 bracket and plateau’s a bit after that.

The tax rates for the financial year of 2008/2009 are,

• $0 – $6000 => 0%
• $6001 – $30,000 => 15%
• $30,001 – $80,000 => 30%
• $80,001 – $180,000 => 40%
• $180,001 and over => 45%

You can visit the Australian Tax Office website for more information on income tax rates.

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If you’re using Wordpress 2.7 and you’re trying to upgrade to Wordpress 2.7.1 and you come across an error message like “Cannot redeclare pclziputilpathreduction()“, make sure that your Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin is disabled/deactivated.

Then proceed to upgrade your Wordpress to version 2.7.1 from your dashboard and it should work fine (make sure your backup your files & database before hand!).

Seems like Wordpress has already incorporated automatic upgrade into its core features already which will probably render the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin useless now.

Thanks though to the plugin creator for all your hardwork as it was probably one of the best plugins available ever since it came out.

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