Greene Tea

Amazon aStore with WordPress

Araby Greene — Tue, 17 May 2011 18:29:41 +0000

Adding an Amazon aStore to WordPress is as simple as pasting a line of code for the embedded iframe (inline frame). To see an example, click the Real Tea button in the top menu. The “gotcha” is that the default full-width aStore is 796 pixels wide. Add a vertical scrollbar for long pages, and it [...]

Amazon Auto Parts Widget

Araby Greene — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 16:18:29 +0000

Amazon.com Widgets

Update: The Auto Parts widget is back! It disappeared in October 2010, because of changes in the Product Advertising API, but has recently returned to the Amazon Associates' widget list. It's really one of the nicer widgets and works great, if you have an appropriate website for it.

The widget's Go button [...]

Install WordPress on your home computer

Araby Greene — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:55:20 +0000

I like to try new things with WordPress, but it's time consuming, and occasionally risky, to upload every incremental change or tweak to a remote web host for testing. Wouldn't it be great to have a local test environment with MySql, PHP, and WordPress?

After doing a little research, I discovered XAMPP, with Apache, MySQL, [...]

Iframe in a post

Araby Greene — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:10:52 +0000

As a test, I edited this post in the Visual editor, switched to HTML to add the iframe, and published. Never go back to the Visual editor after adding an iframe tag to a post because the TinyMCE editor will strip it out.

It’s advisable to install the tiny RawHTML plugin, if you use [...]

Link to product details in an aStore iframe

Araby Greene — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:45:29 +0000

It’s easy to link to product detail pages in a standalone Amazon store, or to use the target attribute with a custom navigation menu on the same web page as an aStore iframe. But what if you have several product reviews on various pages of your site, and want to link to their product [...]

BCPL tips and tutorials

Araby Greene — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:41:20 +0000

As a volunteer with Friends of the Blount County Library, I'm happy to provide a little extra technical support for fellow users of TEL (Tennessee Electronic Library) databases and a growing collection of eBooks and audio books.

There is a link to BCPL Tips and Tutorials in the top menubar:

If your question is not answered here, [...]

Trying out Jing

Araby Greene — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:36:40 +0000

I have coveted Camtasia ever since I downloaded it as a 30-day trial several years ago, but couldn’t justify the cost. Last week, I discovered Jing. My goal was to find screencasting software for demos on how to access databases from a portal site. First I tried using my trusty copy of SnagIt, which gave [...]

Precise font-size and line-height

Araby Greene — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:59:49 +0000

I love the flexibility of the Atahualpa WordPress Theme Options list, but I confess to making one change to a core file outside of the Options interface. I added a line to css.php to set the font-size of the root element to 62.5% so that the body font expressed in ems could be calculated as [...]

Amazon Video On Demand Widget

Araby Greene — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 01:02:29 +0000

Amazon has had a Flash widget for previewing shows offered by its Video On Demand service. Amazon Associates may add the widget to web pages or blog posts. The first step in creating the widget is to select popular types of shows from a menu or choose items from keyword search results. The widget wizard [...]

Create an Amazon Image link

Araby Greene — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:53:01 +0000

There are several ways to create Amazon image links in WordPress. This post describes how to download a product image from Amazon (or construct a direct URL to a product image), and then use the WordPress Upload/Insert Media wizard to upload the image (or specify the image URL), and create the image link.

Experienced web developers [...]