coderchris.com

They guys who produce TinyMCE suggest, when initialising the editor, that you set the content_css parameter to be the url to your site’s CSS, so that the content you type into the text area is styled in the same way as the rest of your site.

This is a great idea and works very well, but a lot of CSS layouts make use of various text positioning options which don’t really apply when translated to a wysiwyg editor, for example making the default alignment centred with no padding.

Thankfully you can get around all of this quite easily and add further custom styling to your editor’s textarea by adding the .mceContentBody style to the end of your site’s CSS file and specifying any further layout options in that.

For example the following css tells the editor in my app to always ensure the text alignment is left justified by default and give a 10 pixel padding to the textarea the editor’s being applied to so that the text that will be input by the user doesn’t squash up against any particular border of the text area itself:

.mceContentBody {
text-align: left;
padding: 10px;
}

Nice and simple really but not so easy to find quickly when searching on Google so I hope this helps someone else out there too!

My gumtree ads (mygumtreeads.com) is a new project of mine, filling in what I see as one of the major gaps in Gumtree's current service. The gap that I and I'm sure many other people have experienced is the inability to setup a user page containing all of your ads for easy reference, a bit like an eBay store.

The real issue with Gumtree is that each ad is regarded as unique and has no obvious relationship to other ads on the site, even if they've been posted by the same person. So, once you post an ad it can get lost forever in their system and though they send you emails telling you what your ad id is, etc. it's very easy to lose track of the ads that you've setup, especially if you have a lot of items to sell, swap or give away.

The service itself is a mash up between wordpress, twitter and gumtree itself, and though released to a wider audience, is still in beta testing, meaning that from time to time there will be issues with system while I iron out bugs and more importantly I'm very open to suggestions on new features and functionality.

Technically, the site is built on wordpress and uses my own rapid plugin development code framework, to extend the base functionality (which I hope to release sometime soon). It uses twitter as a way of collating a list of ads that you post and then processes these entries to form a catalgouge/store like interface.

Anyway I hope if you are also a regular Gumtree user you'll try out the site and see if it works for you.

If not, let me know why and I'll do something about it!

Everybody out there at the moment is trying to make money from their blog in one way or another, and one great way I found recently was via matched.co.uk, who will pay you up to £75 per month just for putting their ads on your sites.

This is great, but the way they do it is by allocating you one ad per page, up to 5 pages per site which can be a problem for wordpress users:

1. Because the wordpress editor interferes with the ad code if it's pasted into a post
2. Because if you were to dump all the ads in to your sidebar so they appear on all pages they'd look a mess

To get around this, I have written a neat little ad rotator plugin / sidebar widget for matched ads which will display each ad correctly in the sidebar of each page you have an ad allocated to.

You can see this in action by visiting the following links:
http://www.coderchris.com/
http://www.coderchris.com/2007/09/21/making-flash-sites-easy/
http://www.coderchris.com/2007/09/19/installing-red5-open-source-flash-media-server-on-centos-42/

A screen shot of the interface is here:
http://www.christopher-dean.co.uk/images/main.php?g2_itemId=1980

If you too would like to make money from matched.co.uk easily with wordpress, then you can buy my ad rotator via paypal for just £10 by clicking this button: