I finally have the used car database complete. The result is a database that should help any programmer needing the same information for their used car project.

The Used Car Database currently has over 5,200 cars listed by Year, Make and Model, from 1989-2009.

The data matches what is listed in the Kelley Blue Book which has been the nation’s number-one-selling automotive book, I did this to have a good reference point for data validity.

The file download includes 2 file formats of the database. A CSV file and a MySQL export file. Between these 2 formats, most programmers should be able to incorporate this data into a project easily.

Here is a random sampling of the data.

2002 Saturn SC2
2009 Chevrolet Colorado
1992 Mercury Sable
1994 Dodge Viper
2007 Chevrolet Equinox
1994 Suzuki Samurai
1999 Lexus LS 400
1999 Dodge Durango
2001 Ford Mustang
1992 Buick Riviera

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The one thing you need before you start is a copy of WordPress 2.7+ so you can copy some code. Just a little side tip here. Even though most of my sites and clients have one button install of WordPress, I keep a copy of each version that is released on a thumb drive with my other web stuff so I always have it handy. I also sync that thumb drive up to a hard drive in my office for backup!

Here are the steps to take to convert your comments to threaded comments as they appear here on my site.

• Copy \wp-content\themes\default\comments.php from WordPress 2.7+
• Copy \wp-content\themes\default\comments-popup.php from WordPress 2.7+
• Copy code from \wp-content\themes\default\header.php, and place in your header file.  <?php if ( is_singular() ) wp_enqueue_script( ‘comment-reply’ ); ?>
• Copy the Updated styling code from this great article by Chris Harrison

Turn off  ”says” :

That’s it, about a 5 minute process to convert to WP Threaded Comments on a WordPress blog. Pretty painless too. Big thanks to Chris Harrison for his excellent post on styling Threaded comments!

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PHP Freaks

W3Schools PHP Tutorials

PHP Net

PHP Classes

The thing I liked about getting into PHP Programming was the amount of help and sample code out there is unbelievable, and if you work in WordPress you have a great place to test PHP stuff.

I would recommend setting up a dummy WordPress site, just to try things out, it is an excellent way to learn from the ground up.

If you ever need to just ask a simple question, give Twitter a try, there is always someone willing to help.

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At that point they lost me. With the advent of Linux and the world of open source it just did not make any sense to stick with something that required so much overhead. Another key downside was the database programming required either SQL Server or MS Access. One was too expensive and the other not robust enough.

I switched to PHP and MySQL and I have never been happier. It is easy to find a hosting company that supports these languages and there is a wide realm of support and samples for both. If you like web programming PHP is a must to check out.

And of course the ever popular WordPress platform is PHP based.

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But if you watch this WordPress Twitter Search it seems every so often someone has a little spat with their WordPress installation. Like WordPress is picking on them personally or something, lol.

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To catch this bug before it causes an unexpected problem you should check each plugin immediately after running an upgrade. Simply click the Edit button next to Deactivate, scroll to the very bottom of the file and make sure there is no whitespace at the end of the file. If there is whitespace, simply delete it, and save the plugin. See example images

If you do not check your plugins this bug can become a real pain. The main reason is that once it occurs you have no idea if it is in the WordPress PHP, Plugins or Theme files.

Reference Link : Search › xml parsing error

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Have you ever wondered why some WordPress themes have certain files while others do not?

A WordPress theme requires only two files as I have discussed before, the index.php and style.css. If you took a basic WordPress Theme and deleted all the files except those two in the theme folder, it would still work. However, the pages would basically look the same.

Now the question is, where do these other files come from? And how does WordPress know which ones to look for? This is actually a very simple process. WordPress uses a page hierarchy to choose which files to use for each type of page.

As an example if there is a single.php file, WordPress will use that for the individual (single) post, if that file does not exist, it will use the Index.php file.

There are 10 basic WordPress Theme pages, these are:

• 404 (Not Found) page
• Attachment page
• Author page
• Category page
• Date page
• Search Result page
• Single Post page
• Tag page
• The Main (Index) page
• WordPress Page

This gives us the ability to customize each type of page. This WordPress Codex page explains the Hierarchy.

Let’s look at the Tag.php page as a more specific example.

The Tag page hierarchy goes like this.

• The Tag Template with a matching slug. If the tag’s slug were sometag, WordPress would look for tag-sometag.php
• tag.php
• archive.php
• index.php

So if your WordPress theme does not have a Tag.php page you can easily copy the archive.php page to create a custom tag page, if you do not have a archive page, you could copy the index page to start your tag page.

To help you I have created a simple text file that lists the WordPress heirarchy that you can download here.

So with just a little thought and practice it is very easy to create very unique pages for your WordPress Theme.

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You can read the full post from Mark Lucovsky here.

To show how easy these API’s are to work with I built a simple Partner Bar and plugged it in below. This API would make an excellent WordPress Plugin, I am just limited in time. So here is what I did.

I took the sample code and placed it in a seperate PHP file in my Themes folder. First I modified the feeds included in the sample and included the file in my header.php. Then I placed the required div tag in the body of this post.

I can see where the Partner Bar could be utilizied on a blog or website to either support your partners, but it may also be a good way of selling ad space in the form of a RSS list from the customer. And since this is an AJAX API it is not machine readable and able to pass page rank. So there is a win win!

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One thing I know as a programmer is that every single character in a file is critical. I can not even guess how many times a simple question mark or apostrophe has caused me to lose hours of time trying to find. And here is a perfect case of troubleshooting a WordPress error that was so simple, yet so hard. The error was an XML Parsing Error.
I have a new site (NonPartyPolitics.com) that I have been working on and I realized the RSS Feed was not displaying, the following error was popping up.

Looks pretty obvious, there was an error at line 2, column 1. Step one was to see what was happening, so the first thing I did was look at the source of this page. Nothing jumped out at me, so I loaded a working WordPress site, pulled up the RSS feed and looked at the source, I placed the 2 files side by side and there it was. On the feed with the error there were 2 blank lines before the code. Interesting. I then pulled up the home page for both sites and the same thing, there were 2 extra blank lines on the home page source. This told me that the problem was probably not in the RSS code, but it could still be in the code somewhere.

The next logical step was thinking of what I changed last. I really had not done much outside the template except installing a couple plugins. So, I turned off all plugins. Now the hard part was having a little patience. I could see that on the home page the 2 blank lines were now gone, but I had to edit a post and wait for the feed to catch up.

Sure enough that was it, 2 blank lines were gone in the feed. Now, which plugin?

Here is a little logic for you, if I have 2 blank lines, and I know a plugin is causing it, all I need to know is which plugin is issuing 2 extra carriage returns. The key to this is to know that I was not looking for the plugin actually writing the blank lines, I was looking for a plugin with 2 extra carriage returns. And I found the culprit.

I am not going to call it by name because the plugin worked fined on other sites and it did not download from the original like this. Either I did something to cause this problem, or it was just a fluke.

Here is the plugin before I fixed it…..

and here is the plugin after the fix…

So there we go, a real WordPress troubleshooting case solved. All of that because of 2 extra carriage returns.

Make sure when you are working with code you are aware of every character and every space!

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By adding an image to the background and a few little tweaks of the CSS file I was able to get the same result. I think it actually helps augment the video player and video title. To see the results click on one of the URL’s below and click on a video in the left sidebar.

I placed this new page in its own folder to demonstrate the ability of making a dynamic page that can have different URL structures. Using PHP I setup a default variable or you can pass any variables to create the following.

• Page Name
• Page Title
• Keywords
• Description
• API results

Examples : (default variable is “Blog Search”)

http://www.cybercoder.net/layout/

http://www.cybercoder.net/layout/You-Tube-Layouts

http://www.cybercoder.net/layout/You-Tube-Layouts/

http://www.cybercoder.net/layout/You-Tube-Layouts.html

The search box will pass input to PHP and the result will be displayed with the following URL. It is not hard to convert this search box to use any of the above URL structures.

http://www.cybercoder.net/layout/index.php?a=You+Tube-Layouts

This project took approximately 2 hours to complete. The bulk of the time was getting a good image formatted just right for the results. No programming was needed on the actual page as the CSS file took care of everything once the image was formatted. I also use the htaccess file to create the redirects for the multiple URL structures.

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