There has been no update on this blog for the past two weeks. I would like to apologize to everyone about the same. The reason ?

Well there was a flood here in Iloilo City and my room was completely under water. Woke up to a beautiful day and sunny day, went for a smoke outside. Suddenly there was water outside the building. Ran inside the room so that I could move my things on top of my bed so that nothing would get wet. Kept moving things for about 2 minutes and saw that there was water about 2 feet outside the door. The water has gushing in through the gap in the door. Opened the door to see that the sofa, tables and chairs outside were floating around. I took my laptop and went to the second floor. By this time the water was up to my neck. Tried to save some things of my neighbor but lost all my things in the process.

The water rose to more than a floor high and there was all kinds of things floating around. Managed to pull in a big bottle of mineral water which helped us survive till the water went down the following day.

The room and everything in it was covered in about 3 feet of mud. Lost most of my belongings. There was no electricity for almost 2 weeks. Finally after a week of cleaning was able to move back into my room. The laptop and internet is working from today. Hope to start blogging again in a day or two.

Please stay with me through this unfortunate incident.

Finally got spare time to work on the blog. The first addition is the new social networking buttons below each post. I had seen these buttons on many blogs and decided to make my own. The reason for not using wordpress plugins is becuase they start giving problems later on with many 404 errors. Hope the new buttons look good and here is the code if anyone wants to make them for their own blogs.

These custom social networking buttons require you to edit your wordpress theme files. Its not complicated, just follow the steps and you will be fine.

First we need to edit the single.php file in your wordpress theme.

To do this login to Wordpress, go to Design > Theme Editor > choose Single Post (single.php)

Paste the following code in the required position. You can test where to place it by typing something, saving it and checking where the typed message appears on the page

---

<!– START SOCIAL NETWORKING code –>

<strong>Discover and Share</strong>

<div class=”share”>

<a href=”http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” target=”_blank”><img src=”/images/sharing/stumbleupon.png” alt=”StumbleUpon” /></a>

<a href=”http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>” target=”_blank”><img src=”/images/sharing/digg.png” alt=”Digg” /></a>

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/submit?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” target=”_blank”><img src=”/images/sharing/delicious.png” alt=”del.icio.us” /></a>

<a href=”http://www.technorati.com/faves?add=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>” target=”_blank”><img src=”/images/sharing/technorati.png” alt=”Technorati” /></a>

<a href=”http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&t=<?php the_title(); ?>” target=”_blank”><img src=”/images/sharing/reddit.png” alt=”Reddit” /></a>

<a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/techieportal” target=”_blank”><img src=”/images/sharing/feed.png” alt=”RSS Feed” /></a>

</div>

<!– END SOCIAL NETWORKING code –>

---

Please note that the code is for the social networking sites i have used on this site, you may add more as you wish. You will also need to change the URL for the RSS feed. Get the images you need to use for the buttons and upload them to your site. Change the url in the code above to reflect to your images.

Now to add some effects to the social networking buttons we can add some CSS style

Once again go to Design > Theme Editor > choose StyleSheet (style.css)

Add the following code

---

div.share a img {

padding: 5px;

}

div.share a:hover img {

background: #eeeeee;

border: solid 1px #cccccc;

padding: 4px;

}

---

Note that in the first code the div class was “share”. In the style.css we are adding the style for that class.

If you need any help, feel free to ask in the comments with a valid email and I will reply.

PS :- I am bad at CSS, just try to understand the code with common sense.