Stuff

Shortly after installing Ubuntu on a computer, I like to change the default Ctrl-Alt-Del sequence (which opens the logout/shutdown menu) to be more like the Windows experience (which opens the task manager, allowing you to close processes that might be causing problems).

The easiest way I’ve found to achieve this is as follows:

From the main menu, navigate to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts.

Locate the category Desktop then locate the action Log Out. Click on the Ctrl-Alt-Del text and you should see the text change to “New Shortcut…”. Press a sequence of keys to change this, preferably something unobtrusive like “Ctrl-Alt-Escape”.

Now, click the Add button at the bottom and enter something like “System Monitor” for the Name and for the Command, enter “gnome-system-monitor”. Press Apply to add it.

Find this newly added shortcut at the bottom of the listing under “Custom”. Notice the “disabled” text under the Shortcut column. Click on this and press Ctrl-Alt-Del to make this the new key sequence.

Press Close and you’re all done.

Having recently setup a site on Buddypress, I wanted to remove the admin menubar since it just didn’t fit my site. However, it turned out to be a big deal only because, of the two simplest articles I found on how to achieve this, one was wrong and the other required a bit more information.

To hide the admin menubar in a Buddypress installation, you’ll want to either alter or create a file called “bp-custom.php” in the wp-content/plugins folder on your server. To clarify, if this file doesn’t exist in that folder, you’ll have to create it.

In this “bp-custom.php” file, you’ll want to copy and paste the following:

define('BP_DISABLE_ADMIN_BAR', true);

If the file is empty, just copy and paste it right into that empty file and if the file already has more in it, this can be pasted safely at the beginning or end of the file.

Joomla has this rather ugly “feature” where on a default installation, the page title for the home page shows up on the home page as if it is an article. To hide it, simply login to the administrator section (http://www.yoursite.com/administrator), highlight the menu item labelled Menus from the top menu bar and click to select Main Menu from the list that drops down. The next page should list a few items. Click on the Home item and on the following page, you should see a list of Parameters off to the right-hand side of the screen. Click on the Parameters - System item to open that section up. Right below the Page Title item you should see Show Page Title. Select No. From the buttons above that section, click either Save or Apply to complete the change.

The home page title should no longer show on the home page as an article.

This post is a slight variation on my previous post regarding the removal of the header title from Wordpress blogs. The method used in that previous post to remove the title text from the header section of Wordpress blogs will not work with Artisteer 2 generated Wordpress templates, though it turns out that such removal is actually quite intuitive.

To remove the title text, simply open the style.css file located in the generated template folder and find the section that reads h1.logo-name. That portion of the file should read similarly to the following:

h1.logo-name
{
display: block;

Simply change the block to read none as follows:

h1.logo-name
{
display: none;

One more quick change and we’re done. Following that section above, there should be a similar section which reads as follows:

.logo-text
{
display: block;

Change that block to read none as follows:

.logo-text
{
display: none;

And we’re done. The blog title should no longer show as text, leaving us with just the pretty background logo we’ve created.

This appears to be a very common request from people working with Wordpress blogs and here we have what I consider the most elegant solution.

The problem: Wordpress displays the title of a blog in the header section even if there is an underlying graphic that is meant to replace the text title.

The solution: In the template being used, add the following line anywhere in the style.css file:

#header h1 { display:none }

To be sure, there are other methods of removing the textual title, but they have their problems. For instance, just deleting the title name from the Wordpress admin interface has the effect of displaying no title name on the browser window and the title will also not show in search engines and rss feeds. Another possibility is editing the header.php file to remove the title display, but again, the browser wouldn’t display the title either. Editing the css rather than the php has the benefit of having no bad side-effects.