Blah, blah, blah.

So the other day I was doing some work for our new site Folio Candy (where you can purchase premade portfolio sites, perfect for showcasing your creative work) and I came across an issue in Illustrator that I had never come across before. My Save for Web feature was not working properly. Save for Web is mainly used when saving images as JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, etc. Losing this capability definitely makes my work harder – so it was frustrating. My boyfriend, Scott – a Genius at the Apple store – told me that I should try and clear out my preferences in my Library. I was like “hmmmm?” Well – that fixed it – so if you ever come across this crazy and frustrating issues, follow these steps:

1- First, go ahead and quit Illustrator.

2- Go to your Home and find the Library folder. Jump into that folder.

3- Find your Preferences folder inside Library, and jump in there.

4- And in Preferences you are going to be looking for something like Adobe Save for Web 11.0 Prefs. Delete that sucker, and restart your computer. Open up Illustrator and tada, you should be good as gold.

But it left me wondering, why does this happen … In my case, there was a file I was using, that every time I accessed Save for Web within that file, it would come across an error, saving improperly and then screwing it up every time after no matter what file I tried it with. So I just don’t Save for Web in that file. Sheesh.

I’ve been developing sites on WordPress for awhile now, and I love it for a number of reasons. It’s fully customizable, has an incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use interface, and the thousands of plugins available pretty much cover all the bases for any functionality you could possibly need.

I’ve also been learning lots of nice little tricks for customizing themes. I plan to occasionally post little tutorials describing some of these tricks. Hopefully, someone will find some use for them, and save themselves a little time!

One trick that I just used and that took forever to find is the ability to display the current category name somewhere on the page. Specifically, I wanted to be able to output this in an <h1> tag on my category.php page. I tried a plugin that was supposed to provide additional template tags that aren’t included in a native WordPress installation. That didn’t work; it kept outputting the default category. I tried lots of thing, and finally found the solution I was after.

<?php single_cat_title(''); ?>

Pretty simple, right? This will simply display the category name on the page based on the category slug on the current page. If you want to add some text to display before the category name, you would use:

<?php single_cat_title('You are reading about '); ?>

Which, if the current category was WordPress, would look like this:

You are reading about WordPress

Alternately, you can assign the category name to a variable for use in your code. That would look something like this:

$current_category = single_cat_title("", false);

Pretty cool, huh?