James' Blog is now using lovely post thumbnails on it's articles. It's something that I've been wanting to add into the blog for quite some time but with failed attempts of getting a simple enough system, well thanks to my friend Fire G, he sent me the script thats he's using on his own blog over at Fire Studios Although there are WordPress plugins that handle post thumbnails, most seem to be feature happy and kind of distract you from the raw functions you need

So after being told about this simple script I set about intergrating into the blog, and it worked great, even before the customization and once more I can add, delete, change a thumbnail in the post edit panel. For anyone thats informed within the world of WordPress the script is using one custom field to define the thumbnail for the specific code, seems the PHP code is placed with the template file you need not add anything else, it's all done for you! If you thinking wow, I really want to get this script and do this too, then you are in luck as I have decided to make a tutorial on how to do it. At the moment im testing to see if It can be done with a site thats not using wordpress. So look out for the tutorial!

You may of seen the post thumbnails appearing and disappearing a few days ago, and probably looking horrible or even messed up, this was me (Who else) testing the code out and seeing what I could do. They we're also appearing on pages which is a no no but I've fixed this issue, and since about 4 PM today (And it's now 6 PM) I've been going back through old posts and adding post thumbnails to them. I could of easily left the older posts but doing this would make other posts look odd and different, so updating all of them was the best option and seems I had 40 posts to update it took some time! I've tried to be creative with the various post thumbnails and hopefully you'll agree. You'll notice some duplicate post thumbnails e.g. Blog Update articles will have the same image, others depending on what the article is about will have unqiue thumbnails.

So whats so good about these new post thumbnails. Well for one if the title of the article isn't descriptive for you I guess the image could give a little more idea of what the arcticle is going to be about, basically like a summary but with a image, also the new post thumbs give the blog a slight uniqueness to itself, yes people use post thumbnails but what are the chances of another website using the same techique, style and images as me?

Enjoy the new post thumbnails!