Granted that it will not necessarily minimize bandwidth usage by loading the page any faster, but nonetheless provides an alternative to having the entire content load on each and every page (even where not needed).

From our last experiment, we have a layout constructed with featured post option and some borrowed styling. Now we will add the cool tabbed interface to the sidebar.

There are many Java options out there that can generate these tabbed interfaces, the more popular ones are DOMtab and Tabber. We will introduce one other simple tab JavaScript at the very end that has recently found its way into WP themes, but for most part, we will focus on DOMtab and Tabber.

Creating such category specific presentation on demand requires both PHP script manipulation within the WordPress Loop and some changes to the CSS stylesheet. In continuing with the series on dissecting magazine style themes, we will attempt three hacks that will allow you to do the following:

1. Create a featured post that is displayed at the very top of the page, followed by regular posts; all of which happens taking into consideration the pagination aspects of the site so as to not repeat the featured post on every paginated page.
2. Create a simple featured and non-featured posts distinction using minimal PHP hack, keeping it simple enough so as to not worry about pagination.
3. Create asides to highlight useful bits of information without hogging potentially critical presentation real-estate, or in other words, creating non-intrusive side posts without using a plugin.

1. Copy your code (HTML or PHP or whatever else) and paste it in the Postable post area (which at first will read “For your copy-and-pasting pleasure.”).
2. Click the “make me friendly” button
3. The code is converted to characters, for example < will be converted to & l t ;
4. Copy the characters and past it on your blog post or comment within code tags
5. That’s it.

In order to demonstrate how it works, I have copied and pasted a piece of code from one of our latest themes below using Postable conversion:

<?php if (have_posts())  >
<?php $postCount=0; ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post();?>
<?php $postCount++;?>
<div class="entry entry-<?php echo $postCount ;?>">
<h2 class="entry-title"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<p class="meta">
Posted <?php the_time('m.d.Y'); ?> at <?php the_time('g:i a') ?> in <?php the_category(', ') ?><?php if (function_exists('the_tags')) { ?><?php the_tags(', ', ', ', ''); ?><?php } ?> received <strong><?php comments_popup_link('Have your say »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?></strong>.
</p>

The code is then displayed in a format that can be copied and pasted and never executed. Works fine to me!

Update: Two other tools of significant use are SimpleCode by Dan Cederholm which I have adopted as part of the comment form on this site and elsewhere and the user submitted Asciible converters!