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6 Wordpress Plugins You Might Need 7-22-08

admin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:17:50 +0000

As an accumulation of research over the past couple of weeks, I have come across 6 Wordpress Plugins each one totally different from the next that you might find helpful in a project of yours or maybe even on your own Wordpress blog.

1. Full Registration Form

With this plugin you add the fields ‘First Name’, ‘Last Name’, ‘Nickname’, ‘Description’, ‘Website’ to your registration form. By default, the wp-register.php file that allows your readers to register as a user to your blog only asks for Username and Email. You can of course use this to get a little more information about your users.

2. Side Content

This plugin provides similar functionality to the Drupal Side Content module. It enables you to define a set of widgets which are effectively placeholders. Each one is empty until you assign content to it when editing a page. This enables you to effectively extend the content of the page into the sidebar. Suppose, for example, you have a set of pages about people in your company. You could use a side content widget to add a biography for each of them, or a photo, or to list their favorite pizza toppings. You can use the plugin without any template changes at all, but it does provide a simple API so you can test for the presence of side content widgets and adjust your templates accordingly.

3. WP-LinkChanger

WP-LinkChanger is a small script for affiliate link masking. That means all of your affiliate links in a post will automatically be changed to an internal file. After installation all links of your new posts will look like http://your.domain.tld/exit.php instead of http://evil.affiliatelink.com/ref/id/123

4. Email Commenters

Sometimes you want an easy way to e-mail all the people who commented on a certain post. Up till now that took a bit of work, now it’s as easy as installing this plugin, and clicking the link you’ll get underneath each post labeled “Mail the commenters on this post”!

5. WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages

This plugin creates a new blog on your WordPress MU system for all the posts on your site, much like http://wordpress.com/tags/ For performance reasons the number of posts is limited to a user configurable amount, and the blog itself can be made indexable by search engines or not.

6. WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. However, because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment, the plugin will only serve static html files to:

Users who are not logged in.
Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

This plugin should help your server cope with a front page appearance on digg.com or other social networking site.

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5 Basics to Speed Up Your Torrents

admin — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:41:09 +0000

Do you want to speed up your Torrent downloads? Then here are 5 tips that could help you. These are just basic tips, and I will be listing some more advanced tips later on on this blog. But start with and make sure you are doing the basics first, before you move on to the advanced.

1. Seed

Downloading speeds will be sub-optimal for everyone unless everyone plays their part and seeds. Private tracker sites are a great example of how the overall speed of the swarm increases when everyone is seeding and downloading in equal measure. So, play your part in seeding and tell others to as well.

2. Be Connectable

Make sure you’re not “firewalled” by opening up your incoming ports or by enabling UPnP in your router, otherwise you’ll be leaving bandwidth on the table.

3. Manage your upload speed

It is all about striking a balance. You don’t want the upload speed to be too high, nor do you want it to be too low. Ideally you want to set your upload speed to be 80% of the maximum possible line speed.Try this handy settings calculator, works for all clients

4. Select the right Torrents

Your download will be faster if you choose to download a torrent where there is a good balance of seeds and peers. For instance, Vuze ranks its search results according to the number of seeds and peers to make this easier.

5. Be Realistic

Check the swarm average and if you’re already above average, then you just need to be patient. If you’re below average, go back and check some of these other things I’ve mentioned.

Much thanks to torrentfreak.com for providing this list of tips. You’d be surprised how much you can speed up your downloads just by following these 5 basic tips. My downloads increased dramatically. Big downloads basically got cut down to about a day rather than several days.

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How to Use Camstudio

admin — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:45:20 +0000

Camstudio is the open source screen recording software for your computer. There are many other software companies that offer to sell a screen recording/capturing software. But if you know how to use Camstudio correctly and understand some of the basics of configuring it, you’ll never need any paid software in this field. Camstudio will do the job completely for you. The following YouTube video is by far the best instructional video on how to setup and use Camstudio. It will tell you everything you need to know.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kiug3H3c4gk

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Welcome Back Wordpress Themes Directory!

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 03:08:04 +0000

In case you didn’t know, let me be the one to tell you. The Official Wordpress Themes Directory is back live again and updated with all new free themes for your wordpress “crazies” like me. No more searching those random affiliate ad heavy websites for new themes. The official theme directory for Wordpress should be pretty well updated with everything from here on.

Tip: RSS Subscribe to the Newest Themes

A simple little tip that will help you stay up to date on all the latest new themes that come in through the directory. When you go to the themes directory, click on the “Newest Themes” link located on the right hand side of the page. You will notice now you have an option to subscribe to this page via RSS. That way, you can see all the new themes right as they are coming in and stay ahead of everyone else on the goods!

Contribute Through Voting

Help the community know which themes are the best by using the 5 star voting system and voting each theme you come across. This will help everyone as a Wordpress community sift through the bad and the good. This will only take you not even a second as you are browsing the different themes, so just do it and help the rest of us out!

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The Best Free Ecommerce Template I Could Find

admin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:50:05 +0000

Many of you i’m sure are accustomed to dealing with many of the open source ecommerce/shopping cart applications and might understand what i’m about to explain to you. It’s so hard to find any good free templates/themes for any of these ecommerce applications. Most of them, especially OScommerce and Zen Cart are absolutely hideous looking right out of the box.

Free Ecommerce Theme from CSS Creme

CSS creme has put together a free CSS ecommerce template that looks pretty nice. It’s simple and coded together well so that you can customize it and use your imagination on top of what is already put together. If you are using an open source application like me, you will need to apply this template to your theme and make your customizations. But I know with me that this will save me some serious time on a few projects of mine.

Instead of recreating the wheel everytime I make a shopping cart website, I can build off an already CSS/XHTML built template and make my customizations after that. The free template comes with 3 pages:

Product Listing Template
Product Detail Template
Form Template (contact us)

That way you have enough to build off of with your Zen Cart theme or OScommerce theme or even Ubercart theme. This also could be a benefit if you are just putting together a quick shopping cart for a friend or relative for free, and you don’t have much time to put something elaborate together. Just throw this CSS template together with your theme and you are good to go.

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Display FriendFeed Comments on your Wordpress Blog

admin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:32:59 +0000

Here’s a new and interesting plugin. It’s called the FriendFeed Comments Wordpress Plugin and it displays your FriendFeed comments from your posts on your Wordpress blog. It’s kind of a difficult thing to describe easily, so i’ll let the creator explain it to you.

“This plugin will allow you to display on your own site the comments that people make on FriendFeed about your post. I keep trying to think of a more succinct way of writing that but I can’t. It always sounds more confusing than it is.” There we go that’s much better.

How it’s Used in your Template

The plugin ads a template tag called , which you can drop onto your template somewhere inside “the loop” so it can access the post’s details to match it up with the FriendFeed data.

How I plan to Use it

I personally have not been to motivated by the FriendFeed tool, despite all the attention that it has been getting. But now if I can integrate the comments between FriendFeed and my blog, then I don’t see any reason why I won’t promote my blog posts on FriendFeed and start building a network of friends. In my blogging efforts, I hope to be able to use this method to build more comments and conversation on my blog(s).

Why FriendFeed?

The interesting aspect of FriendFeed is its quick evolution from a lifestreaming service to lifestreaming plus discussion forum plus latest news plus search engine. It seems to be a way to add all of these different information sources into one. The way I see it, if you can tap into all of my informational resources, than you can know everything I know about the Internet. And that becomes mutual. I can learn everything you know about the Internet. Knowledge sharing increases at incremental rates if people use FriendFeed to it’s capacity.

You can download this plugin from the creator’s website. Don’t forget to inform him of any bugs that you may come across. And don’t forget to thank him for his contributions.

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A Slideshow Like BarackObama.com

admin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:10:31 +0000

Have you been to Barack Obama’s website and seen the cool slideshow that he has on his home page? There is actually a splash page that you have to go through first, before you get to the home page. But then you will see it. It looks like this:

Have a Slideshow on your site just like Barack’s!

Well guess what. Thanks to our friend Guillermo Rauch over at devthought.com, you can now have the same slideshow for free! Guillermo has put together a script in Mootools using a bunch of CSS to give you the same type of look and feel and cool slideshow effects that Barack has on his website. The script is fantastic looking and very lightweight so it doesn’t slow loading time up too much. See the Demo Here.

The Creation

Here is a little bit more of an explanation of the slideshow. “I took my previous class (SlideList), and made a few changes here and there. It works with MooTools 1.2, and supports all kinds of shape transformations (top and left coordinates, and height and width properties), which means it can now be used with vertical, horizontal, or even irregular lists. I extended it and came up with a new class that receives the images and loading spinner as parameters (note: it’s arguable whether this is the best decision OOP-wise, but due to the simplicity of this script, this was the right call)

The Code

To ensure all images are loaded before the user makes any interaction, the MooTools Assets component is used. The CSS plays a major role (as in every other animation-focused script). I suggest you analyze it carefully before implementing it in your applications or websites. You’ll probably need to adjust the ids, or use classes instead to keep your stylesheets clean.

The markup is meaningful and simple. Two lists are used (one for the images and the other for the links). The loading element is included in the HTML, but it’s probably better to inject it from the script directly. You can download the files for this slideshow at Guillermo’s Blog at devthought.com

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Open Source Microblogging Tool

admin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:29:59 +0000

Laconica is an open source Microblogging tool that you can use to build a microblogging website of your own. Websites such as identi.ca use Laconica as it’s platform. The dependencies for running Laconica are Pear, XMPPHP, php-openid, and OAuth.php. You can learn more about the dependencies and how to install and configure Laconica by going here.

What is Microblogging?

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. The most popular of this type of service is Twitter, which i’m sure you have heard of lately. People are still trying to figure out exactly how it is they can benefit from such a service, but I think right now the possibilities still stand as “endless”.

What would I do with a Microblogging Open Source Tool?

Now this one is up to you. But the ideas that microblogging brings to the table are literally endless. And chances are you will probably be introduced to a project of your own, or of someone elses that will require such technology. One thing that I have thought of is to have all developers on an open source project microblogging together to collaborate on that open source project. This would increase productivity and communication at a faster and more effective rate to help get projects done quicker.

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Open Source Mootools Slideshow 2

admin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:14:12 +0000

Slideshow 2 is an open source Mootools slideshow class for streaming and animating the presentation of images. It’s definitely one of the better looking slideshow’s out there. A very impressive look is given to your images in a much more professional manner. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like (without mootools of course)

You can choose from a variety of different effects of course which gives you some good flexibility on how you want it to end up looking. The cool thing is that you can input your slideshow via HTML with one simple line of code. The example they give is this:

new Slideshow('show', ['1.jpg', '2.jpg', '3.jpg'], { controller: true, hu: ‘images/’ });

Here are the features as listed in the blog article that featured this tool from webresourcesdepot.com:

Dynamic resizing - Slideshow can accommodate any size presentation.
Thumbnails - intelligent, auto-scrolling, tracking, etc.
Full-featured controller - completely style-able with CSS.
Animated captions - plain text or formatted with HTML.
Fully accessible - Slideshow can be controlled with access keys.
Automagic slideshows - create slideshows from existing HTML images.
Varied hyperlinking options - allows for mashups with Lightbox, Slimbox, etc.
CSS slide transitions - designed in stylesheets, not javascript,
allow for an infinite combination of effects (plus support for all
Robert Penner transitions).
Unobtrusive and degradable - Slideshow even functions with Javascript turned off!

So if you are looking for a cool javascript slideshow to add some spice to your website then try this one out. There is some good documentation to help you along the way in customizing it to fit your needs. Enjoy!

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Wordpress 2.6 New Features & Improvements

admin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:58:51 +0000

As many of you may know Wordpress has just released it’s version 2.6 which you and I will need to upgrade to (as soon as we can all find some time of course!). The new version of course comes with some new features as well as many improvements. Here’s the video of the brief tour for Wordpress 2.6:

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

This is basically a new feature that tracks content changes made to any posts or pages, similar to the way MediaWiki content management system works. This comes in extremely handy for those who run collaborative blogs with multiple writers.

Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

They developed a Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog

Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging

In this release Wordpress stuck to using what’s called a “Local Server” to cache or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds

Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing development.

And the rest of Wordpress 2.6 Features & Improvements

Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
Bulk management of plugins.
A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
Plugin update notification bubble.
Customizable default avatars.
You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

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