Feb 16 2010

Wordpress gets a new default theme

Wordpress is working on a new theme for 2010, called “Twenty Ten”

http://2010dev.wordpress.com/

The new theme supports a lot of built in options for customizing the banner, background, and typefaces. Kubrik was a great starting place for a lot of <= 2.8 themes, but with 2.9 and 3.0 coming out, it’s time to embrace the upgrade. Go Wordpress team!


Jan 4 2010

Finalize your Wordpress Site

A todo list for finalizing your Wordpress site

  1. Set up a Robtos.txt
  2. Burn your feed (feedburner) or disable RSS
  3. Create a google XML sitemap
  4. Add stats to footer
  5. Add webmaster tools meta tag
  6. Install E-mail shroud plugin
  7. Install TinyMCE Custom Config Plugin (add stylesheets and remove h1 tag)
  8. Install TinyMCE advanced and set up allow line-break option
  9. Install The Future is Now Plugin
  10. Install WP Super Cache
  11. Make sure that your Privacy Settings allow search engines
  12. Install a backup plugin like wp-db-backup

To be continued . . .


Jan 4 2010

Visitor Distribution for Willshouse.com

It looks like the willshouse.com is a bit more popular, especially internationally, than I had anticipated. Here’s a map of the last 500 visitors as of today.


Dec 23 2009

WPtouch iPhone Theme

“With a single click, WPtouch transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device.”

Basically, this plugin will take your Wordpress 2.7+ blog and check the HTTP headers to find out if the user’s browser is a mobile phone or iPhone, etc. Then, instead of serving up your normal theme, s/he is given a cool iPhone style interface to navigate your blog.

It’s really quite cool and it takes care of some issues regarding small screen size browsing. It didn’t disable some of my plugins, however, which use javascript, (for example, the snow falling script) which seem to give the iPhone’s processor  a little bit of trouble (lots of math for that script).

Over, I like it.


Dec 21 2009

More Fields for Wordpress 2.8+

MoreFields for Wordpress History

Are you a long time user of More Fields who is upset that it broke with Wordpress 2.8 and hasn’t been fixed yet? Me too.

I needed this for several projects so I hacked my own working version together with help from these folks.

MoreFields for Wordpress 2.8+ download

Download my version (2009-12-20) here

Support, Requests, Etc

Feel free to comment on this page and send along your feedback. However, I’m not getting paid to keep this plugin up to date, I just need it for some projects, so don’t get mad at me if I’m behind the times with it. If you can help make improvements, send them to me and I’ll implement them.

More Fields for Wordpress Description

If you are not familiar with More Fields, here is the description of More Fields for Wordpress from the original plugin page.

More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post. For example, if you write about books, you can add a box where you can enter title and author, etc. The boxes can be placed either to the right or to the left on the Write/Edit page.

In addition, the new version of More Fields enables you to define post types, which are custom Write/Edit pages that contains a pre-defined set of boxes. For example, you write about books and you write about your holidays, then you can define a post type ‘Book’ and a post type ‘Holiday’ each containing the input boxes relevant to each type of text. You can also set pre-defined categories, tags and templates for each post type.

With More Fields you can:

Add any number of boxes with any number of field to the Write/Edit page.
Add text, textarea, wysiwyg, checkboxes, radiobuttons and select lists as your input fields.
Create custom Write/Edit pages with a pre-defined set of input boxes, custom set categories, tags and templates.
Create archives based on Custom Fields values with custom slugs
Create boxes and post types programatically so that they can be created from within other plugins
List posts based on post type under the Manage menu
Set visiblitiy of a post type based on user level
Set global visiblity of boxes, in addition to the ‘Screen Options’ available for each post type for each user.


Aug 16 2009

Good wordpress themeing (and optimizing) videos

http://wordpress.tv/2009/07/12/jeremy-clarke-theming-montreal09/

http://wordpress.tv/2009/07/11/jeremy-clarke-optimization-montreal09/

http://wordpress.tv/2009/07/11/andy-peatling-cooking-with-buddypress/


Jun 18 2009

10 Wordpress Plugins Guaranteed to Save You Time

clipped from sixrevisions.com

In these days of the ever-increasing competitive world of the web, time is as valuable as money. To be noticed, and to stay at the top of the game, content writers must post a lot of content on a regular basis. To keep up with time constraints, Wordpress plugin authors provide an array of useful plugins that will drastically reduce the time required to write, format, and post your content.

In this article, you’ll find 10 excellent WordPress plugins intended to reduce and simplify tasks associated with blogging so that you can spend more time creating content, and less time with site administration.


1. Post Ideas – take charge and manage your post ideas


2. Tidy Up – Automatically find errors and clean up your HTML


3. Pages+ – Deal with many pages with ease


4. Mass Post Manager – Save time managing old posts


5. Attachment List - Easily spice up attachment icons without coding


6. Survey Gizmo – Dealing with polls can’t be simpler than this

Survey Gizmo

Jun 14 2009

Adding static page to WordPress

clipped from geekycoder.wordpress.com

Difference between Page and Post

Before explaining the difference, it might be useful to understand what blog means to many people. In common term, a blog is merely a site to store a chronological timeline of entry/article submitted (I like to use article rather than Post, because Post is more verb than noun eg Post entry/article means submit entry/article) and that what make a blog site different from a website. And it is exactly this common definition of blog that the Page feature is underused or even ignored.

Support for Internal and External Page

Thankfully, WordPress includes support for both external page and internal page. So what is the difference between them ?

The external page is actually a Page in a external website that is referenced explicitly using its URL (eg. http://geekycoder.byethost13.com/geezer.html) and is not stored as part of WordPress repository.


Jun 10 2009

WordPress Trackback Tutorial

clipped from www.optiniche.com

When used properly, trackbacks and pingbacks are an excellent way to build links and traffic to your blog, as well as building relationships with other bloggers.


What Is Trackback?

In layman’s terms, trackback is a way to notify a website when you publish an entry that references it.

When you send it a trackback, a link with a short excerpt of your entry will appear on the referenced website.
Example of a Trackback


How To Locate The Trackback Link

When you want to trackback, you will need to use a special link provided on the blog you want to reference.

Most trackback links appear just after the blog post content and before the comments.

Sometimes the link will appear as a plain text link:
Example of Plain Text Trackback Link

Other times it will be a hyperlink:
Example of Hyperlinked Trackback Link

If the trackback URL is hyperlinked, you’ll need to right click on it and select “Copy link location…” (or your browser’s equivalent), otherwise, you can highlight and copy the link.

If you plan to reference more than one blog entry, each trackback URL will need to be copied individually.


Jun 10 2009

Pingbacks and Trackbacks for Wordpress