Weblog Tools Collection

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I re-wrote a hack to post directly from FeedDemon to WordPress and or b2/cafelog. For this you would have to be logged into your blog admin portion (a previous login with the cookie set will do just fine).
Here is the hack.

Check out the other Blog Tools, Hacks and Cool scripts on this blog to make yours better and more fun!

This website from [EDIT] Floopie is a very good resource for people starting off with PHP, MySql and blogging. If and when you get stuck with your install of your blog and dont know where to turn, these tutorials, in very simple and lucid english (written by an accomplished programmer and web designer, I must add) will get you going again. Check them out when you get a chance, or if they seem overwhelming right now, remember to come back and look them up when you DO need them. More tutorials are added everyday. Some of the work there include

MySQL Tutorial - This tutorial is for setting up a MySQL database.
Email Setup Tutorial - This tutorial is to help you set up your email client with a domain email address you have created in your control panel.
Blog Tutorials - Skinning a blog - This tutorial will help you set up a blog with different themes or skins.
Protect your site tutorials - HOTLINK Protection Tutorial - This tutorial is to prevent people from using your graphics on your domain on their domain. They will be stealing the graphic and raising your bandwidth by doing so.

I found a really interesting article at A List Apart dot com about dynamic stylsheet changes using a simple javascript and storing the information as a cookie. I was really itching to try it out with all the talk in the WordPress Forums about retro stylesheets for WordPress. Check out the switcher at http://dinki.mine.nu/weblog/ On the top right hand side of the menu you will see the themes I have installed for my version of WordPress, albeit with a few modifications to suit my second menu column. Feel free to play around and see which one you like best. If you would like to implement this on your site ( no matter which CMS you use, this will work for you ) simply visit the List Apart link above, download the javascript and follow the instructions. If you are confused, feel free to email me and I will try to help.
PS: once you choose a templte/style, a cookie is set on your computer which remembers your choice for the next time The themes break in Mozilla (for now) and do not degrade well, but thats not the point of this exercise

Old b2 theme design from myself and from allusion. Check out this WordPress Support thread for all the download links.

I found a couple of places that host scripts for an Amazon Wishlist Display. There is Kalsey.com Amazon Wishlist display which puts out a text list of all Amazon products in your wishlist. Here is a quick rundown of the idea from Kalsey

MTAmazon is often used to insert a person’s wishlist into their page. If you don’t want to go to the trouble of installing MTAmazon to display your wishlist, or if you don’t use MT, here’s simple way to put your wishlist on any web page.

Go to Kalsey.com for instruction on how to impliment it.

The second script I found is from EDazzle AmazonBox This wishlist outputs pictures of the items on your list and is extremely configurable with lots of CSS tags to help integrate it into your site. See how it works at Mindful Musings

Drupal is a Content Management System which integerates a bunch of interesting features. I consider it to be a very useful tool for websites which cater to a lot of changing content and cater to a large and active userbase. The new version has some major improvements including changes to the original database. The list of features include

Collaborative Book
Friendly URL’s
Modules
Online help
Open source
Personalization
Role based permission
Searching
Recently Modified List
User management
User authentication
Polls
Templating
Threaded comments
Version control
Blogger API support
Content syndication
News aggregator
Permalinks
Platforms supported: Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X
Database independence
Multi-language
Analysis, Tracking and Statistics
Logging and Reporting
Web based administration
Discussion forums
Caching

If this long list of features makes any sense to you, go to Drupal.org and download 4.3.0 Release Candidate of Drupal. Even though this is a release candidate, it is quite stable.
*Edit* I believe this comment from Gunnar Lanegnmark deserves to be a part of this post:

What you miss from the very long list is the taxonomy system. Most people do not realize how much you can do with the right taxonomy system. Categories are not served well by one simple hierarchical list. That is the most compelling feature in Drupal, and the one which originally made me dump PostNuke, MT etc.
Now - a year later - Drupal is rocking once again. The feature list is as long as the 100 modules. Drupal has the best approach for a professional Information Architect and for a programmer. I am not a programmer, and some things are hard to do in Drupal if you are not a programmer, but I know they will come, if I ask for them, and have the patience to wait.
In other systems things are too complicated for developers to change, because the fundamental philosophy of their coding standards is flawed - so you will never get what you want, simply because it is too hard to code.

I knew that Blogrolling.com gets its “recently updated blogs” information from both blo.gs and weblogs.com, but I was recently having some problems with my site showing up on the updated list, but not updated on Blogrolls. I took a closer look at the problem (the links matched exactly) and found nothing of suspicion. So I decided to fix the problem by pinging Blogrolling.com directly through b2/Wordpress. Here is what I did:

1) In your b2-include folder, find b2function.php and add this code somewhere within the php tags, preferably after the weblogs.com ping. (Yes, the code is very similar to the other pingers with just a few changes)


// pings Blogrolling.com
function pingBlogRolling($blog_ID = 1) {
// original function by Dries Buytaert for Drupal
global $use_weblogsping, $blogname,$siteurl,$blogfilename;
if ((!(($blogname=="my weblog") && ($siteurl=="http://example.com") && ($blogfilename=="b2.php"))) && (!preg_match("/localhost\//",$siteurl)) && ($use_weblogsping)) {
$client = new xmlrpc_client("/pinger/", "rpc.blogrolling.com", 80);
$message = new xmlrpcmsg("weblogUpdates.ping", array(new xmlrpcval($blogname), new xmlrpcval($siteurl."/".$blogfilename)));
$result = $client->send($message);
if (!$result || $result->faultCode()) {
return(false);
}
return(true);
} else {
return(false);
}
}


2) Now find b2edit.php in the main b2 folder and find the line
pingBlogs($blog_ID);
Add the following line right after that:
pingBlogRolling($blog_ID);

And…voila! you are done and pinging Blogrolling.com
The above hack is explained for b2. b2edit.php resides in the wp-admin directory in Wordpress; everything else remains the same. Hope this helps someone!

John from DexterDog.com has new 3 Column Narrow all CSS template for WordPress. Find it here.

I had so much trouble figuring out Regular Expressions for PHP that I decided to put all of the stuff I foud in one place. I have attributed to all the authors, but if you still have a problem with the information being on this page, email me and I will take it down. Here is the link to my Regular Expressions Tutorial

Visitor Trac is my incarnation of the menu depth expression from UseIt, Jakob Neilson’s website This script dynamically keeps track of the last 5-6 pages that a visitor clicks through on your site. It keeps this information for 7 days. The information is stored in individual text files (I realize this makes it slower, but it also makes installation very easy) and the text files are time-managed. It degerates the link table once there is more thn 5 click throughs and the files are checked for date and time difference every time they are accessed. There are a few benefits of this script that should be mentioned here. I have come upon many bulletin boards where I keep track of certain topics and I have to click through a bunch of links before I can get to what I was viewing the last time I was there. This script would improve the server load and click through rates in such a case. I personally run a large school website which hosts a lot of static information that is embedded in a relatively cimplicated link structure. This script will make menu navigation for repeat visitors a snap. It should increase the usability of the site tremendously. If you would like to see this script in action, please visit my weblog, Mindful Musings and look towards the top of the page for the link structure.
This script is very simple to install. Download the following Source Zip File and unzip the single php script inside. Just copy this script to the part of the page you would like the links bar to appear (within Div tags if needed) and change the default URL at line 16 and you are ready to go. One item of concern is the growing number of text files that are generated. An update will have the required tools to manage the growth of these text files. This is not implimented yet. Please let me know what you think of this script.

I ran into some problems importing from BlogRolling OPML code into Wordpress 0.72. I took a very quick look and realized that the regular expressions dont match the OPML. I made some changes to Wordpress and I hope this helps someone.
Steps:
1) Look for links.import.php in the wp-admin folder.
2) Around line 108, replace the preg_match_all(’/ preg_match_all('//’,$opml,$items);

PS: Links in your BlogRoll which have never notified Blogrolling.com of updates will not transfer over with this script. (the way it stands now) My reg-ex knowledge is years old and I havent spent enough time fixing it. But basically, the “lastmod” item does not show up for those links that have never been updated and so those lines do not match the regular expression and gets left out. If I consider those to be optional through my expression, the code breaks because it keeps track of these items in an array which is dynamically generated.

There are many ways to track visitors to your blog. You could use a service like Nedstat which offers free page count analysis. If you look towards the bottom of the menu, you will notice a small and unobtrusive icon of a graph. If you click on that you will go to the site analysis page for Weblog Tools Collection. There are various other free counter services out there. Some of these are very intrusive and insist that they place a huge banner on your site along with the number, others prevent unauthorized access to the information. An interesting statistics site for bloggers is BlogPatrol.com They are tuned for bloggers and their statistics are very attuned to user tracking and click through evaluations.
There are some other interesting ways to track visitors. On my main blog, in which I use b2 as the CMS, I use a tool called b2stats This can be implimented through this b2hack from The Protagonists’ Blog I use it all the time and it gives me a fair idea of what is going on with the insides of my blog.
If you are not using b2 to blog, you could use the javascript equivalent of a referrer tracker. It is available for free from Downes This is probably the most popular link tracker available today. It gives you the last 24 hours’ worth of pages from which your blog was linked. Pretty neat and very very very easy to use. If any of you use other tracking tools, (I know MT has some interesting built in ones) please post a comment or register and add some posts. Hope these help some people.

The WordPress team has released a full version of WordPress (which is what this blog is, and it has been updated to 0.72 as well) 0.72. It has some very nice new features which were lacking in b2 and even in the old WordPress. There are more options to configure and much more control over the output of the blog. There is a pseudo Blogroll built into the system and even allows update information to be downloaded from the Blogrolling website. I did have some problem with the setup of the links, but realized soon enough that it was a mistake on my part. Just remember to enable the php include for “links.weblogs.com.php” at the beginning of the index.php and everything else takes care of itself. Here is the link from SourceForge to download the zip file with the updated WordPress.

Some of the bugfixes and updates listed on the WordPress DevBlog include:

Tons of bug fixes
Password protected posts
Cursor-aware quicktags (like using a fancy text-editor)
Improved API support: full or near full support for the Blogger, MetaWeblog, and MT APIs
New template design from Dave Shea
New configuration method, no more editing files!
New Blogger import
Improved upgrade and install scripts.
Improved post and edit interface
RSS feeds for comments
RSS feeds support Conditional GET
Improved XHTML auto-formatting
Improved Link Manager
Geographical data support
Improved image upload features
Improved calendar
Improved smilies function
No more invalid characters
Increased customizability
And more!

Let me know what you think of the new template included with the package. There are going to be a few more available.

Originally started by a couple of very clever programmers, BlogSnob has become a very important tool in the Bloggers’ collection. I signed up for it a couple of days ago and you see the little text ad that shows up at the bottom right hand corner of my menu. It is a simple way to get text ads posted on your own blog and get your ads posted on other people’s sites. I have been using Blogsnob on my main Blog for about three months now and I have served over 2500 ads and have had about 20 people see my page through those ads. A pretty good ratio. Consider a free Google Ad-Sense for Bloggers and you have Blogsnob. Another interesting feature of Blogsnob is the idea of SnobJumping. The idea is to click on the blogsnob link of one blogger and follow this link around to other bloggers’ sites on the internet. This is a very cool way of reading a lot of other blogs and wasting many many hours in front of your computer.

I came upon a couple of very interesting sites today. One worth mentioning is the Web Page Analyzer .

This incredibly useful (and free) online tool accurately and intelligently calculates page size, composition, and download time. Add it to your web design / development bookmarks. Created and produced by Andrew (“Speed Up Your Site”) King.

- Jeffrey Zeldman

I have modified the default Wordpress template into a 3 column CSS and index.php with a few extra hacks in place. I would like to offer it to the Wordpress Community. My blog, Mindful Musings showcases this theme (style or template) and you can download the zip file here.
Peace

I found an interesting site today called NITLE Weblog Census I came upon this because the site was crawling my blogs and I did not recognize the name. They have some nice information about the proliferation of blogs on the internet and go through and categorize quite a bit of information. The most pertinent information from that blog was the Blogging Tools MarketShare page. It shows that Movable Type is by far the most used stnadalone blogging tool out there, followed by b2 and by php-Nuke Some other interesting peices of information on that site as well. A good look-see.

Here is the list of tools for which we need reviewers:

…and the list grows.

This blog is written using Wordpress which is a branch of B2 and is about to become the primary distribution of b2/Cafelog. I have been using b2 for some time now and have really liked the flexibility of the code and the simplicity of the coding practices. Some of the features of b2/Wordpress that I really like a lot are:

Cafelog runs relatively efficiently on my server without being too much of a resource hog. I use my blog extensively and hope to keep publishing with b2 and Wordpress for a long time.

AlumniLink grew out of the need for an alunmi database for the EECS Department at the University of Toledo. I needed a script which would create a dynamic Alumni Website without having to have a MySql database. This script is written by using the php-text-db API from C-Worker There is a nice interface to make the tables and the necessary setup of the database. This script is from a German site I cannot pronounce the name of. However all of the licenses are in place and should be adhered to. Now that the formalities are out of the way, here are the list of features (shortened)

See this script in action at
EECS UToledo Alumni Site
Here is the link to the AlumniLink zip file.

Please Rate my Script at Hoscripts.com!
Look at my other projects and Weblog Tools Collection