Weblog Tools Collection

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Alex King has declared the winners of CSS Styles contest. There were a total of 38 new styles that can be downloaded as a result of this contest and a round of applause goes out to the winners and the contest organizers. This brings the total number os usable WordPress CSS styles to 44! Here is the link to download them all or browse through them.

I wrote a small newsreader php script which could be used in a bunch of applications. It is really simple, reads RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 (with ATOM support coming up). Here is the link to the script. It is really simple to implement. Call the script as a link with the variable ‘url’ containing the RSS url and you are done. For example: http://weblogtoolscollection.com/newsreader.php?url=http://dinki.mine.nu/weblog/wp-rss2.php
brings up my main blog’s news feed. I use it on my main blog to provide news links from my blogroll.

This hack can be used by any PHP enabled blog/site to display their Technorati Link Cosmos. You can see it at work on the right and the instructions can be downloaded here.

#EDIT# Now updated with a better automatic cache mechanism!!

While answering a question in the wordpress forums, I remembered an (obscure to me) function in php which generates a regular expressions ( regex ) to be used in a MySql query. This is very useful when performing a dynamic ORDER_BY or a SELECT and you do not want to use the LIKE statement. The syntax is as follows:
$new_string = mysql_regcase($string);
Where the $string was the original query string and the $new_string is the regex for that query string. I am not sure whether WordPress uses this or not. However, it sure could prove useful in unlikely circumstances.

The CSS styles competition at Alex King’s website is really heating up. There are some really wonderful examples of these themes on display and there is more to come! If you are looking for a nice theme to start with or for some design ideas, this is definitely worth a check out. If I was not that busy this semester, I would have worked on something (though my work does not validate most of the time). Thank the authors and please provide attribution if you use their work.

My crawler has unearthed dissappointing results. Here are the most recent stats:

total blogs crawled: 49807
total wordpress blogs: 193
total Blogger blogs: 13587
total Typepad blogs: 1358
total .Text blogs: 269
total BlogTool 1.4 blogs: 226

I was really hoping to find more blogs that are run by Wordpress. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of WordPress blogs do not have the original meta tags from the index and are thus not responding the way they should. In order to circumvent this problem, I would really like to solicit some help from my readers. If you are a blogger and your blog is using the WordPress application (any version) please click on this link, type in the url of your blog and click on submit. If your blog urls is already in the database, it will make sure that it is recognized as a WordPress blog and will show you the list of WordPress blogs crawled so far. This list can be used for publicity and for various other WordPress related issues and statistics. Thank you for your participation. Please feel free to post the above links in your own blogs.

I wrote a little crawler which counts the number of WordPress blogs (among others such as blogger, .Text, BlogTool etc) that ping weblogs.com and Blogrolling.com recently updated list. Here is the link to the most updated stats. The crawler has just been running for a day and if your site is not in the list, please be patient and it will get listed in time. The crawler code is being tested and modified and the database might get emptied from time to time for code changes. However, it looks good for now and is a very good place to advertise the variety of sites that WordPress can handle. I am planning to add an XFN crawler when I get the chance. I will make the database available publicly (after you promise to NOT use it for nefarious purposes) once it reaches a 100,000 entries. Please let me know what you think.
PS: Please do not remove or modify the generator tag that exists on the top of the WordPress index.php Thats what is used to identify WordPress blogs.
PPS: I am looking for a good way to identify MT blogs. I realize that there are no meta tags which do so at this time. If you know of anything, please leave a comment or email me. Thanks!