Weblog Tools Collection

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BlindMuse from the WordPress fora has written a word count add-on for WP. This plug-in:

that not only shows how many words are in the entire post, not just what is current on display. The script will also count how many total images are the post and display that count as well

More information here at BlindMuse’s How-to-WordCount section

The Location Manger is a utility add-on for WordPress 1.2, that allows you to save latitude and longitude pairs with a name, url, and a comment. You can access your saved locations from the advanced editing page (on basic editing WP uses the default lat/lon as usual). This hack adds a “Location” panel to the admin interface and a dropdown menu to edit-form-advanced.php. As a technology demonstration, it’s object-oriented, with the HTML output done from inside the class.

I’ve uploaded a screenshots of the Location panel and and editing interface for your viewing pleasure. You can download the .zip file from my projects page, and leave comments & bug reports on this blog entry.

For everyone having problems with the WordPress to LiveJournal hack, I have found a solution thanks to testing from Kitten and Cytoplas (from #Wordpress). Please download the following file:

http://weblogtoolscollection.com/b2-img/class-xmlrpc.phps

rename it to class-xmlrpc.php and replace the original found in the wp-includes folder of your blog. This file has a bug from WordPress.

You can download the new instructions from here:
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/b2-img/ljautoupdate12.txt

By popular request, this lot as a zip file:
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/b2-img/lj2wp.zip

From Scott Merrill(Skippy)’s website:

This modification allows blog authors to assign a minimum user level required to view each post. The default value is zero (retroactively applied to all existing posts), which means anyone can see the post. By choosing the post level on the admin post or edit screen, the author can limit who sees what.

This looks to be a very useful tool for community sites powered by WordPress and it is from Skippy, so you know it is a quality production.
Check it out over here.

The WP Blacklist hack has been updated to a plugin to work with WP 1.2 and has also had a few new features added such as the ability to ban IPs and the option to directly import entries directly from Jay Allen’s centralized blacklist. Actually, the latter feature was already there but this release fixes some regex incompatibilities between Jay Allen’s list and PHP. You can download the plugin here.

I have released an extensive hack for WordPress 1.2+ to give you post per post Copyrighting ability.
You can see more about it over on my blog, and you can also see it running there as well.
This feature is very handy for those of us who like to provide content under different licenses.

Redemption in a blog has a really nice (and concise) writeup on setting up Ping-O-Matic to be pinged from your Movable Type installation.

If you dont know about Ping-O-Matic already, it is a way to ping a bunch of services (once you update your blog) by pinging their RPC server. More information here.

I redid and reworked the Nicer Archives for WordPress. The archives list can be sorted by date and category and filtered by author and year. All of the functions, as far as I tested, are working.

The example archives are here:
http://mindfulmusings.net/weblog/narchives.php

Download php file from here:
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/b2-img/narchives.phps

The install is really simple. Just rename the downloaded file to narchives.php and copy it to the root of your blog and create a link from your index.php.

I have started upgrading my blogs to WordPress 1.2 and there might be some disruption in services in the process. Thank you for bearing with me. In the meantime, please check out the new theme/style for my Mindful Musings blog. I opted for a very simplistic, almost MT like look to prove to some of the “designers” that all WordPress blogs do not have to look the same. If there is any interest in that template, I will release the code for distribution.

Please let me know what you think.

WordPress 1.2 “Mingus” is out. I am really excited about this release and will be upgrading most of my hacks and my plugins when I get a chance. This blog, as well as a couple of others will get upgraded as time goes on. In the meantime, here is a very small changelog. The rest of the *big* changelog can be found at the WordPress Wiki. That would also be a very good resource for upgrades etc.

* Sub-categories: Categories can be arranged hierarchically and infinitely deep. Multiple categories combined with sub-categories gives WordPress the most comprehensive taxonomy system of any blogging software available.
* OPML Export and Import: You can import and export OPML to systems like Bloglines or desktop aggregators like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.
* Automatic Thumbnail Creation System: WordPress has a refined upload feature that automatically creates thumbnails any size you want.
* Encyrpted passwords and cookies: All passwords in the database and password cookies are encrypted, ensuring maximal security.
* New plugin architecture: The new plugin architecture simplifies modifying or extending WordPress features. Plugins can now hook into nearly every action WordPress does.
* Localization of WordPress and Unicode support: The efforts put into internationalizing WordPress have borne fruit, and now you can adapt WordPRess to work in your native language. Several translations are already available.
* Advanced comment moderation: You can now fine-tune your moderation filters in a manner very similar to blacklists for other weblog tools. There is also mass-editing of comments, which makes it a snap to delete hundreds of comments with the click of a button, if necessary.
* Post preview: Near-instant previews while writing or editing articles help you proofread and make improvements before finally presenting your work of art to the world.
* RSS and LiveJournal Importers: The new RSS import script is the closest thing to an universal importer. It allows you to import entries from Radio weblogs even other blogging tools that we may not support specifically. The LiveJournal importer finally lets you have a full blooded self-hosted weblog without losing all your old LiveJournal posts.
* Unlimited update services: Now you can define multiple weblog change monitoring services to be pinged when you post.
* Directory flexbility: Now you can have all the WordPress files in one directory and the weblog in a higher level directory.

Congratulations, Matt! Great work as always and thank you!

For everyone having problems with this hack, I have found a solution thanks to testing from Kitten and Cytoplas (from #Wordpress). Please download the following file:

http://weblogtoolscollection.com/b2-img/class-xmlrpc.phps

rename it to class-xmlrpc.php and replace the original found in the wp-includes folder of your blog. This file has a bug from WordPress.

You can download the new instructions from here:
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/b2-img/ljautoupdate12.txt

This is from the blurb on the page - “Your ISP offers you 30MB of disk space, but doesn’t tell you how much space is used! This tool enables you to get a usage piechart from your FTP service, showing which directories are taking the most space, and to drill down into those directories to see which are the largest files. Simply double-click on a pie segment to drill down!”

I’ve been using it today to get a better picture of what’s going on with one of my domains, and it’s damned useful! It is not able to look into folders that have very restricted permissions - remember this is looking in from the outside so to speak - and I had to use the remote address as given by my ftp program for it to find the right path in, but it does do what it says. Why can’t all ISP’s offer this as a standard ?

It’s Freeware too !

FTP Pie

I wrote a very small addition to WordPress 1.2 which lets you have comment previews. The install is very simple and it helps in a couple of ways:

- Lets your commenters know what their final comment is going to look like
- Might prevent comment spammers

Example here: http://proc.homeip.net/testwp

Download here: http://weblogtoolscollection.com/b2-img/wp-comment-preview.zip

Please post bugs/suggestions.

Joe from the WordPress Fora writes:

WordPress File Manager Hack
This hack adds Morten Bojsen-Hansen’s excellent GPL File Manager “PhpFM” to Wordpress 1.2. You can use it to upload/delete files, view images, and make new folders from within Wordpress. Give it a try and let me know what you think
You can see a screenshot at http://mudbomb.com (broken for now)
Download Wordpress File Manager

Have you ever wanted an easy way to check the overall state of your blog?
Well I did, but could never come up with a good solution.  Flash forward a couple of days/weeks/months and I run across a proposal by UI Guru mpt on the WordPress Wiki.  I thought that layout was genius, and I had to have it… now.
So after 4 or 5 hours of hacking and testing, enter wp-glance.
wp-glance gives you an easily readable UI to get up to the date information concerning your WordPress powered weblog. From the local time of the webserver your blog resides on, to a smattering of page view statistics (powered by my lovely wp-yansp aka Yet Another Stats Plugin of course!), and a plethora of fun info.  You can find a screenshot of the page over here
Once implemented, wp-glance will replace your index.php file within your /wp-admin/ directory.