Weblog Tools Collection

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WP Custom Fields Contest: Aaron Brazell, techie extraordinaire from Technosailor (also responsible for the technology strategy and implementations for b5media) is sponsoring a “Custom Fields” Contest for Wordpress. Basically, it is a contest to show off the best use of Custom Fields implementation in a Wordpress Blog. The results will be judged on visual aesthetics, code examples and SEO benefits derived from the custom use of Custom Fields in Wordpress. He will be offering cash prizes totalling $200 and is looking for sponsors and other cash and prizes for the contest. The last date to enter the contest is February 28th. It looks like he has some stellar help in judging the contest and that should make his life (and the contest) a lot easier on turn around time.

I remember how excited I was to find custom fields in the CVS when I was working on Pictorialis and used them to store EXIF information for the pictures in the database. Custom Fields are truly an underused but extremely useful and extensible part of Wordpress. At present I use Custom Fields on this blog to store various tidbits of data on posts and pages. With the recent MySql upgrade, I have been writing some gnarly code with views and triggers on this information that gives me a far greater insight into the various aspects of this blog.

Greenery is a green two column widget ready theme for WordPress.

Pinky is a pink color schemed, single column WordPress theme. Preview.

Vertigo Enhanced is a modern, 3-column Widget-ready theme by Brian Gardner. Preview.

Online Pages is a two column theme with a brown color scheme and fluid width by Rosemarie Pritchard.

Ds rosa is a two column pink and white theme. Preview.

Sharepoint Buzz is a wide, two column, reverse Hemingway theme for Wordpress in blues and whites. It has a very distinct tech forum feel to it.

Digg-ish is a two column hybrid theme for Wordpress with a lot of possibilities. The heading and date backgrounds have the Digg like rounded, faded effect and thus the name. Preview Digg-ish here.

Embedded Video with Link is made for easily embedding videos from YouTube, Google Video and many many others into a blog post.

Link Optimiser queries search engine with your post title, for top ranked urls and place them underneath your post content. This ensures that your post has relevant external links in it.

Custom Comment Text allows the customization of comment text (e.g. “5 Comments”) generated by Template Tag comments_popup_link(). The customization is set per Post basis; the Posts whose comment text are not customized will use default comment text output by that Template Tag.

WordPress creates a .htaccess file on your web site which can disable WebDAV publishing in some setups. WebDAV Publish Enabler updates the Permalink RewriteRules each time they are generated allowing WordPress to play happy with WebDAV.

Shortcut Macros auto-expand shortcuts you create to the longer text you have specified for the shortcut. Download and details.

HAL is a three column fluid layout, widget ready with a custom header and support for Sweet titles and IBox.

Bluish Cloud is a 2 column wordpress theme design, with the appearance of a blue sky by WP Theme Gallery.

Small Potato has released See You At The Beach and Total Liquidation

GlossyBlue is a theme with high-tech glossy Mac style with Web 2 Mini icons.

Intra Blog is a two column theme based on a template from Template World.

TheTapestry.org has released three themes viz. New Wave, Trust in the Lord and Harvest is Ready.

Filosofo Filosofo JavaScript Extract reveals blockquote sources by making a link from the cite attribute, and it turns image alt or title attributes into visible captions.

Filosofo Home-Page Control allows you to put pages on the same Permalink level (or higher) as the blog’s directory and set which page you want to be the “home” page.

Filosofo Comments Preview is a WordPress plugin that lets you preview comments on your blog before you submit them.

Free Multiplayer Games lets you add all the existing Multiplayer Games from Dimensione X on your own web site.

Guestbook Generator has been updated for WordPress 2.1. It generates a guestbook for Wordpress blogs.

Thumbnail Viewer implements CSS and Javascript from the Image Thumbnail Viewer from Dynamic Drive.

Bible Verse of the Day fetches the daily verse from Good New Publishers (The English Standard Version) or BibleGateway (NIV, KJV, etc.).

WordPress Todo List lets blog members share ideas and manage a todo list.

The Blogging Essay Competition ended on January 14th but I have been giving the latest few entries some time to catch up in the number of votes. People were still voting on the entries till about a week ago when interest dropped. If you have not read through the entries or voted, I am sure the authors would appreciate your encouragement. I will tally the results at the end of this week and post the winners on Sunday.

If I have not said so already, thank you for your participation.

[EDIT] Since there is some confusion, we are not extending the competition, but extending the judging time to get all the entries similar exposure to reader reviews.

Yet another threaded Comments lets users to reply to comments on your post. Comments can selected from a dropdown box.

Another Title optimizes your single post titles, removing any redundant stuff like ‘Blog Archive’.

Flickr Widget is a wrapper round the badge functionality of Flickr

Full Text Feed prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a more link to your website’s feed.

Latest Comments With Avatars Reloaded show the commenter’s MyBlogLog Avatar rather than their name in the latest comments list.

Sjeiti Librarything will cache the javascript from Librarything which contains the references to the last 200 books from your collection at Amazon.

IM Online is a neat little Wordpress Widget to show your current online status on your blog. The plugin is powered via onlinestatus.org and supports most IM services including AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Jabber (inc. Google Talk), Skype and ICQ.

Primitivo is a three column WordPress theme in a black and green color scheme. Preview.

Empowered is a two column blue schemed theme with inbuilt support for Google Adsense and Ultimate Tag Warrior. Preview

Internet Center is the Wordpress port of the theme at Solucija.

Sunset Birds is a two column theme with a light gray and blue scheme. Preview.

Ocean Life is a 2-column,widget-ready,fixed width theme that is based on a design by Free CSS Templates. Preview.

3 Column Cutline is a three column version of Cutline, modified by GPS Gazette. Preview.

This blog is now running Wordpress 2.1 Ella and I am impressed. This server was running a much older version of MySql and since Ella requires MySql 4.1 support, I could not upgrade right away. I was somewhat apprehensive of upgrading MySql on Plesk and wanted to put aside some time for the upgrade in case things went south. This morning, I upgraded MySql, this blog, all the plugins and performed some much needed tweaking and maintenance.

For those that are on Plesk servers and would like some instructions on how to upgrade MySql safely, this post should help. The upgrade was simple, the instructions made sense and were complete, and the upgrade itself went without a hitch. After the upgrade, I tweaked the query cache (sorely missed in MySql 3), upped the key buffer and the thread cache sizes and optimized all the tables. I am satisfied with the results. Once I have gathered enough performance information, I will post an update with a screenshot. This post on CircleSix, mentioned previously, is a great place to start.

None of the plugins I had installed required updates right away beside Ultimate Tag Warrior which I updated and patched. I was also really glad to find that this theme was completely compatible with Wordpress 2.1 It just goes to show the proficiency of Joao Craviero. That being said, if something is broken or non-functional, please let us know.

I alluded that I was impressed with Ella and I am (with not just her music). The number of queries to generate the front page has dropped 41% and the memory requirements for the query and its cache has dropped many fold due to the improvements in the query structure. I am loving the autosave feature and the code tab on the write post page. I also like the quicker back end, the fast dashboard, the built in spell check and the small improvements scattered around the admin interface. The TinyMCE WYSIWYG interface is much easier to use and the auto formatting is more intuitive. I did end up hacking the link button on the write page so the “Insert” button was on the left instead of the right since I kept clicking the “Cancel” intuitively. Also, since we have been receiving a lot of questions on how to add news to this blog, I have added a Submit News menu item to the top menu for future reference.

So when are you upgrading to Wordpress 2.1 Ella?

Tippy gives you a way to include highly configurable tooltips in your WordPress site.

Thumbnail, based on DynamicDrive libs lets you display image links so that they popup in the same window. Preview is available on the plugin page.

btc-meta lets you add html-meta description, html-meta-keywords and html-meta-robot tags to posts or pages.

My Video lets you embed videos from YouTube and Google Video in your post.

Akon is a two column, simplistic, minimalist, light colored theme for Wordpress with a very nice header image. Preview here.

ZedSimple is a simple one column layout. Preview

FlyAway is a 2-column wordpress 2.0 theme with Custom Header support with the header wallpaper by KoL. Preview

Small Potato has released three more themes viz. Quadruple Blue, Zip It and Fruitlicious

Fast Track has been updated to support WordPress 2.1

Braille is a two column theme for WordPress and WordPress MU, which also includes a Print stylesheet.

Cordobo Green Park has been updated to work with Wordpress 2.0 and 2.1. It is a three column, widget ready theme for Wordpress with the original template coming from chungo.net

Alex King has updated Share This and WP-Grins. These are available on his WordPress Plugins page.

Wikipedia-NoFollow will add a a rel="nofollow" to all your outgoing links to Wikipedia. This is in retaliation to Wikipedia adding a rel="nofollow" to outgoing links.

WordPress 2.1 requires smiley codes to be followed by a whitespace character. Usmivki allows displaying smilies that are followed by non whitespace character.

iMax Width sets a maximum image width so large inline images don’t mess up your wordpress theme. It also adds height and width tags to all posts so the page loads more smoothly.

Simple Clan War permits you to add your clanwar results on your blog using a simple tag.

Show/Hide Links has been updated to support v2.1. This plugin generates a list of all links, listed by category, and outputs it as a series of unordered lists with Javascript-based Show/Hide functionality. Also adds a class of “offsite” to each link to cause them to open in a new window.

WP Unformatted has been updated as well to support WordPress 2.1. This allows you to add custom fields to a post to disable auto-formatting and/or auto-smart-quote conversion on a per-post basis.

Fishy is a 2 column, widget-friendly wordpress theme.

Island after Sunset is a two column theme which features Aldin McLeod’s island photo from stock.xchng.

MistyLook has been updated to be the first ever wordpress theme, with the “Custom Image Header” option.

005, Digg 3 Columns and Orange Subway are three new WordPress themes released by WPDesigner.

Red Planet is a two column, widget ready theme based on a template from Free CSS Templates.

Pink-Kupy Theme is a two column theme with a pink color pallete based on Tony’s theme

Bare, as the name suggests is an extremely simple WordPress theme, with some cool javascript to view the posts.

Beast Blog is a powerful, dynamic WordPress blog theme that’s accessible, usable, solidly-built to high standards, and attractive.

Refresh is a two column WordPress port of the template by StyleShout.