Weblog Tools Collection

Thanks for visiting! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. This blog posts regular Wordpress news, updates of themes, plugins, ideas, hacks, quick fixes and everything about blogging, especially about Wordpress. Go ahead, subscribe to our feed! You can also receive updates from this blog via email.

WordPress Commodore 64 Theme Remember the Command Line Interface (CLI) theme for Wordpress. Well now there is a theme to convert your Wordpress blog into a Commodore 64. Since the the blog has been Boing Boinged, server might be slow/dead but there is an alternative link. I love how Cory puts it … “It’s endlessly fascinating and deliciously pointless”, I cannot help but concur!

How to Design Your Own Minimalist Wordpress Theme: Here’s a simple trick* for creating your very own minimalist Wordpress themes, as discussed endlessly by Diggers. First, download and install your chosen theme from any of the various Wordpress theme sites. Next, accidentally on purpose delete the themes image folder. View your blog with all of the theme’s original images missing. Interesting thought.

Wordpress Theme Generator: There used to be some very good ones out there but they seem to have dropped out of favor. This new one offers such conveniences as instant previews, lots of layout, color and gradient settings, custom header graphics and download of individual files as well as a neatly packaged zip. This could be a good starting point for Wordpress bloggers who want to play around with colors and layout and do not want to muddy their hands with code. I like the instant gratification and appreciate Yvo’s hard work.

Plugin Page
Organize Series

Description
The Organize Series plugin helps with the organization and presentation of articles/posts you write as part of a series. It helps make it easier for readers of your blog to discover all the series you’ve written and also to easily find post that are part of the same series.

Features

• Integrates with the category system of WordPress
• Robust administration options menu for the plugin that allows you to control much of the output of the plugin to suit your own tastes without having to open the plugin file and edit things manually.
• Automatic tag insert for displaying a "container" on the full post page that will show what series it belongs to and other articles in the series.
• A custom .css file (orgSeries.css) accompanying the plugin to make it easier to make changes in the display of various elements (for those familiar with .css).
• Two simple tags for easy insertion in your theme if you want to have more control over the way your series are presented.
• Tested on and works in WordPress 2.0.6-2.1
• Makes managing and viewing the series you write on your blog a whole lot easier.

Demo
- http://www.unfoldingneurons.com/category/series/
- http://www.unashamedsermons.com/category/series/

Future Plans

• Streamline the creation/editing of series by implementing a version of category icons right in the plugin code and making everything work more intuitively (possibly by including series creation right in on the write/edit post screen)
• Make positioning of various auto-tags selectable in the plugin options page
• Add the ability to edit the .css style via the options page (thus making it possible to tweak everything about the plugin via the options page without having to go into any of the .php files.)
• Create an option to "hide" series categories from the core template tags for listing categories and along with this create a template tag to display all the series that have been written as a list for display anywhere on the blog.
• Create a template tag for displaying a "feature" series.
• Better documentation
• Write a series of articles describing all the various ways this plugin can be used
• Write a series of articles showcasing various people who are using this plugin.

Review
Organize Series is a plugin I haven’t given a complete test, but intend to do so as part of the series I run on my tech blog. It is also strange that I haven’t implemented it yet!

Anyway, the plugin does what it says it will do and that is help you run a series on your WordPress blog.

Installing and using this plugin however isn’t for total beginners to WordPress, but with a little patience this can be done, because the author has detailed the instructions very clearly on a the plugin page. Kudos for that!

The installation requires you to create a category for your series, feed the category ID to the plugin via the Options page and copy a category template file to your theme and maybe customize the look of it to fit your blog.

For more advanced users, the plugin provides a good number of template tags that you can use to customize the posts of the series. This ensures a perfect integration with your blog, limited by your imagination (and what the plugin provides )

Overall, the plugin is impressive. I would like some feedback from users who are using the plugin already on their blogs.

How has it been performing for you? How easy was it to setup the plugin and the series on your blog. Do put in the URLs for the series so that we can take a look.

Tom has put together a Wordpress Theme Viewer with 39 themes. Many of these themes have been announced here before and before anyone asks, Tom has no plans to update the viewer with new themes. You can download the themes in his viewer from this list.

Another reason for this post is to draw attention to some of Tom’s work and the reason I want to garner that attention is because I believe that his work can be really helpful to novice bloggers. He is a technical writer and podcaster and has a lot of good things to say on and about Wordpress. He has written on themes (on which the theme viewer was based), plugins and various other Wordpress and blogging tips and tools.

I love bloggers, they are very good people. But even the most kind hearted and best intentioned bloggers sometimes either misinterpret or misread information and the piece ends up very different from where it started its life. This somewhat macabre movement of information from one person to other with slight mutilations is very interesting to me. All of us have studied or read about it in one form or fashion.

Now here is the idea for the meme: Read through the following news paragraph and recreate a post on your blog from memory if you will. Encourage your readers to do the same with a link back to your post.

Now, imagine throwing video into that mix. By the time I got the headphones on and the video downloaded, I’d be on to designing some new feature (or, more likely, answering more email). I’d only get to hear three words at a time, which just doesn’t seem very satisfying. I can sometimes have podcasts on the in the background, and those are easy to download and listen to at the gym. (I have a working shuffle! I can once again listen to things while I work out! And I can still do email at the same time.) But videos? I realize this is my own personal shortcoming, my short attention span that accelerates my multitasking tendencies, but why can’t all videos come with transcripts, like closed captioning for those of us with attention deficits? (I realize also this wouldn’t work so well with videos of cute jumping cats.)

I would love to read the third (or fourth and so on) reiteration of this paragraph.

Notwithstanding the results of this experiment, these human failings are just the reason us bloggers (and any media outlet for that matter) should pay very close attention to the originator of a thought or discussion and read the language and details quite closely before jumping to conclusions. We should be even more careful in reiterating these thoughts in our own words and make sure we link to the originator so their viewpoint is preserved and readers have the option of checking with them.

When the news or topic is hot, it is easy to fall into the trap of jumping on the bandwagon (first to market is a slippery slope, remember webvan?) but I think we owe it to ourselves and our readers to look closely.

Plugin Page:
http://blog.no-panic.at/projects/flickrss

Description:
Flickrss is a Wordpress plugin that displays the latest comments of your Flickr account in your Sidebar.

Features
- Shows latest Flickr comments in Sidebar
- Links back to Flickr or optionally to your own Blog if FAlbum is installed.

Future Plans
Some more Options to alter the way the comments get displayed in the sidebar by choosing which HTML tags get put before and after the entries.

Review

Installation of this plugin is normal as well. You needa do the extra step of adding code to your sidebar.php or wherever you want the images to show up.

There isn’t much to state about the plugin, as it is built for one purpose and does the job well, i.e. it fetches your comments and displays them.

The plugin uses Magpie RSS which is a well established script and used by many, so the plugin comes with all the features that Magpie offers, including object caching.

The inbuilt support for FAlbum ensures that visitors don’t leave your blog when viewing the comments.

FAlbum didn’t work for me, so I’m still looking for a good Flickr plugin that will display my sets on my blog. Someday…

What I would love to see with Flickrss is the ability to fetch the latest images as well, so that those not using FAlbum can benefit.

It would also be nice to have integrated support with other Flickr plugins like Flickr Photo Album.

Are you using Flickrss? If not, do you find it useful… of course you need to have a Flickr account.

Plugin Name
AntiLeech

Plugin URL
http://redalt.com/Resources/Plugins/AntiLeech

Description
AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site and sends it only to them.

Review

AntiLeech is a perfect plugin to hit back at scrapers and it is the primary purpose that the plugin is built for. The plugin can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string or by IP address. You also have the option of adding your own set of IP addresses to which you want to “feed” the fake content.

Whenever the banned bot with the banned user-agent or IP address tries to scrape your content, Antileech detects this and gives them some fake content.

Regular visitors will have normal browser agents and they will see the correct content. i.e. they won’t even realize you have some kind of protection setup.

Readers of your feed will see the small image that Akismet adds. You can see that in my blog feed.

Besides this, Antileech also allows you to redirect your feeds to Feedburner. This features ensures that you don’t have to edit your .htaccess file or use an alternate plugin.

Installing the plugin is normal. You can set up some options from within WP-Admin itself, as well as setup which feeds you want to redirect to Feedburner.

I haven’t faced any problem with scrapers off late, but if that does happen and Antileech works its wonders, you shall be the first to know.

Have you faced problems with content scrapers?

Plugin Name
Feeder

Plugin Page
http://xubz.com/weblog/2007/03/feeder-wordpress-plugin

Description
Feeder is a RSS Feed aggregator which parses the feed and displays them in <li> tag.

Features
- User can control how many links and characters to show.
- Can cache the given feed on your server

My Review
Feeder is a simple to use plugin. The installation process is just like any other plugins. However, you do not get a management interface which would have been ideal for beginners.

You will need to edit your template files (e.g. sidebar.php) and add the necessary code. This is where you will pass an RSS2 feed url to the function. You can also pass several other parameters like number of items to display, XHTML tags to use etc.

The system to pass the url is good as you will need to pass different feed urls, however, it would have been better to have a management interface in WP-Admin to set defaults for the other parameters.

One good feature supported by Feeder is the ability to cache the feeds on your server. This can greatly speed up the site loading as well as reduce load from the server the feed is hosted on.

Talking about this plugin I got one complaint, and that is not related to the plugin, but the plugin page infact.

The plugin page gives you zero information about the plugin except for a basic description and that it caches.

A good plugin page should have description, features, installation / removal instructions, customization (if needed) etc.

Anyway, this a good plugin to display headlines of feeds. However, do take permission from the owners of the feeds before you start displaying them on your blog.

Lucency is a three column, fixed width, customizable theme with transparent mainframe, roll-over subpage menu and Flickr integration.

Love is Here - TE is a two column Wordpress Theme, ideal for Love contented blogs. (Contains Sponsored Links)

Luxury is a two column, fixed width theme ideal of Real Estate blogs. (Contains Sponsored Links)

Thrifty Scot is a two column, fixed width theme for Financial blogs. (Contains Sponsored Links)

Spunky Orange is a two column, orange and black, fixed width theme. (Contains Sponsored Links)

RockinBlack is a black and white, clean and simple, three-column theme designed with little elements for the minimalist in mind, includes an easy-to-replace graphical header. (Contains Sponsored Links)

My Youtube Favorite Videos displays your latest favorite videos from Youtube.

No Life grabs a list of links from your approved comments and turns them into a random blog show.

SimpleTwitter allows Wordpress blog owners to add Twitter messages to their templates.

WP-ExternalFeed displays links from del.icio.us, Technorati and Reddit that is relevant to the current category of your blog.

PhoneGnome Updater automatically updates your PhoneGnome public profile when you create, publish, or edit a post on your WordPress blog.

BP Bookmarks adds feed syndication and social bookmark links to your blog.

w3images gallery adds an image gallery to your WP.

WP-Highslide is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily use Highslide by automatically inserting the necessary javascript into your posts or pages.

Chess By Blog is a plugin for WordPress 2.0 that adds graphical chess functionality to your WordPress blog.

Plugin Name
IImage Browser

Plugin Page
http://fredfred.net/skriker/index.php/iimage-browser

Features
- Create and browse directories
- Upload images and create thumbnails
- Delete files
- Generates code to insert the image into the post

Review
I’ve been using this plugin for a long long time, right from the 1.5 days. Even with the new image uploader in WordPress 2.0 and 2.1, I have continued using the plugin.

The installation process is a bit cumbersome in my opinion, because it requires you to dump one php file in the plugins folder and another php file in the wp-admin directory before you get the plugin to work.

The plugin adds a button to the quicktags toolbar (which is also the toolbar in Code view of the WYSIWYG in WordPress 2.1).
Clicking this button launches the image browser, where you can upload images, create directories, create thumbnails, generate the code or delete the images.

IImage Browser gives me the exact amount of control I need to organize the images. I like the images to be organized based on category, as opposed to the date-based structure that WP offers by default.

One extra feature that makes IImage Browser useful is the ability to specify custom code that you can use for full size images and ones with thumbnails.

I’ve used this feature to integrate the Open Picture Window plugin to display the full size image on clicking on a thumbnail.

Again this is a personal choice on how I want to display images on my site, but I would like to hear your opinion.
Are you using this plugin? What are your experiences.
If not this, what are you using to add images to your posts?

1 Bit Audio Player is a very simple and lightweight Adobe Flash MP3 player with automatic JavaScript insertion. It’s main purpose is to act as a quick in-page preview for audio files you link to from your website or blog.

Pagebar adds a nice page bar for selecting indivual pages instead of just the previous or next page.

wpSEO plugin rewrites your blog title, META description and META keywords so these are more user and search engine friendly. (Page in German)

Amazon Book Picture allows you to include a simple tag with a books asin or isbn in your posts which is replaced by an image of that book from Amazon.

Fancy Pullquotes is a simple plugin for wordpress that allows you to effortlessy obtain a nice pull-quote of a specified text. The pull-quote will be formatted with a fancy nice style, exactly like one of those you can read on a regular magazine.

Alt to Legend is a plugin for Wordpress 2.0 that allows you to display the ALT text of an image as its caption.

Updated Today displays a banner in the upper left corner of your blog when the date of the last post matches todays date, therefore telling the visitor that your blog has been updated today.

Vinto Tinto is a two column dark WordPress theme based on K2.

CalmBlue is a 2 column light blue/white wordpress theme.

Sly Wordpress theme designed with a three column fixed layout as an online magazine style. Two mini loops are retrieving their posts from different categories at the frontpage. One loop in the sidebar showing two posts, one loop in the main area showing one post.

[EDIT] Thanks for the catch, the date was wrong. Links remain same, but the date changed.

10 Rules for your Small Business Website: Having worked for a small business for some time and with Wordpress being such a widely used tool for building small business websites, I think most of these are well thought out and make a lot of sense. My ex-employers website violates almost every rule mentioned.

Spotback provides you with a small script to embed on your posts to provide centralized and socialized ranking for almost anything. Visitors will also receive personalized referrals and recommendations from your site or blog. No Wordpress plugin available but I am sure the plugin programmers out there can whip something up quite easily with the Wordpress hooks available.

Perils of Problogging ia points out the Perils of “Problogging” and when I was notified of the entry, I almost felt like I was being singled out. Food for thought.

JS-Kit is another centralized ratings widget with commenting built in. Not sure how the commenting would help Wordpress bloggers but the ratings widgets are quite nice. However, the commenting/ratings widget might be used for static HTML pages quite conveniently and since JS-Kit uses Akismet to mitigate Spam, comments are bound to be spam free.

Amatomu and Afrigator are Two African blog aggregators with a variety of feed and channel features built in. I was pleasantly surprised to see the volume and quality of blogging activity going on in that subcontinent.