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.
GaMerZ’s WordPress Plugins Updated: If you are a fan of Lester’s plugins and have updated your blog to WordPress 2.3, you might want to check them out again. If you have never seen his list of plugins, it might be time to take a gander. I use a few of his plugins and have had nothing but good things to say about them. He has updated all his plugins to make them WordPress 2.3 compatible though some of them are not backwards compatible anymore. The 2 new plugins that he added to this mass release are WP-DownloadManager and WP-PluginsUsed.
Classy wp_list_pages adds classes to the LI tags generated by WordPress f wp_list_pages() function.
Cleaner Dashboard removes WordPress News and Other WordPress News from your dashboard and makes the dashboard sidebar more horizontal, with four columns instead of the default one.
Tags4Page allows you to insert tags on pages.
Who’s Linking Me? shows backlinks to your blog from Technorati.
WordPress Upgrade Preflight Check attempts to check your other plugins and themes for problems that may cause errors when upgrading to WordPress 2.3.
WordShout creates a live shoutbox, using AJAX as a backend.
Autumn is a 2-column theme with a very seasonal look.
Enlighten is a 2-column theme with customizable header image that comes in AJAX and non-AJAX flavors.
GenkiTheme is a 2- or 3-column, widget-ready theme.
Pinkbird is the 3-column Bluebird theme modified for Pink for October.
SEO Streamliner is an SEO-ready theme.
Tumble Hybrid is another tumblelog theme built on Sandbox.
Five Reasons Why The Mobile Web Sucks and the counter arguments from Russell (warning, littered with expletives) made me think about blogs, mobile web and the proliferation of blogs on mobile phones and mobile browsers. Since I am closely involved with many of the technologies that are being bolstered or criticized on those posts, I have my own opinions about some of them.
- Wireless carrier networks are SLOW: I am not so sure. Sprint has decent speeds and I can surf just fine on my phone or by using it as a modem. It is not as good as my 17 Mbps cable modem, but when I was stuck in a hospital and needed to call my parents in India using Skype via Sprint through my 755p, it worked like a charm. My VPN back to work and most surfing done over the phone was painless and got me through our crisis without loss of communications. The experience left me wishing (among other things) more sites and blogs used Alex’s Mobile Edition plugin including Weblog Tools Collection.
- Public WiFi access is a SCAM: Scam is too strong a word and quite misleading. Localized public WiFi has been successfully deployed over and over again. Airport WiFi, WiFi in smaller stores and shops, public arenas and other public locations work and work quite well. Citywide WiFi however runs into trouble. Some of my friends and co-workers own WiFi enabled phones such as the iPhone and the Sprint Mogul and they browse the web with aplomb on their phones.
- Sites aren’t formated for small screens: Yes and no. I say yes because more sites and blogs need to be mobile web enabled. I say no because Opera Mini and Blazer do a terrific job of making the large screen formatted sites so much easier to use and navigate. You really have to use these browsers in their present incarnations to know how far they have come. I regularly browse my favorites and answer emails from my phone during lunch.
- Mobile device screens are too small: Yes. But I would rather carry a phone and use it for all my web needs than carry a laptop (in addition to the phone) if I don’t have to.
- Advertising gets in the way: This point is completely lost on me.
The real contention is how badly you want to browse the web over your phone and not how the mobile experience is not as good as that on your desktop or laptop. My father used to hate browsing the web on my phone but that was because he was averse to new technology and he had a hard time using it. However, since he has gotten interested in blogging, he wants to check his visitor stats and his email on my phone when we are traveling and that desire has helped him try to understand mobile browsing a little better. I suspect that a lot of the hoopla and complaining about the mobile web is done by people who have pre-conceived notions about the mobile technology and are not giving it a fair shot. Wireless, WiFi and mobile browsing technology has come a long way and much of it is due to dedicated, fanatical and enterprising professionals and technologists such as Russell.
With that in mind, I did some research on mobile tools, plugins and themes for Wordpress. What have you done to your WordPress blog to make it accessible from mobile browsers? If having a mobile version was as simple as installing a plugin in WordPress, do you think that it would be worth having a mobile version of your site?
- The first one on the list is Alex’s Mobile Edition. Everyone uses it, it works well and everyone loves it. (Alex, I know I have whined about this before, but we really need some anchors for your plugins)
- iWPhone plugin and theme combination from Content.Robot which displays an iPhone version of your Wordpress blog to visitors from the iPhone and the iPhone Touch
- Andy Moore’s Wordpress Mobile Plugin which allows you to view posts, pages, archives and comments on a mobile device. Standards are supported, posts and comments can be submitted by phone and your WordPress is easily moneitized by AdMob.
- iPhone Mobile Admin provides an iPhone interface to your Wordpress backend. Dan promises that though the iPhone is the only phone supported in this version, he has plans to support other phones as well.
- WordPress PDA is a plugin that allows you to view your WordPress blog on a PDA browser
- WP-WAP is a plugin from the amazing Lester Chan that will let you browse your WordPress blog from a WAP enabled phone
If you use any other plugins that enhance the mobile experience on WordPress please let me know. Do you have a mobile edition of your WordPress blog?
BlogBackupOnline: I found out about this service while reading through Leo Laporte’s latest post in which he talks about how he used BlogBackupOnline to import all old VOX posts from his old blog and restore them onto Wordpress. From their help PDF, Techrigy’s BlogBackupOnline allows users to create a full blog backup, schedule automatic daily backups, and restore or export a blog. The service is free for the first 50 MB (while in Beta) and backups can be scheduled and restores can be incremental. This service can be used to import blogs, restore single posts, export blogs from one platform into another among other features. Supported platforms include Blogger, WordPress, Friendster, LiveJournal, TypePad, Serendipity, Windows Live Spaces, Movable Type, Terapad, Vox and Multiply. A worthy tool indeed. Priced right, it could be a silent soldier that everyone depends upon.
Now that WordPress 2.3 Dexter has been released, it is time for everyone to upgrade and check out what the hoopla is all about. Just as in the WordPress 2.3 pre-release coverage, there are a lot of really good resources that discuss preparing your blog for it to be ready for the 2.3 upgrade. Since there is a bigger (relative term, bigger than upgrades in recent memory) chance that many of your plugins and themes might stop working with this new version, checking compatibility and making sure that everything will work as expected is even more important. Here are some resources that might help you make that leap.
- The WordPress Development Blog has a good article on Preparing for 2.3
- Blog Security has an article on 5-step Failsafe upgrade to Wordpress
- This is slower but it is much safer (and less service affecting) to create a local copy of your remote WordPress install and use the local copy to check for the problems
- First hand advice from rawiri (I love his theme) on upgrading a live blog to 2.3
I especially love this paragraph, I am going to put it in bold so people notice it and remember it while upgrading a live blog. For people who have installed 2.3 to find that you’re receiving a 500 Internal Server Error or a similar issue that is preventing your site from working, simply install 2.2.3 over the top and you should be up and running again. At least enough to further investigate why 2.3 isn’t working for you. [EDIT] I am not sure this is such a hot idea since if the upgrade went through all the way, 2.2.3 would be missing some tables and things would still be broken.- Now if you do go back to 2.2.3 and try to re-upgrade at a later time, you might run into trouble with your database, so a backup is very, very important
- [EDIT] WordPress Support thread with 2.3 upgrade database errors and proposed fixes Thanks Spencer
I will keep this post open for editing throughout the day. If you ran into a particular problem upgrading your blog to Wordpress 2.3 and think that others could benefit from your experience, please leave a comment or contact me.
Facebooked is a 3-column, widget-ready theme based on the social networking site.
Loopy Red is a 3-column, red theme.
Love is a 2-column, widget-ready theme that pays homage to WordPress.
Pigments is a 2-column, blue-and-green theme.
Pink for October is a 2-column theme with pink, black and white colors created for breast cancer awareness month in October.
Ranting Daily is a 2-column, widget-ready theme.
Saur is a 3-column, widget-ready theme that features a random image, big search bar, and comment counter.
T1 is a nice-looking Tumblelog theme with styling classes for several different types of entry.
Configurable Tag Cloud is a WordPress 2.3 widget that gives you a very nice set of configurable options for your sidebar tag cloud.
Global Post Password enables you to set a global password for all your password-protected posts, and switch password protection on or off from the writing screen with just one click.
Headspace 2 manages meta-data and handles a wide range of SEO tasks, including tagging your posts, creating custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, changing the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.
Page Category Plus is a WordPress 2.3 plugin that allows for pages to be assigned categories in the same manner as posts.
WordPress 2.3 Related Posts will generate a list of related posts via WordPress 2.3 tags.
Tag Suggest Thing is another tagging plugin for WordPress 2.3 that adds a box to the sidebar that will send a request to the Yahoo! term extraction API to get a collection of (possibly) related terms.
wp-cron Dashboard Display lets you see what cron jobs are scheduled for your WordPress installation.
AirPress: This post has been sitting in draft for some time, waiting for me to actually produce a video post but time has run away from me. AirPress is an Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) based desktop blogging client that is still in beta but has a few cool features including video blogging right from the desktop with a simple webcam. At first glance I had thought that AirPress lets you post “webcam streaming” to your blog, which would have been tres cool (albeit very hard to manage) but I must have misunderstood the somewhat sparse instructions on the AirPress site. At this time, you can add flash, video, music, pictures etc through AirPress. I would have given them five thumbs up if they would have concentrated on media blogging instead of trying to be another desktop blogging client, but it definitely has potential but it also is buggy. Thanks David
One of the very first tasks I always perform on every new WordPress installation I do is to go into my user profile and turn off the visual WYSIWYG editor. I prefer to handle all my formatting markup myself because it gives me more control over the final product. The other day, Mark suggested that most ‘professional’ bloggers also prefer not to use the visual editor.
So, the question I throw out to you, the reader, is this - which do you prefer to use, the visual editor or the basic editor, and why?
Extra credit: Do you use any formatting plugins for faster, easier, on-the-fly markup? If you use one of these plugins, why do you use that specific markup plugin? For instance, I use TextileWrapper on my own blog because I like how easy it is to add just a single character or two to a line or phrase to get the formatting I want. I originally used Text Control - and I still prefer - but it broke on a WordPress upgrade awhile back and is no longer being supported by the author, forcing me to find an alternative. TextileWrapper is an excellent plugin in its own right and continues to function well through each upgrade.
I had come upon this technique sometime ago but with the recent change in the way Technorati looks, I wanted to document the link since it still appears to work. You can use the following URI to generate a PNG with incoming links to your blog for a given period using Technorati. There does seem to be a maximum number of days Technorati keeps track of links and that number is less than 365, closer to 200. Just change the BlogURL value to the URI of your blog, and modify the size of the graph as you see fit for your blog or application.
http://www.technorati.com/chartimg?q=BlogURL&days=3600&width=460&height=200&type=url
I come up with the following graph for WeblogToolsCollection.com
The final release of WordPress 2.3 with its native tagging functions is right around the corner, and there are already a few plugins floating around that will enhance tagging in WordPress 2.3. Here are two I’ve run across today:
- Advanced Tag Entry lets you choose tags from a drop-down list to your posts, remove tags you’ve already added to your posts, create new tags, edit tags, and delete unused tags from the database.
- Click Tags adds a clickable list of existing tags above the native tag field on the Write screen. This is a great plugin if you have only a handful of tags you use.
AskApache RewriteRules Viewer is a simple plugin that makes it easy for developers and code hackers to view the current WordPress RewriteRules at any time.
Futures Contract Plugin will display this month’s futures contract price on the sidebar of your blog. Prices are updated from the Chicago Board of Trade.
PicasaWebShow will display all or part of your Picasa album on your blog. EDITED for content, NSFW
Sub-page Links creates an automatic index of all sub-page (child, parent and sibling) links through a template tag in the page template.
Upcoming Events can receive iCalendar feeds from third party sites and display aggregated upcoming events from multiple feeds.
Many different sites and blogs have documented what they thought were their most desired features in WordPress 2.3. Since I am as excited about this release as I was about WordPress 2.0 (I consider 2.0 to be a significant milestone), I am collating them here with each discussed feature bulleted under each of the links.
I had been meaning to start a companion blog for some time and Beta 3 was my chance to get it up and running. If there are any other sites or blogs that discuss Wordpress 2.3 in detail, please leave a comment or contact me and I will add them to the list.
Blue Sky is a 3-column, widget-ready theme available in both AJAX and non-AJAX versions.
The Morning After is a 3-column, widget-ready theme with a magazine-style layout.
Sixtyfour is a single-column theme for WordPress with a Tumblr-like layout.
Broken Images is designed to fight broken images on your WordPress powered site by allowing you to hide, style, or replace them.
Click Tracking can monitor visitors’ clicks on your blog.
Cross References lets you insert cross-references between posts or pages.
Role Manager 2.0 lets you manage, create and delete roles and capabilities.
VR Visitas allows you to take a record of the visits to your page.
Admin Drop-Down Menus provides one-click selection of admin options via proper drop down menus.
Different Posts Per Page allows you to modify the number of posts shown in home, category, archive or search page.
Download Counter Lite is a simple tracking system to keep a watch on how many downloads your files get.
Download Counter Advanced is a more versatile version than the ‘Lite’ version which still tracks downloads and keep counts but can also download virtually any file type.
Gallina 4 allows you to publish the starred email from your Gmail to your blog.
Link Uploaded Files shows and links the uploaded files of a post.
openWallet is a login system for websites, which replaces user names and passwords with digital keys and a password.
Page Category Organizer allows for categories to be assigned to WP pages.
Post/Page Update Notification lets users subscribe to a WordPress ‘Page’ so that when you next update it they will be automatically notified by email that is has changed.
Popup Image Gallery allows for a user-definable grid of thumbnails and a large, main picture to be placed on a standard WordPress page and posts.
Mark Ghosh 
Powered by 
Designed by 
