Name your plugin after yourself. If you have a name for it already, add your name to the beginning or the end. This will make your name stand out, make your plugin more recognizable and it will build your reputation for you. This is a suggestion for all plugin developers participating in the WordPress Plugin Competition and is applicable, in my mind, to almost every other non-mainstream mod/fix/plugin. I understand that every project and/or program cannot be named after the developer. I doubt that a project like Mozilla could ever (or should ever) be named after a single developer. However, consider the following example. Do you know who Steve Minutillo is? A lot of you might know of him already because of FOF, but I would wager that an even larger number of you have never heard of him. A project like “Feed on Feeds” would work perfectly fine as […]

To make sure that the Readme file format does not adversely affect any developers and to formalize the format for use in the future to catalog and categorize WordPress plugins, I have started a Readme.txt Format for WordPress Plugins wiki page. Understand that this is the format to be used for every readme.txt that is accompanied with an entry into the WordPress Plugin Competition. Also, if you make any changes to that format in the wiki, please make sure there is a VERY GOOD reason to do so and please make sure you leave a note with your name and the reason for the edit at the bottom of the page. Any random and uncommented changes will be reversed.

In trying to drum up some more interest in the WordPress Plugin and Mod Competition I would like to start a meme for WordPress Plugins. What plugins do you use on your blog and how do you rate them? Sadly for me, most of the plugins that I use are written by me and so I have the astute pleasure of critiquing my own work. Blacklist Peering Plugin – Share my blacklist and moderation keywords. 7 out of 10. Really useful, needs some interface and functions enhancements Click Counter – Remnant of my original hack for WordPress 1.2, tweaked to work with WordPress 1.5 Quite “hacky”, fast and useful, already made into a plugin by a couple of people. 3 out of 10 Threaded comments – Again, remnants of a WordPress 1.2 hack, tweaked not (not) work with WordPress 1.5 Worked really well with the original code, really broken now, […]

If anyone here is running Adsense on their own site/blog, could you please check something for me? Run last month’s totals using the “Aggregate” data. Then run last month’s totals using the “channel” data (considering that you have URI channels setup, which I do) These numbers are wildly different for me. I even went through and checked my total earnings and compared them with the two results and sure enough my earnings were recorded and paid with the “aggregate” data and not the channel data. These two values have never been different for me for the last year or so that I have run AdSense, barring March and now April and that makes me really confused. Am I seeing this wrong or am I losing money?? I have written to AdSense support, but I never have had stellar luck with them. Considering the difference in the two amounts, I would […]

Here is the link to the WordPress Plugin and Mod Competition Blog. The aforementioned blog will contain all announcements for the Plugin Competition and I encourage all entrants to register and post about their plugins.

What a difference a simple cleanup and optimization makes! If you are using PhpMyAdmin, follow these simple steps (after safely backing up your data). Click on the database you are working with on the left hand side frame (not the table, the database name) On the right hand column your tables should be listed. Scroll down till you see the “Check all” link. Click on that link, make sure all database tables are checked and then from the dropdown next to it, carefully select “Optimize table”. This should perform an analysis, repair and an optimization of your database. Most problems will be solved with this. In rare cases you might have to rebuild indices, but thats a huge topic, too dangerous to perform without looking at individual cases and thus I will not preach it here. (My database corruption was one of those rare cases) Please backup your data before […]

Ladies and Gentlemen, Hot in the heels of Alex’s extremely popular WordPress 1.5 Themes Competition, I would like to announce the start of the WordPress Plugin and Mod Programming Competition. I would like to make the pot REALLY sweet and promote a LOT of really good development and generate lots of new ideas (stressing on the new). In doing so, I am seeking commercial support from interested parties in exchange for “sponsorship” ads. I am personally going to donate all the earnings/donations from my blogs for the month of April and if enough, will present a Sony PSP to the “Best of Show” (I hope). The following groups/categories come to mind: 1) Most elegant plugin/mod for WordPress 1.5 2) Most innovative plugin/mod for WordPress 1.5 3) Most outrageous (out of this world) plugin/mod for WordPress 1.5 4) Best code in a plugin/mod for WordPress 1.5 5) Best documentation for a […]