If you have been paying attention to Amazon’s single product pages and if Amazon’s engineers have been doing their job well, you have most likely clicked on one of the links in the group of deep links called “Customers who bought this item also bought”. This plugin tries to create a similar group of links for your blog. If you have enough links in your theme (Contextual Related Posts plugin comes in handy) for readers to explore, then as and when readers click on links, this plugin checks to see if it was referred from your blog, checks to see if it can identify a post or a page from the information it has and then adds a link to the referring page. I have been testing it on this blog for a few days while I iron out the bugs. Check out the pages and what grabs readers’ attention […]

As announced, today is the first day of the WordPress Plugin Competition. Plugin authors should register at the Plugin Competition Blog and start posting their ideas, future plugins and everything else about the competition. I have already received a bunch of requests for sponsorships and prizes. So here is a list of resources for the competition: Plugin Competition Prizes: If you have promised a prize or have paid already, it should show up on this page, more details to follow Plugin Competition Blog: This is where all the announcements and code should be posted. Contact Form: Use this form for sponsorship questions and submissions. Preliminary Rules: Most of the rules are listed here. More to follow on a separate page. All competition entries must be submitted with the final version of code to mark at wltc dot net. This can and should be done towards the end of the competition […]

WordPress Plugin Competition 2009 Prizes Weblog Tools Collection (p) $1000 WPMU / WPMUDEV $1000 BuySellAds $200 White Shadow (p) $150 WPWebHost $500 Ozh $100 Techtites $100

Last Tuesday, May 28, I released an update to the Sandbox theme, version 0.9. Since releasing the Sandbox back in August of 2006 Andy and I have received lots of good feedback. I called it “the theme for themers” and it has had a really positive influence on theme design within the WordPress community. There have been more than a few themes/designs built on the Sandbox and released—and for good reason. Its highly semantic, dynamic structure make it immensely easy to design for, not to mention all the features built into its markup, like Microformats. So I thought it was a good time for a new theme competition—or rather a “designs” competition. It has been around two years since the last successful WordPress theme competition (participants of the competitions in 2006 will roll their eyes and would include me). We’ve seen the launch of an official theme viewer, two major […]

Big news this evening is the launch of Google Gears which is an “Open Source Toolkit for offline web apps”. Pretty neat idea with lots of possibilities. TechCrunch has a nice writeup and so does Scoble. After some initial apprehension, I decided to download Google Gears and try the posterchild Google Reader app. After following a few steps of relatively simple instructions, I had downloaded all of the new items from Google Reader to my computer for offline viewing. This will be an awesome tool for travelling or to catch up on some extra reading during lunch at the local greasy spoon. I can see a lot of possibilities for Gears. A blog posting app that caches posts offline and then submits them when a connection is made is the first one that comes to mind. The new mashup editor has lots of possibilities as well. While we are on […]

If you or someone you know is using the Vistered Little theme from Windy Road, a vulnerability has been found and you need to upgrade your theme to version 1.7.3 as soon as possible  (or revert back to the another theme for the time being and delete the vistered little theme folder). The latest version that fixes the bug/vulnerability is 1.7.3 while versions 1.6a through 1.7.2 are all vulnerable.

How Scoble reads 622 RSS feeds every morning: Vlog of how Scoble organizes his feeds using Google Feedreader and filter and sifts through them to find the relevant information he wants to track or read about. The number of feeds he follows is staggering to me. I read approximately 200 feeds and rotate them freuqently. In spite of the smaller number, I have a hard time keeping up with the rush of information from feeds and other sources. Although in my defense, my 24″ vertically rotated monitor really helps with the reading (I run two monitors, 1 x 20″, 1 x 24″ rotated, Ultramon) and blogging is not my day job. Also of interest, is the Better Google Reader Firefox extension that I find quite useful. I started using Google Reader a few months ago and have yet to switch back. The linked video was choppy for me but Scoble’s […]

Impact is a fixed-width, 2 column theme with right sidebar, compatible with WP 2.2 Dream in Infrared is a fluid width, light on dark theme with lots of CMS features. “Soho” is a widget-ready WordPress theme designed with a three column fluid layout. Demo. Two mini loops are retrieving their posts from different categories at the frontpage. One loop in the main post showing latest post, one loop beneath the main area showing one post. “300” is a widget-ready WordPress theme with three columnd fluid layout and an edgy footer from 300. Two mini loops are retrieving their posts from different categories at the frontpage. One loop in the main post showing latest post, one loop beneath the main area showing one post. Deziner Folio is a two column, fixed width theme with support for several plugins. Rocking is a very light colored 3 column theme. (Contains Sponsored Links)