Posts Tagged ‘plugin’

Plugin Review – Add Twitter RSS

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

It’s proving to be a great week for my plugin’s. Following on from WordCast PodCast mentioning WP Frame Breaker, Weblog Tools Collection have just posted a review of another one of my plugins – Add Twitter RSS.

If you use Add Twitter RSS, head on over and let them know what you think.

Add as always, feedback and requests for more options are always welcome.

WordCast Pod Cast

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

My WP Frame Breaker plugin gets a mention on this weeks WordCast PodCast: WordCast 51: Big-Wheeled Sedan. How cool is that?

You can hear more at about the 49:35 mark.

Thanks to the guys at WordCast PodCast for the mention.

New Plugin – WP Frame Breaker

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

For all you WordPress authors out there unhappy with Diggs new policy of putting outbound links in a frame, here’s an easy way to break out of the frame – WP Frame Breaker.

Follow the link to read more and download the WordPress Plugin.

New WordPress Plugin – Twitter Friends Widget

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

I’ve a new plugin available for download – Twitter Friends Widget.

Basically it replicates the Twitter sidebar and displays all those you’re following. Read more and download it from the “Twitter Friends Widget” plugin page.

New WordPress Plugin – Email Post Activation

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

I was looking into blogging via email[1], and I couldn’t get it to work. Until I discovered that WordPress has to be told to check for any new emails.[2].

In order to process the email post, WordPress uses wp-mail.php. Loading this page in your browser will tell WordPress to check for new email posts. There are three ways to call the file:

  • By visiting the URI to wp-mail.php in your browser,
  • By using Cron to automatically load the file after a set period of time, or
  • By including a hidden iframe in your Blog footer that links to wp-mail.php.

Not all WordPress users have the ability to edit their crontab and even more have no interest in editing their theme files. So I wrote a simple plugin that will add the iframe to the the blog footer.

When I say simple, I actually mean simple – there’s all of 3 lines of code in this plugin, so not much can go wrong with it.[3]

You can read more about it here.

  1. The reason for which I’ll go into in a later post []
  2. I should of realised this, but it was so obvious that I didn’t even consider it []
  3. Having just re-read that, it looks like I’m tempting fate. []

New Plugin – Add Twitter RSS

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

I’ve just finished a small plugin that I wrote for WordPress. “Add Twitter RSS” adds a link to your blog header for your Twitter RSS feed.

More details from the plugin page – Add Twitter RSS

FireStats Update

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

The last couple of days have seen some updates to the FireStats plugin. The first update was a security fix, and the last two have been bug fixes. It’s recommended that if you are using this plugin that you update to the latest stable release, version 1.1.8-stable. The download is available from here.

Plug-ins List

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

I was pretty bored, and couldn’t sleep, so I went looking for new plug-ins to install on my blog. I came across Lorelle’s list of WordPress Plug-in Lists, and I went through every site on that list looking for plug-ins. There were quite a few I hadn’t come across before, so the one’s that interested me were duly downloaded and installed.

I also modified one of the sidebar widgets that came with the theme I’m using and I created a “Plugroll” widget. All I did was add a link for each installed plug-in to my blogroll, gave them a category called plugroll, and used the widget to list them automatically. You can see the list below the linkroll in my sidebar.

Without further ado, here’s my list:

Akismet: Comment spain is a royal pain in the ass. Akismet saves you the hassle of wading through hundreds of spam comments. Any comments detected as spam are held in a spam queue for 15 days. You can chose to delete or unmark potential spam comments. Check the spam queue once a day, just to make sure that you have no false positives.

Autometa: Inserts META headers into your pages. Useful for serach engines crawling your blog.

Category Cloud Widget: Creates a cloud of your categories. The number of posts in each category determines its dominance in the cloud.

Category Tagging: Converts your categories into tags. Simple really. Also allows you to create a tag cloud.

DoFollow: Removes the “nofollow” attribute from links on your blog. “nofollow” tells search engines not to count the link from your page when determining the popularity of a site, which has a significant effect on a sites placement in search results.

FeedBurner Feed Replacement: FeedBurner is an alternative method of providing RSS feeds to your reader. Provides all sorts of statistics and extra functionality. This plugin forwards your feeds through FeedBurner without having to rewrite any code.

FireStats: Provides statistics on who’s visiting your site, most popular pages, unique visitors in the last 24 hours, etc. Uses a nice AJAX interface to reload the statistics every 5 minutes without reloading the entire page.

Google Sitemaps: Generates a sitemap for your blog whenever you save or edit a post. Automatically pings Google when the sitemap has been updated. Can also be used to manually generate a sitemap without saving or editing a post. A must if you want to improve your Google ranking.

Joe’s Quote Widget: Generates a random quote every time your site is loaded. Just one of those fun widgets to make your blog more interesting. Includes famous Bushisms, but Joe also provides Futrurama, Family Guy and Simpsons quotes.

runPHP: Allows you to embed PHP scripts in posts or pages, and have it run. Configurable so that only select users can insert scripts. Handy for creating pages with tag/ category clouds, etc.

Search Meter: Provides statistics on what users are searching for on your site. More importantly, also shows searches which return no results. If your readers are looking for something and can’t find it, it will let you know so that you can add it.

Sidebar Widgets: Enables Widgets in your blog. Opens up a whole new world. No more fiddling around with arcane code. Just drag and drop the widget onto your sidebar, and away you go.

Sociable: Add links to the bottom of your posts to submit to numerous social websites. Configurable for the websites that you want your material to be submitted to.

Tiger Style Administration: Cleans up the WordPress Administration Panel. Easier in the eye, and easier to navigate, and all done through the power of CSS.

Ultimate Tag Warrior: The ultimate in tagging, lots of configyration and administration options, supremely powerful. The best tagging plug-in out there. I particularly like the way it has a version number of pi. Just as powerful as pi, if you ask me.

Wordpress Database Backup: Sooner or later you ARE going to need this. No ifs, no ands, no buts. You will need it. First rule of WordPress: backup your database. Second Rule of WordPress: backup your database. Third Rule of WordPress: we don’t talk about the Third Rule…..

WordPress Mobile Edition: You want to reach a large an audience as possible with your blog. Now you can extend your thoughts to those browsing on mobile devices. With a browser sniffer, and a theme designed to display on mobile devices, you won’t go wrong with this plug-in.

WordPress Reports: View your Google Analytics and FeedBurner statistics straight from WordPress. You’ll need accounts with Google Analytics and/ or FeedBurner for this plug-in to have any use, but if you already have accounts with these services, then you know the power of information.

wp-cache: Speed up your blog with this caching plug-in. Creates static copies of your frequently visited pages, and serves those instead of your database intensive, dynamically created pages. May require minor editing of your wp-config.php file, but worth the effort.

WP-phpMyAdmin: Use this plugin to get direct access to your WordPress database. Optimise tables, drop tables if you like, but just be careful before you do.

WPG2: Embed photos from your Gallery2 installation directly into your blog. Can embed random or specific images and albums. According to the home page, not fully compatible with WordPress 2.1, but seems to be working ok here.

That’s it, that’s my list of plug-ins. I have a couple of more installed, but they’re not activated for various reasons. The main one being that I got fed up of them, and just haven’t gotten around to uninstalling them yet.

WordPress Upgrade

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

I’ve just upgraded my WordPress installation to version 2.1. All went well apart from a problem with the WordPress Gallery2 plug-in. Following the installation it wouldn’t validate, but a quick re-installation later, and it was back up and working. So far everything seems to be working, but if you have any problems, please let me know.

The only other problem is that now the sidebar widgets that displays my blogroll and linkroll are now both displaying all my links, so I’ll have to look into that.

Subscribe to Comments Updated to v2.1

Sunday, February 18th, 2007

Mark Jaquith has released version 2.1 of his “Subscribe to Comments” plugin. If you’re using a previous version of this this plugin, I recommend upgrading. It features changes to the subscription manager that allows you to see at a glance the email addresses used to subscribe and the posts that your users are subscribing to. The new version also allows you to remove readers subscriptions with a couple of clicks. Very handy for removing spam email addresses.