The WordPress Hosting Monitor plugin, created by WebHostingSearch.com, that gathers useful data about the server your blog is hosted on, and spits it out in a convenient widget.
If you only have access to your server via FTP you really won’t know all that much about it. The reason for this lack of information is that you don’t have admission to the SSH, also known as the terminal, network protocol. Many of the biggest hosting providers are for some reason a bit shady when it comes to some of the numbers and stats that can be useful for their clients to know. We recognize this problem and have therefore created a plugin with which you will be able to see basic info that can help you understand your site and server better.
The plugin shows the OS the server is running, CPU speed, cache size, RAM usage, load averages, and the time since the last downtime (among other things).
The data can be output via a widget, or a template tag that you could put somewhere out of the way. You can customize what information is displayed, so I can output select data to be shown to the general public (e.g. server uptime). A page under the Settings menu lets you choose what data to display.
The plugin provides some interesting insights into your server, and is certainly a fun thing to play around with, and could potentially be useful for diagnosing issues.
My newest post on Net.Tuts+ was published yesterday: 40+ Invaluable PHP Tutorials and Resources
It is a roundup of articles, tutorials and tools of interest to PHP coders, on topics such as security, OOP, frameworks, and WordPress.
PHP is one of the most popular scripting languages on the internet today, and one of the easiest to get into. Whether you’re a PHP newbie, or an experienced code-slinger, there is always something new to discover. A function you’re unfamiliar with a killer timesaving tool, a technique that you forgot about…
Head over to Net.Tuts+ to read the full article.
The second beta of WordPress 2.8 has been released. If you develop plugins or themes, it’s about time to do some testing. 
From the looks of things, I project that the final release should be available sometime this June. We may see another beta and a release candidate before then, but it won’t be long now, I don’t think.
As usual, you shouldn’t install it on a production blog. There are bound to be bugs. If you have an extra database handy, feel free to install a test blog and try it out though. This Codex page has an overview of some of the things coming in 2.8.
A new service called Blogs.mu sprang-up recently. It’s kind of like “WordPress MU in a box.” With a very WordPress.com-like setup, you register to become your own blog provider. So you can setup a topical blog community.
While I was working on a WordPresss plugin recently, I needed to implement a version check. The plugin required WordPress 2.7 or greater, and it made use of several functions available only in PHP 5 and up (such as SimpleXML). It seemed like there should be some sort of version check, so if an installation did not meet the minimum requirements it would exit with an error.
I ended up writing this function:
Continue reading →
Yesterday I released my newest WordPress plugin: Tweetable. It helps integrate Twitter into your blog. It tweets your posts as they are published and adds a configurable sidebar widget that displays your latest tweets (with optional follower count). The automatic post-tweeting can be configured to use the URL shortener of your choice, and Google Analytics campaign tags can be included.
Google Analytics supports an interesting feature called campaign tagging, where you append variables to a URL so you can track a “campaign.” You could, for instance, add them to the URL of a post of yours that you will be sharing on Twitter. Then you wait for it to propogate and go viral. You can then track, in Google Analytics, how much traffic is coming from Twitter. Usually, Analytics won’t be able to give you an accurate picture of how many hits are coming from Twitter, as it only sees visits from Twitter.com. Traffic from desktop clients like Twhirl and TweetDeck appear as direct visits. Campaign tagging fixes that.
Jack McIntyre recently cooked up an interesting plugin for WordPress, one that I’m surprised hadn’t already existed. It’s called Tracked RSS. It adds campaign tags to your RSS feeds, so you can tell when someone clicks through from their feed reader to your site. This is something I’ve long wanted to do. There’s also a sister plugin, Tracked Tweets, which tweets your posts and includes campaign tags in the shortened link.
The WordPress Theme of the Month for May 2009 is Gallery, released by Smashing Magazine and designed by Christopher Wallace.
Apparently I’ve been doing things the hard way in my WordPress-related coding. I’ve been using regular expressions to turn URLs into clickable links, when WordPress already has a built-in formatting function to do just that.
Meet make_clickable(). All you have to do is pass a string to it, and it will return the string, but with any web URLs, email addresses or FTP URLs turned into HTML links.
$text = 'This is a cool link: http://www.webmaster-source.com';
echo make_clickable($text);
Will return This is a cool link: http://www.webmaster-source.com. Easy enough, and certainly a more efficient method than writing your own function to do it.
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