Tag Archives: WordPress

Historical Timestamps in WordPress

May 5, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 4 Comments

Jayvee Fernandez recently wrote on The Blog Herald about WordPress and it’s problems with historical timestamps.

A friend on Plurk asked whether it is possible to use actual historical dates on your blog’s CMS (i.e. 4th of July 1776 for Independence Day). I did some digging and there are posts that address this question.

While this is a neat idea, setting the post date to reflect the time period a work was created (e.g. a photo taken in 1985), it introduces some problems.

  1. You won’t be able to schedule posts to be published at a later date. Setting the timestamp to a historical date will cause it to go live immediately.
  2. Posts with historical dates won’t necessarily be seen on the homepage when they are published. As WordPress (by default) orders posts by date, users would have to browse the archives to find the post. If you’re a master of custom queries, you might be able to remedy it in some way.
  3. I’ve always thought of the post timestamp being the date of publication, not the date of the content’s creation.

Continue reading →

Twounter: Display Your Twitter Follower Count in Plan Text

May 4, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 3 Comments

For the Twitter-obsessed who want to display their follower count on their blogs, ThemeSphere has put together a WordPress plugin that will get it in plain text.

Installing the plugin gives you access to a function and a shortcode that will return the follower count for a user you specify.

Example: <?php echo twounter('redwall_hp'); ?>

You could use this to simply display your Twitter follower count, or you could use it for something more interesting, like displaying the follower count for each user in a multi-author blog. If you look around at sites like Net.Tuts+ and Blogging Tips, they often have brief bios after posts, complete with a Gravatar and link to the author’s site. Why not add a follower count to the mix?

wpTweety – Twitterwall for WordPress Tweets

May 1, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

wpTweety is yet another one of those “twitterwall” sites (like Helveti-Tweet), where Twitter postings on a certain topic are harvested from the Search API and dumped onto the site. By the name, I’m sure you can realize what topic wpTweety searches Twitter for… WordPress!

wpTweety

The wpTweety design is fairly simple, but very interesting visually. It’s color scheme reminds me of both the Twitter and WordPress colors.

From a functionality standpoint, wpTweety is well-equipped. It automatically refreshes the content (via an AJAX request, of course) every so often, and handy reply and retweet links are included next to each tweet.

Kind of fun, but I still wonder who actually uses these things. :)

WordPress: Tweet Shortened URL of Current Page to Twitter

Apr 29, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

A month or two ago I had an interesting idea involving WordPress permalinks. I realized that is would be very simple to automatically shorten WordPress permalinks for usage on Twitter. With a little .htaccess tweak, you could have something like yourdomain.com/s123 redirect to yourdomain.com?p=123. The default WordPress permalinks always work, and will forward to your preferred permalink. You end up with an easy way to have a short link for each of your posts, and it’s all self-contained within WordPress. No third-party services.

Continue reading →

What Automattic Can Do With WP.com

Apr 28, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 4 Comments

Automattic recently acquired WP.com from Yahoo, and now they are wondering what to do with it. (They’re asking for suggestions, too.)

Yes it’s true, Automattic is now the proud owner of WP.com, which we acquired from our buddies over at Yahoo! We’ve been using WP.com as internal shorthand for this site for years now, and ever since we figured out four or five years ago that Yahoo had that domain (as opposed to the Washington Post or something) we’ve been doing our best to get it, a journey that culminated in ultimate success a few days ago.

Continue reading →

The Two Approaches of Premium Themes

Apr 19, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

“Premium,” that is “paid,” themes have gained a significant footing in the WordPress community in recent years. There are many designers selling them, and there’s no shortage of buyers.

What makes a theme worth paying for, though?

There are two main angles in which designers approach selling a premium theme. WooThemes and ThemeForest illustrate them well.

Continue reading →

Display Your Latest Tweet on Your Website

Apr 13, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Coding 2 Comments

More and more bloggers are displaying their latest postings to Twitter on their sites, most frequently in the sidebar.

There are WordPress plugins that can accomplish this, such as Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin. Then there are the simple widgets offered by Twitter themselves. But with such an extensive API available, wouldn’t it be more fun to do it yourself?

Joost de Valk has an article that explains just how to Easily display your last Tweet.

Continue reading →

WooTees: Design a T-Shirt for WooThemes

Mar 29, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Design No Comments

WooThemes is running a contest to design a T-Shirt for them to take to the Future of Web Design 2009 conference.

We’ll hopefully be taking some t-shirts to the event to giveaway and that’s where we need your help – in designing them. We are looking for a kickass design that people want to wear, not your typical promotional tees that get thrown into a cupboard never to be worn. Your design can be trendy, humourous or professional, or even all three – we open to suggestions.

The winner will recieve $500 in cash and a 6-month WooThemes developer license. The runner up will get $250 and a 3-month developer license. Third place will get a 6-month developer license, but no cash prize.

The rules are fairly simple. The format should be a PSD, or Fireworks or Illustrator format; no stock images; you must follow the design guidelines so print will work properly; submit through the Flickr pool before April 3rd, 2009.

It sounds like a fun opportunity, and I might enter if I can think of a suitable idea. Everyone likes a funny T-Shirt.

GoCodes 1.3.0 Released

Mar 17, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 40 Comments

Version 1.3.0 of the GoCodes redirection plugin has been released. Several long-awaited improvements have been made.

  • .htaccess editing is no longer required. As long as you are using “pretty permalinks” instead of the default ?p=123 type thing you can just drop the GoCodes plugin in and activate it. The behind-the-scenes magic will do the rest. (If you are upgrading from a prior version of WordPress, it is recommended that you remove the redundant .htaccess lines, as they are no longer required and may hinder some functionality.)
  • You can now sort the Manage GoCodes table. People have wanted the ability to reorder the Manage table by date added, key, or the number of hits. Now you can!
  • Replace the /go/ in redirect URLs with your own “virtual subdirectory.” Want to have /affiliate/ instead? Just pop over to the new Settings -> GoCodes page and change it.
  • Automatically nofollow redirects. Some users have been writing-in, asking for the ability to “nofollow GoCodes.” If you check the “Nofollow” box on the settings page, GoCodes will start sending a “noindex, nofollow” header statement to search spiders trying to index redirects.
  • An assortment of minor tweaks and fixes.

Also note that GoCodes now uses the more SEO-friendly 301 redirects instead of 302s, and has since the previous release.

To update, either use WordPress’s automatic plugin updater, or download the latest version manually from WordPress.org.

If you find any bugs, or have a feature request, feel free to leave a comment.

BuySellAds WordPress Plugin

Mar 13, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 2 Comments

I’ve previously talked about the distinguished BuySellAds banner marketplace. The network makes it much easier to sell ad space on your website, and has proven to be an excellent alternative to directly making deals with advertisers.

Thaya Kareeson of Omninoggin.com has put together a great WordPress plugin to make it easier to add the BSA ad code to your site. (As if pasting a bit of JavaScript wasn’t easy enough.)

The Buy Sell Ads WordPress Plugin, once installed, allows you to insert an ad zone into your sidebar simply by dropping a widget in. For ads elsewhere, or if you don’t have a widgetized theme, you can use a template tag instead.

Continue reading →