Last night I was looking for a quick site to generate these short URLs from the full Flickr URL. My searching came up with nothing. As such, I decided to quickly throw together a site to do just that. Short story even shorter: URLkr.com was created.

URLkr is a simple and quick way to generate a short flic.kr URL from a full flickr.com URL. I hope some people will find this useful (I know I do). Check it out and let me know what you think.

I’m not sure why so many people ask “do you feel any different?” on your birthday. Seems like a silly question to me. Why would I suddenly wake up and feel different just because my age has been incremented? Humans are, by nature, curious beings. As such, we often seek explanations and answers to events that we can observe around us. Age and time are something we created to explain why things occur the way they do (I would say “over time”, but that would defeat the point of my argument). Time is simply an arbitrary value. By extension, age is as well.

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WordPress Development: Filters
Moving Beyond SSH: Installing a Web Server

You can also find me hanging out on Twitter and posting some of my photography over on Flickr.

2.7 also has tons of new features, including a threaded comments API for themes to use, the ability to reply to comments right from the admin. It also includes support for automatically updating itself, whenever a version after 2.7 is released (so no more FTPing to update WordPress after 2.7)

The WordPress guys have created a video showcasing the new features, which you can see over on their blog.

It it recommended that anybody running an older version of WordPress to update as soon as possible.

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As this plugin checks Twitter for every username it finds, I strongly recommend using a caching plugin (such as WP Super Cache) with this plugin. Which will both help ease the load on Twitter’s servers, and also speed up your page load times.

This plugin requires cURL to be installed on your server, and has only been tested with PHP 5.2.x. It is available to download here.

The Comment Approval Notification plugin will send comment authors an email when their comment gets approved (if it was held for moderation, of course). The email sent to the comment author is fully customizable using “shortcodes”. Shortcodes are special placeholders (in the form of [shortcode_name]) which allow you to add dynamic information to the email (such as the name of the comment author), and have it replaced with the actual information. A full list of the available shortcodes is available here.

This plugin will be useful for people who require comments to be moderated before being shown, to not leave comment author in the dark as to when their comment will appear.

You can find more information about this plugin, and where to download it, over at it’s plugin page.

Update (November 16, 2008): It turns out this plugin wasn’t quite WordPress 2.6 compatible. I have fixed this and released version 1.1.1, which can be downloaded from here. Thanks to Ricky Buchanan for bringing this to my attention.

1. wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
2. wp-includes/version.php
3. wp-admin/includes/media.php

Which you can conveniently download in ZIP format right here.

If you’re not using 2.6.2, then you should re-upload all the files.

You should upgrade immediately to ensure your blog is protected from security risks.

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This integration will provide users with more data about user behavior, such as which pages advertisements are clicked on and referring sites. This looks to be very useful data that publishers will be able to use to optimize their earnings. They posted the following video:

Google is currently in the process of rolling out this integration, and you can look for you invitation on your AdSense overview page.