First of all, Topic Storm 1.3 is WordPress 3.3 ready! The new WordPress version has a lot of very nice features, among them a speedier interface which you can look forward to.

Topic Storm

Twitter to WordPress autoblogging!

Scans the most popular trending words on Twitter, publish 24/7 the most trending topics right now!

In this release of Topic Storm

A better interface. I had a brush with lots of green colors previously, but it horribly crashed with the rest of the WordPress interface. The design changes are a move towards a leaner and more polished look. Scandinavian design ftw!

A cool feature with the new Twitter API is that you can use WoeID (Where on Earth IDentifier). You can look up different countries, regions and cities with this system, try it out here for instance: http://woeid.rosselliot.co.nz/lookup/

Yahoo API decrapated, using BING API instead, this needs an API key (free to sign up). If you want to use images with Topic Storm, you need to sign up for a free Bing API (you do that here: https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/Developers/AppIds/)

The pictures are now downloaded and added to the internal media library (for easier media management) and are attached as a featured image to the blogposts published.

Oh yeah, I added better usage of WordPress’s transient API for a speedier workflow.

Have you already purchased? Go to your user profile and download the update right now. Want to buy now? Go right ahead:

Topic Storm

Twitter to WordPress autoblogging!

Scans the most popular trending words on Twitter, publish 24/7 the most trending topics right now!

WP Caretaker is a WordPress plugin that helps keep your WordPress site fit and in shape.

Changelog for WP Caretaker v. 0.6

• The log: The log table in the database was not set up properly, leading to not all logs making it into the database when storing.
• New: Added emptying RSS cache entries
• New: WP_DEBUG reminder. I personally forget sometimes to turn off WP_DEBUG once I am done debugging a site, and WP Caretaker now kindly reminds you to turn it off once you are done.
• New: Improved interface. Green is nice. Too much green is not nice.
• Updated: The footer link will only be activated if you choose to turn on the cron feature.

Head over to the members page to download the latest version.

I have worked with WP EC a bit recently, and I feel it is time to change my shop. To best do this, I am putting the site in maintenance mode (via the GD Press Tools PRO plugin) and I will relaunch once I have finished tinkering. (I have lots of stuff planned).

The site will be in maintenance mode soon, if you wish to follow the progress, you should

where I will try to update the progress as I go along.

This version fixes a recent problem with reading and processing content, the problem was with properly encoding the content to UTF-8, and once located the error was easy to find.

Thank you everyone who reported the bug to me and thank you especially Nikola and Greg for helping with the testing

I have not been good at updating CleverWP.com recently. Mostly because I have been extremely busy, but another big reason was the site itself. I did not like the layout (never really did, but I was in a hurry) and both the flexibility and performance was getting a bit ridiculous.

The old website was running an outdated and heavily customized copy of the Thesis WordPress theme.

The new theme is the new Chameleon WordPress theme, and it is absolutely amazing to work with. Nick from ElegantThemes has a very elegant coding structure as well, and it is easy to tweak and optimize his code.

Nick’s code is fast, but he has to take care of a lot of if-then and different variables and settings that change from WordPress website to website. By removing and hard-coding many of these variables it is possible to cut the number of queries.

I have tweaked the code here and there to lower the loading time, but there are many things being tweaked and I will publish an unusually large blog post about that when I have finished.

Two new WordPress websites

I have also recently published two new posts about two new WordPress sites I helped bring to life.

The first post was about the new Ramboll multisite WordPress installation on blog.ramboll.com : Ramboll goes WordPress

The second blog post was about the new venusohara.org. The official website of Venus O’Hara. :Venus O’Hara v. 3 – Redhead WordPress Goddess.

Version 1.2.1 of Topic Storm fixes the recent changes by Twitter to their API.

Registered users can log in and download the latest version from http://cleverplugins.com/members/.

My recent update of the Delete Duplicate Posts plugin got great general feedback, but a few users noticed I forgot to include the option to remove the footer link.

The new version of Delete Duplicate Posts re-introduces just that feature. The link back to cleverplugins.com is automatically added when you first activate the plugin, but can be turned off in the configuration page of the plugin.

It happens from time to time your WordPress site gets a lot of duplicate posts, and there is no easy way to delete them all.

With Delete Duplicate Posts it is easy to detect and delete duplicate blogposts.

Not only can you choose to keep the first version of the duplicate posts, you can also set DDP to keep the latest duplicate post and delete all the old ones instead. (Filtered via post id).

Version 2.2. also introduces compatibility with WP Total Cache and WP Super Cache so when duplicate posts are deleted, the page cache of either plugin is immediately updated.

This version is tested and working fine with WordPress 3.1, and I also optimized the code for more speed and stability.

Oh yeah, and Delete Duplicate Posts also has an option to run automatically on your blog once a day! Keeping your blog nice and tidy, should something happen while you are not looking.

Delete Duplicate Posts 2.2 Settings Page

Topic Storm, The WordPress autoblogging plugin with a Twitter Twist, has just been upgraded to version 1.2

The new version introduces W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache compatibility.

These two caching plugins are well used with over 306.000 and 2.1 million downloads respectively!

Previous versions of Topic Storm did not trigger an update on websites that use above caching systems, meaning posts would not always be immediately available. The new feature introduced in Topic Storm 1.2 forces an update in the page cache on sites that use either W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.

Thank you Santiago for suggesting the cache plugin compatibility feature

The Best WordPress Cache Plugin?

Personally I prefer and recommend W3 Total Cache.

There are cases where alternatives provide better solutions, but it is always the first WordPress cache plugin I test on any WordPress installation.

This is just a quick update to let you know that Topic Storm, the WordPress autoblogging plugin with a Twitter twist, is now back in the shop.

There are many ways you can use Topic Storm to bring SEO value to your blog. I will explain one of the smart ways of doing this in an upcoming blogpost on my CleverSEM.com (SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing)

CleverSEM.com

I recently published a couple of more posts on CleverSEM, one of which was about how I have automated the data-gathering aspect of SEO work, in my post “How to automate SEO reporting“.

My very first post on CleverSEM.com was about Milan Petrovic’s amazing WordPress plugin, GD Press Tools PRO 4. The second of my recent blogposts is about the automated backup feature in the plugin.

“WordPress Backup on Dropbox” explains how you can set up GD Press Tools to back up your WordPress site to any of the major CDN’s (in my case I use Dropbox). The backup process is completely automated, not only does GDPT backup the database, it can also be configured to backup all the files as well.

The backups are automatically uploaded to Dropbox in a specific folder in my account. This folder I’ve set up to be synchronized on a couple of my machines, and particularly my Mac Mini, which is then also backed up via my Time Machine.

Backup paranoid? You betcha. I’ve learned my lesson about backing up, in fact I have learned that particular lesson several times in my careeer. I sleep better at night backing up on Dropbox using Milan’s GD Press Tools PRO WordPress plugin

Several other changes have been done here on CleverPlugins.com, but I’ll update you about those in a later post, have a nice weekend everyone!

Topic Storm for WordPress

Topic Storm grabs the trending topics on Twitter, the topics which are popular and what the world is tweeting about right now.

You configure topic storm to how often it should grab new content, what kind of content and which category to post it in.