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Tapping WordPress for Internal Communication

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:37:55 GMT

I wrote recently about the advantages and disadvantages of the PHP programming language in a couple of blogs. In the former piece, I suggested that the many popular Web-based applications built on PHP could be of value to the SMB. Today, I

Popularity Contest 2.0 beta 2

Alex — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:23:24 GMT

A new beta of my Popularity Contest plugin for WordPress is available – this has some minor bug fixes and some new features and nicer handling of some edge cases. Since this version is the best known version, I have made it the default download at WordPress.org’s plugin hosting.

Changes since beta 1:

Added tag reports. I’m pretty pleased at how these work – you type in the name of a tag you want a report on, it will auto-complete just like in the tags form on the New Post page, and then bring back the tag report when you hit Add.
Added nice re-flowing code so that reports take up all available horizontal space when displaying.
Added some additional refinements to the overall Popularity list at the top of the reports page.
Added a Last (n) Days option to the widget (you can configure the # of days for the widget).
Removed tags from category reports list.
Fixed an issue with AJAX deletion of comments.
Fixed a divide by 0 error that I’m not sure how could happen, but apparently did for someone. The code is more robust now anyway.
Don’t add JavaScript code to the post content if not using the API (default) method of recording views.
Works around a broken data situation where there are no rows in the Popularity Contest options table. I have no idea how you’d trigger this situtation, and still can’t reproduce the issue – but now the code works around it. Thanks to Dave (who apparently has never heard of Hanlon’s Razor) for finding the cause of the issue.

Known Issue in beta 2:

When installing for the first time, the WordPress plugins page reports an error:

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

with an empty “fatal error” message. It also successfully activates the plugin and creates the proper default settings – everything seems to work just as planned. I spent a few minutes playing with various things, but without any error message or anything in the error log, I haven’t found the cause of this yet. If any other devs have time to check this out, I’d certainly appreciate the help.

Aside from this and perhaps a few minor tweaks based on feedback, I think this is just about ready for the final 2.0 release.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please contact the WordPress HelpCenter or you can try the WP Support Forums.

The Audry Theme for Thematic

Ian Stewart — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:00:58 GMT

Design Notes has released a really striking looking Thematic Child Theme with tons of interesting texture called, Audry.

If you’re interested in learning how they made Audry, there’s also a two part tutorial on Thematic Child Theme Development at Design Notes. Make sure you check it out.

The “Joy of Working with WordPress”

Raanan Bar-Cohen — Wed, 06 May 2009 07:55:01 GMT

Michael Ashby of Coherent Methods LLC, published a very thoughtful post about his experience so far working with WordPress and BuddyPress:

I switched from MoveableType to WordPress back in September of last year and it’s been one of the best decisions that I’ve made regarding this blog. WordPress is just so much easier and, dare I say, FUN to use. There’s a richer developer community, more templates and generally more help out there than there is for MT. But my joy with working with WP over MT is more than just skin deep.

Michael goes on to talk about the Six Apart Motion component that works with MovableType:

When I first watched the video for Motion, I kept going “Huh? How am I supposed to use this?” If you take a look at the Motion Demo, you’ll see what I mean … After looking at the demo, the only feeling I’m left with is “Why?” Why would someone want this on their site?

In comparison, the BuddyPress platform sparks this reaction:

Then you take a look at the BuddyPress Demo and there’s a remarkable difference. It’s clearly designed to mirror the FaceBook style of community, but it’s cleaner and clearer as to what you can do and how everything works. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that it’s a better design that FaceBook! I’m currently developing a new community web site and I actually had to stop and think about BuddyPress for quite some time. So at the end of the demo, I’m left thinking “How would I use this?” Not, “Why would I use this?”

Looking forward to seeing what Michael and his team put together with WordPress and BuddyPress.

[ visit mashby.com ]

WordPress in Demand on Elance

Raanan Bar-Cohen — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:00:04 GMT

Elance, a marketplace “where businesses connect with independent professionals to get work done”, has published their latest Elance Online Work Index. In this index they rate which skills are most in demand in their marketplace based on 100,000 new jobs posted on Elance over recent months:

The #1 in demand skill is PHP, followed in the #2 slot by MySQL. The top publishing platform, with an overall ranking of #13, is WordPress, up 2 spots from #15 since the last index. Joomla comes in at #29, previously 18th overall, and the next publishing platform listed is Drupal at #75, previously 46th in the last index.

Since WordPress is PHP/MySQL, WordPress professionals out there are in a great position with the most in demand skills.

You may recall back in January oDesk posted about similar trends in their marketplace as well.

[ Read more on the Elance blog ]

10 Impressive Techniques to Spice up your WordPress Theme

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:22:00 GMT

WordPress awesomeness lies in its fact that it can be customized to power any type of site you like! But what happens when you combine the power of javascript with WordPress, the possibilities are infinite. This article will share 10 great practices, examples & Plugins for using the most popular Javascript frameworks out there to spice up your WordPress theme.

1. Implement a Nice & Clean jQuery Sliding Panel in Wordpress 2.7+

Learn how to implement a Nice & CleanSliding Panel in Wordpress 2.7+ using jQuery. If user didn’t log in or register yet, we will show the login and register forms in the sliding panel with a short Welcome Message:

2. jBreadCrumb

jBreadCrumb is a jQuery plugin for displaying breadcrumb navigations in a more flexible & smarter way. The length of a breadcrumb menu may be very long, jBreadCrumb is a great solution for this issue. It creates a collapsible interface that smartly decides the display method according to the amount and length of the elements.

Learn how to create this navigation technique, and display it on our posts, pages and categories archives in your WordPress theme. You can also use this great plugin or this interesting one to automatically create breadcrumbs in your blog.

3. Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery

The basic idea of the sliding box animations is very simple. There is a div tag (.boxgrid in my css) that essentially acts as a window where two other items of your choosing “peek” through. From this basic idea we can play around with animations of the sliding element to either show or cover up the viewing area, thus creating the sliding effect. I can see this script works great for a CSS gallery, really interesting.

4. How To Create An Amazing jQuery Style Switcher

Add a nice style switcher using jQuery and PHP. The end result will be an unobtrusive & entirely degradable dynamic style switcher which will be quick and easy to implement.

5. Styling Buttons and Toolbars with the jQuery UI CSS Framework

This tutorial demonstrates how to incorporate the power of jQuery UI CSS framework classes in a custom widget to create and style buttons and toolbars.

Creating a basic button is very simple with the jQuery UI CSS framework and styling it is really easy. All you need to do is add the default “clickable” state by assigning the class ui-state-default. We also want these to have rounded corners, so we added the optional ui-corner-all framework class which adds CSS3 corner-radius properties to all corners without the need for any images or extra markup.

6. MooTools Link Nudging

This tutorial demonstrates how to incorporate the power of jQuery UI CSS framework classes in a custom widget to create and style buttons and toolbars.

Link nudging is the process of adjusting the padding on a link slightly to show a simple, tasteful “jump” when you place your mouse over a link. The effect is magnified when mousing on and off a link quickly.

7. jQuery (mb)Menu 1.5

This is a powerful jQuery component to build easily a multilevel tree menu or a contextual menu (right click) in an intuitive way! You can add as many submenus as you want; if your submenu or menu is not declared in the page, the component’ll get it via ajax calling the template page with the id of the menu you need (the value of “menu” attribute) the ajax page should return a well formatted code as the example below for the menu voices code.

There are many tutorials out there for creating a WordPress drop down menues. You might want to check here and there.

8. Fantastic News Ticker Newsvine-like using Mootools

This tutorial explains how to implement a News Ticker, with news vertical scrolling, using mootools. It’s very simple and quick to implement in your blog. I can see this very useful if you are having a news submission are on your website and want to display your user’s contributed links in a nice and fancy way in your sidebar.

9. Snazzy Archives

Snazzy Archives is a visualization plugin for your WordPress site featuring an unique way to display all your posts. You can select different layouts and special effects. Main features of Snazzy Archives are: Unique visual presentation of blog posts, Will work out of the box with all features, Posts are scanned for images and youtube videos and shown together with number of comments, Different editable layouts (HTML and CSS), Special effects using jQuery and more.

10. J Post Slider

Show your post in fancy jQuery box, rotating images, with show-up text box with post description. Mousover stop the animation, and user can click on post link anytime.

DIRECT LINK »

5 Must Know Web Design Polishing Techniques

gomiboot — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:42:32 GMT

5 Must Know Web Design Polishing Techniques

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Friday Favorite: Woopra - tuaw.com

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:07:06 GMT

Friday Favorite: Woopra
tuaw.com, CA
It's still in beta so don't expect it to replace your current solution, but I'm having a lot fun using it on a few WordPress blogs. Setup is easy, if not a bit time consuming. First you've got to submit your site for approval for inclusion in the beta ...

Strange WP-Supercache WordPress Folders

QuickOnlineTips — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:11:01 GMT

I use WP-Supercache, an amazing WordPress plugin which caches html pages of our php pages and reduces the server load drastically. But due to recent internal server errors, I looked inside my WordPress supercache folders and found some strange folders.

As you see there were 3 folders, though quickonlinetips.com folder was expected, quickonlinetips.com. (with a period at the end) and quickonlinetips.com.disabled (with a .disabled at the end) were not expected. As I browsed deeper into these folders, they had the complete directory structure of our site and has hundreds of cached html pages, which were now not being served anymore.

As I started to manually delete these 2 folders and all its subfolders, even after hours, my trusted FTP client Filezilla kept on working and we were getting nowhere. Eventually I realized supercache had created hundreds of similar empty subfolders to an infinite depth which continued as far as I could browse. And whenever I tried to delete them, the server would finally timeout and disconnect.

After several sessions I was still unable to delete all folders. Then I logged into Shell using my trusted Putty, a free telnet and SSH Client for Windows and Unix platforms. Using Putty I was able to quickly navigate to the supercache folder and delete these directories and those unending subfolders using powerful Linux commands - in a few minutes! Amazing!

See the full image to get an idea of how deep these folders extended.

Note that Supercache might not have been the cause of Internal server errors, but these strange folders were definitely created by error. But inspite of these bugs, Supercache is a highly recommended wordpress plugin that every wordpress blogger should have. Have you taken a peek into your Supercache folder lately? - you might find some interesting folders out there.

You might also want to check our previous experiences with WP Super-Cache not deleting expired pages and how we fixed SuperCache errors of no cached pages.

Read more about Blogging, Tips, WordPress

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Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

Short Spark- How to Say ‘No’ While Helping a Friend

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:52:58 GMT

Interview with Template Monster CEO David Braun

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:21:16 GMT

30 WordPress Theme Releases for March 2009 (part 2) - WPZOOM

jonsaysso — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 07:56:28 GMT

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Would You Like a Reply to Your Comment?

Ronald Huereca — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 07:08:57 GMT

One of the things I’ve constantly struggled with is replying to comments.

Sometimes a post is old, and someone decides to leave an off-hand comment. Do I reply, or just leave it be?

Or, someone has made a well-versed comment, but all I can think of is, “Nice comment.”

I’ve created some code (if you’re using WordPress) that takes the guess work out of this. If a reader would like a reply, they can explicitly say so.

The Concept

Right below the comment form is a drop-down box that lets the reader choose if they desire a reply or not.

Once they leave the comment, you are sent a normal comment e-mail with the reader’s preference included.

Here are some screenshots to demonstrate:

On a Blog

In Your E-mail

You can also view live implementations here:

The Code

The code is rather simple, so I’m not going to release it as a plugin.

All you’re required to do is insert the code into your WordPress theme’s functions.php file.

Here is a download link.

When viewing the source, you can customize the IDs (for CSS), as well as text.

If customizing, be sure that the “SELECT” tag ID/Name matches the ID in line 13 of the code.

Conclusion

Giving the reader the option to weigh in on his/her preference is a concept I have yet to see elsewhere.

Please feel free to try it out and/or weigh in here on your thoughts.

---
Related Articles at The Reader Appreciation Project:

Web-kreation - OneRoom - Another free Wordpress Theme by Web-Kreation

randyjensen — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:28:50 GMT

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Core Dump Files in WordPress Folders

QuickOnlineTips — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:30:43 GMT

I was surprised to see my WordPress folder sizes increasing and FTP revealed huge ‘Core’ dump files in several folders of my WordPress installation. As they gobbled up my server storage space, I had no idea where these came from and what to do with them.

I found this 38MB core file in the root directory of my WordPress installation

As I looked in subfolders, I found another 46MB core file in wp-includes

As you can see these are large files and occupy huge storage space on our server. Thankfully my hosting by Dreamhost has unlimited storage space, so I need not worry; but if your hosting has limited storage, it could add to lot of extra charges. I downloaded and tried opening these core files with wordpad and a mix of gibberish text and symbols appeared.

Core Dump Files

I looked around for possible solutions and found more WordPress bloggers reporting this issue in the WordPress forums here and here. I learnt that these are called Core Dump files and Wikipedia says “a core dump consists of the recorded state of the working memory of a computer program at a specific time, generally when the program has terminated abnormally (crashed).” Core dumps are often used to diagnose or debug errors in computer programs.

In these forums some people advised you can delete these files and save space after backing up all your files and database. Some advise the core files can be read using GDB, the GNU Project debugger. I am not sure if I should delete these files and maybe you can help.

I understand that these files are hosted on our server to keep a record of useful data when the site crashed on a particular day, but I wonder if any hosting engineer is debugging this data or diagnosing why the server or unstable processes crashed or terminated.

Check your Wordpress installation and post a comment if you also have “Core” dump files eating your server storage space. What are you going to do about it?

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Twitter Plots Paid Accounts: Warms Up to Newbies - PC World

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:15:42 GMT

TrustedReviews

Twitter Plots Paid Accounts: Warms Up to Newbies
PC World
Micro-blogging service Twitter says it will soon offer premium paid accounts to businesses. At the same time Twitter is raising its profile to Twitter newcomers with a suggested users list to follow. The moves come as massive speculation as to what's ...
Gartner offers advice on Twitter best practice VNUNet.com
Twitter again says it plans premium accounts Bizjournals.com
Twitter Founder Reveals Premium, Paid-For Plans ITProPortal
Mobile Entertainment - Times Online
all 120 news articles

Five reasons why dad blogs are the blogs to watch - Examiner.com

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:42:23 GMT

Examiner.com

Five reasons why dad blogs are the blogs to watch
Examiner.com
Mom blogs have spent a long time in the lime light with countless day time talk shows either referencing or featuring mom bloggers. The ‘mom blog’ has become almost an iconic part of our pop culture. Many mom blogs have fierce cult like followings with ...

The Different Kinds of Hosting

Jonathan Bailey — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:10:02 GMT

Written by Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today

Whether you are setting up a new blog/site or are outgrowing your current setup, finding new hosting can be a very daunting challenge.

One of the biggest problems with hosting is the terminology. There are so many different kinds of hosting out there and their descriptions are not always helpful. Worse still, every kind of hosting is targeted at a different type of user and getting the wrong kind of hosting can leave you either overpaying for your needs or with a setup that isn’t powerful enough for your site.

So how do you know what kind of hosting is for you? Here’s a rundown of some of the more common host types, their advantages and who they are targeted at.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most basic and least expensive form of hosting you can find. Most large hosting companies such as Dreamhost, Hostgator, etc. primarily provide this kind of hosting.

A shared host is a host that puts hundreds, if not thousands of sites, on the same physical server. Since most sites use very little bandwidth or server resources, this is rarely a problem and it allows them to offer hosting at an extremely cheap rate, often just a few dollars per month.

The drawback is that shared hosting is not designed for high load. Though you can mitigate against it by using WP Super Cache or other caching programs, if your site uses too much resources it will be temporarily suspended before it takes the whole server, and hundreds of other domains, down too.

The majority of bloggers use a shared host when they first start out and works well for most smaller to medium sized blogs.

Grid Hosting

Grid hosting is a new kind of hosting that was first brought to everyday bloggers by Media Temple and is designed to mitigate against the problems commonly associated with shared hosting.

Grid hosting works very much like a shared hosting normally, but when a high load hits, the “grid” element takes over, spreading the load of your site across many different machines. This keeps your site alive even during traffic spikes, such as the Digg Effect.

The problem is that grid hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, usually about $20 per month, and there is a new metric to worry about, processing units. Where shared hosts just worry about bandwidth and disk space, grid hosting customers have to worry if their site is taking up too many processing units lest they get a larger bill.

Grid hosting is ideal for sites that don’t normally require a lot of hosting power, but experience occasional traffic spikes and would like to stay active through them.

Virtual Private Server

Virtual Private Server hosting, better known as VPS, is similar to a shared host in that multiple sites share the same physical server, but it is different in that the number of sites is much smaller and each site has a dedicated portion of the server’s resources (usually including both a RAM and CPU allotment). Furthermore, each account has root access, meaning that, to the customer, it is the same as running their own full server.

VPS provides much greater power and access than a shared or grid account but it comes at a higher price. Also, where shared and grid hosts are easy to set up and run, many VPS hosts require a great deal of expertise. Bloggers that aren’t comfortable running a server should probably stay away or pay extra for a managed solution.

A VPS is usually a good solution for bloggers that need more processing power than a grid host can cheaply provide or want to host many sites on the same server. It is also a popular option for the computer-savvy that love playing with their own server.

Dedicated Server

Finally, at the highest end of the hosting spectrum (at least before you start with enterprise hosting) is dedicated servers. The name pretty much explains the service, it is a an entire server available for you to do with as you see fit. You do not share the server, or any of its resources, with any other users.

Though dedicated servers usually provide the highest level of control and power, that isn’t always the case. A powerful VPS may have more resources available than a meek dedicated server. It all depends on the specifications.

That being said, not sharing a server has a great deal of benefit for anyone who wants to run very high traffic of very resource intensive sites. However, dedicated servers are also very expensive, usually many times more expensive than a grid or shared host, and are intended for hosts well beyond the needs of most bloggers.

Hybrid Solutions

In addition to the solutions above, there is a great deal of experimentation going on with file hosting services such as Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files as they let users host static files, such as images, on a powerful server for cheap while keeping their site on a less expensive host.

These setups can be both very cost and speed effective but require at least some degree of understanding both of the underlying technologies and DNS and Web site configuration. However, there are great guides on how to use Amazon S3 as an image or file host.

Bottom Line

The question every blogger has is which hosting is right for them? The answer is that it depends.

Most bloggers start out using a shared host and typically move up to a grid or a VPS as their traffic levels rise. Typically, I encourage people to be one step ahead of what they need. Though a solid shared host may be good enough for most bloggers, stepping up to a grid host offers little extra expense and a lot of peace of mind.

You don’t want to just meet your current needs but prepare for your future ones so you aren’t constantly moving from host to host. When you sign up for a host, plan on being there for two years and estimate your needs accordingly.

Otherwise, you’re going to find yourself searching for hosting a lot more often.

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When Do You Stop Commenting on Other Blogs?

Daniel Scocco — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:03:51 GMT

Mike asks:

Do you still comment on other blogs or do you mostly focus on maintaining the community around your blog?

Interesting question.

First of all let me clarify that I will answer the question as if it was referring to using blog comments as a promotional technique. Obviously there is also a social factor there (i.e. blogs are conversations, and people like to interact with other people), but I will not take it into consideration here.

The short answer would be no. I don’t comment on other blogs as I used to back in the day (which is around two years ago). These days I don’t have a lot time available to work on the blogs, so my main focus is on the content.

I still write a comment once in a while, but those are mostly on blog posts that mentioned me directly, or that raised a very interesting question where I want to share my opinion.

So why and when did I stop commenting on other blogs as a promotional technique?

I would say that you make that switch when the opportunity cost of leaving blog comments becomes too high. Opportunity cost is term used in economics to describe “the value of the next best alternative foregone as the result of making a decision” (quote from Wikipedia).

Let me use a simple example with numbers to illustrate that point.

Suppose you have a guy that started a new blog. At that point in time he has zero readers. He also has two hours to work on his blog every day. Writing content for the blog is a priority, so one hour is going to be spent on that. With the second hour, however, he can choose how to spend it. One of the possible uses for that second hour is to write blog comments. If we assume that each blog comment will take two minutes, he will be able to write 30 comments per day.

Let’s also assume that each blog comment will bring five visitors on the first day, three on the second day, one on the third day and nothing after that. So each blog comment, on average, will bring nine visitors. One hour of blog comment promotion, therefore, should bring 270 visitors after three days.

Since the blog is brand new, 270 visitors for one hour of work is a good rate. Should the blogger use that one hour to just write another post, there is a possibility that he would get zero visitors and no one knows the blog yet.

Once the blog starts growing, however, the picture changes. Once the blog has 500 RSS subscribers, for example, using that extra hour to write another post could bring 300 visitors to the blog, which is already more efficient than spending one hour writing blog comments.

It is therefore a matter having of limited time and evaluating what actions will yield the biggest results.

That is at least my opinion. What about you, do you still actively comment on other blogs? Do you think you will ever stop? If you already stopped, why was that?

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When Do You Stop Commenting on Other Blogs?

The most reliable (and unreliable) blogging services | Royal Pingdom

miyagawa — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:45:34 GMT

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