Many blogs have sitemap or archive made as a post. I’ve searched a little bit and found some tutorials to make it, but it involves using page templates and it’s little bit complicated. So I decided to make my first Wordpress plugin for this.

Simple post list is just generating a list of all posts and it’s very easy to use.  Create a new page and enter

[posts]

and plugin will make the list.

If you need to display the list somewhere else than just paste this PHP code:

<?php posts_list (); ?>

Lists generated with this plugin are dynamic, whenever you make a new post it will update list. Here is an example of archive page on my blog. If you use some caching plugin like Wp Super Cache, you’ll need to clean the cache to see the update or wait until the cache expires.

Download:
Download version 0.2
Download from Wordpress.org plugin directory

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Everybody knows about WP Super Cache, Contact Form 7, All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps those are all interesting plugins, but I tried to fiend some that are not well known but super cool plugins. Here’s the list:

1. Post Teaser
Couple of months ago I bought the Four Hour Work Week audiobook and since that I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss and read his blog regularly. He likes to put the estimated reading time on his post and I tough it’s very cool so I searched a little bit and found this plugin that can display that automagically and also number of words and pictures. (Plugin link)

2. AskApache Google 404
Behind this confusing title there is a plugin that manages 404 errors on your site and displays by default the Google search results for images, news, blogs, videos, web, custom search engine, and your own site. The new version (which isn’t new at all) can display related post and recent posts. (Plugin link)

3. Show Me Options
I like to experiment with plugins and use a lot of them. Some times when I install a plugin it takes some time to find the link to settings of the plugin, Show Me Options does it that for you. (Plugin link)

4. Life Stream
We all have account on many social networking accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, FriendFeed, … This plugin can stream your activity on those networks and display it as a widget or in a post using a shortcode. On my site it looked a little bit bad but I really like the idea behind it. (Plugin link)

6. Shadowbox JS
Shadowbox JS is similar to Lightbox but works with video and audio links. The cool thing about it is if you already have Lightbox you don’t need to edit anything in order to use Shadowbox just install this plugin. (Plugin link)

7. Redirection
You can make short links with this plugin or any type of custom redirection links. You can choose between 301 and 302 redirection and track number of clicks to a link. (Plugin link)

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(Picture from meds.queensu.ca)

On any Linux there are two commands for scheduling at and cron. Programs scheduled by command at will be executed once at a defined time. With crontab it is possible to define a command that will be executed periodicly.
To make sure you can use crontab check if there is /etc/cron.allow file and if it exsists check for your username there. If you use a Debian based Linux you don’t need to worry, you’re may use it by default.
Crontab saves configuration in a simple text file and by entering crontab -e you can edit it in terminal. The syntax for is simple:

time command

Time is construced like this
m h dom mon dow

• m is for minute
• h is hour
• dom is day of month
• mon is month
• dof is day of week

So a simple example would be:

0 0 2 2 1 dd if=/dev/sdb of=./backup

This will backup a device at /dev/sdb at midnight 2nd February and this command will be executed once, to make it run repetitionly, you will need to put asterisk (*) in the place needed. For example if you want to run this command at midnight every day, put asterisk(*) in every place except m and h:

0 0 * * * dd if=/dev/sdb of=./backup

For weekly repetition (every monday):

0 0 * * 0 dd if=/dev/sdb of=./backup

You can also define a range using a hyphen (-) to define a range and a comma for multiple values:

0 12 * * 0-4 mpeg321 ./dont_worry_be_happy.mp3

0 10,16 * * * mailprogram

The first command plays “Don’t worry be happy” every day from monday to friday at 12 and second one checks your mail twice a day.
And for the end the most interesting, to schedule GUI apps with crontab use: export DISPLAY=:0 && app-name.

No related posts.

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(Picture Ubuntu Inside by Kordite)

Phatch

(http://photobatch.stani.be/)

Now how many time did you have couple of photos and needed to do the same editing on them. It could be just resize or something other, but you needed to open every single one and repeat that action. Now there is one cool program for photo and batch, Phatch. You can do: resizing, adding watermark, text, shadow, rotate pictire, … But there is no crop, I needed it couple of time but isn’t there.

Motion

(http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome)

Motion is a motion detection software. If you have camera it’s funny tool to play with. Has a lot of options about sensitivity, output type and other. If you have a large family, or if you’re student and have couple of roommates you can spy who is touching your computer.

StarDict

(http://stardict.sourceforge.net/)

When I used Windows there was a great program called Babylon it’s a commercial dictionary but has some great features like adding multiply dictionaries like Britanica, Oxford, Merriam Webster and also French, German, Chinese and other. When I switched to Linux I missed it a lot. But than I find out about StarDict it’s open source opponent of Babylon. There are also dictionary converters so I was able to convert Babylon dictionaries to StarDict format. There is also an option that if you select a word in other applications and press a defined key you get a popup with definition of the word.

RemsterSys

(http://geekconnection.org/remastersys/remastersystool.html)

With RamasterSys you can create your own Live Linux distro by modifying Ubuntu and share it with your friends. Its made for Debian and Ubuntu. If you are using different Linux distro there are similar tools for every distro like mklivecd for Mandriva. There is a great tutorial about RemasterSys here.

TrueCrypt

(http://www.truecrypt.org/)

TrueCrypt is a multi platform tool able to create crypted partitions using many algorithms. You can use it on Linux, Windows and Mac without any trouble. Basicly it creates a crypted file which can be mounted as partition, but you can also crypt the whole partition. Crypting a system partition can be only done on Windows, it’s possible to crypt a Linux system partition but not with TrueCrypt.

OpenShot

(http://www.openshotvideo.com/)

OpenShot was mad by Jonathan Thomas, when he installed Ubuntu back in 2008. he saw that there is no good video editor for Ubuntu so he decided to make his own. It’s made for GNOME using Python, GTK and MLT framefork. It’s relatively new program and right now exists for Debian based distos and Arch Linux. OpenShot is very powerful, simple and easy to use, it’s not quit stable but you should give him a shot.

EasyTAG

(http://easytag.sourceforge.net/)

If you have a large collection of Mp3s on your hard drive you might want to install EasyTAG. It’s a great tool for editing ID3 tags in multiply mp3s. Not just that it can also rename your tracks to lets say Artist – Song name.mp3. It also supports: MP2, MP4/AAC, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio and WavPac. There are packages for every distribution or if you like you can download source and compile it.

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(Picture: Backups are important by godog)

How important is database backup?

Wordpress is the most popular platform for any use on internet. It is intended to be and is mostly used as a bloging platform but it’s also used as CMS, gallery software and many other. The benefits of that are good community and by that good support from other people using it. Wordpress community is so big that you can sometimes get help within a couple of minutes on Wordpress support forums. But there is also a downside of Wordpress popularity, bugs in Wordpress are well known to hackers and it’s important to make regular backups and to update Wordpress when there is a new version. If your site was attacked you can just reupload the database and files and everything will be normal again. Everything you see on your blog, posts, comments, blogroll links and almost everything else is stored in database. So it’s more important to backup your database than Wordpress files, theme and plugins.

How often to do a Wordpress database backup?

If you are making posts every two weeks and are making backups every two weeks, it will save your posts, but if something happens you will lose comments that you had within last two weeks. It’s hard to say how often you need to make backups of database it depends on how often you post and how often you are getting comments to your blog. There are plugins which are writing to database and if the data that those plugins are entering is important to you, you need to consider that when deciding how often to perform database backup. I’m doing a regular backup every tree days and sometimes even more often if there is something important.

How to backup Wordpress database?

Backups can be performed in many ways:

• using phpMyAdmin
• using Wordpress plugins
• using a script
• by remote access to database

I would not recommend last two because it is much easier to backup using phpMyAdmin or a Wordpress plugin. If you want to backup a database using phpMyAdmin, go to cPnael and find phpMyAdmin click on the database name if left sidebar and click on export tab. Now use settings like on the picture and press Go:

(Click for bigger picture)

The easiest way is using a Wordpress plugin, there is one well known for this called WP-DB-Backup. It can be used to schedule backups and to send them to your email. Just need to setup it once and forget it, it will manage all by itself. The bad thing is that it backups all tables from database you select so if you have installed a new plugin that adds some new tables to database, it will not be backed up. You need to go to plugin setup and manually check the table so that it can be backed up next time.

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(Picture by knihm)

This is the most doubted question when there is a new version of Ubuntu or any other OS. Ubuntu 9.10 is released a week ago and it brings some improvements. There is a new version of the kernel included 2.6.31.1, Ubuntu now ships Ubuntu One by default, GRUB is now in version 2 available. But there are two things that are important to us when we are deciding about clean install or upgrade. Those features are the ext4 filesystem which is now default filesystem and the focus of the Ubuntu developers to the boot time. Ubuntu is doing great job on this, their goal is to have 10s boot time in the next 10.04 LTS release. Many of those improvements are already implemented in the 9.10 Karmic Koala. People who have measured  boot time and compared it with the boot time of Ubuntu 9.04 said that it’s nearly a half.

Almost everyone on Ubuntu forums suggested to do a clean install rather than upgrade (Clean install fiesty vs upgrade) and it was a discussion about Fiesty. If you upgrade to Karmic Koala you will not have the ext4 filesystem which is a little bit faster than old ext3 filesystem and most importantly you will not sense much of the boot time improvements.

The problem with most people is that they have much applications installed and many themes or something else installed so they will need to do that again. I’m like that myself, but upgrades have failed in some cases for me and I had to do a clean install. Now I didn’t even think about upgrade I’ve done a clean install and soon I will do a clean install of Linux Mint that I have on another partition. I first do a clean install, than install couple of applications which I use mostly and which are not included in Ubuntu. And that’s it, I will install other thing when they are needed. So install and setup time for me is 1 hours.

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(Picture by Jonathas Rodrigues)

By migration I mean using some Linux distribution or more distributions as only installed OSes. I’m a Linux user since 2005., my first Linux was Ubuntu 5.04, but I didn’t migrated fully to Linux till September 2009. In this post I will cover some important things that you need to keep in mind about performing migration to Linux. If you have problems with some of them, maybe you need to wait a little bit or use Windows and Linux as dual boot. If you are prepared to delete Windows but still doubting about it, there are many advantages of migration, just jump to the next part.

Things that brought me back to Windows

I have decided many times to use just Linux on my computer, but after a couple of days I have installed Windows again. Every year I tried about 2 times to switch to Linux, but every one of those was a failure. In the beginning it was because customizability of Linux. There is always something to tweak or setup more custom. Sometimes it ended up good and sometimes not. When there was a problem in many cases it was my fault. For example Slackware just prints the output when it boots, I didn’t like that so I spent hours and hours on trying to find the right patch for my kernel and compile it in order to have bootsplash. That worked well and I thought that it’s easy to compile the kernel so I tried to change some kernel configuration and recompile it. That was the end.

Some other things that have brought me back to Windows are games, I liked playing Pro Evolution Soccer so much that it alone was enough to take me back to Windows. Also it was because of some apps that exist only on Windows like DevCpp or Visual Studio. If you are using some IDE for programming or if you use some commercial app for movie editing or something like that, there is a good chance that you will not find that app for Linux. But wait don’t cancel the migration, check Open Source Alternatives to see if there is some application for Linux similar to that you use.

Some other people had problems with drivers, if your computer is brand new try to find out is hardware working in Linux. Support for hardware is much faster available on Windows than on Linux.

Linux awesomeness

Many people install some Linux distribution on a 5Gb partition or even on VM. In order to explore Linux more you need to give it space and time. You don’t need to make the full migration to Linux but at least give it more time and space to shine, you’ll like it.

If you use some famous distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, … you may install any application with just one click and there are thousands and thousands of applications available. The beautiful thing about that is that you can update all those applications and also the OS with one click. You will never be able to do that in Windows, because OS and software you run on Windows is stored on many different servers and there is no way to easily track if there is new version or not.

If you are a developer or you like to learn about the system you use, Linux is perfect for you. There are so many tutorials and books about Linux that you can find on Internet without spending money on expensive books. You will find a lot of joy by customizing the look or behavior of your Linux distribution or app. If you want to build some new application there is amazing set of tools and compilers to help you. There is a large set of libraries so maybe you’ll just need to combine those libraries or build an GUI for them.

On Linux you will not play every new game that comes out, you can play some using Wine. But you can play almost any retro game that exists. There are emulators for Atari, Dos, Sega, N64, PS 1 and 2 and many more. They are all available through software channels and can be downloaded and installed as any other program with just one click.

Some Linux Myths

Many people think that it’s very hard to use Linux and that it’s hard to install it. Linux is just as easy to install and use as Windows and maybe even more easier. Every Linux distribution can be very easily installed and configured through GUI applications, Linux was hard to install but 10 years ago. My friend with which I share a room at college was once bored and asked me if he can play with my laptop. I said OK, but didn’t even mentioned that I have Linux Mint installed on it. He used it without any problem he played a little bit SuperTux, listen to music and played with Chesee. So myth busted

There is also a myth that if you run on some problem there is no one to help you. That is so not true, just on Ubuntu forums there are currently 936,047 registered members, there are so many nice people that know much stuff and can help you at any time. You will even get help faster on any Linux forum than from Microsoft. Just try to email Microsoft and ask for help and try to ask on Ubuntu forum for help and see who’s faster .

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This will be done using a plugin for Wordpress, Contact form 7 and ThickBox. ThickBox is a part of Wordpress so you don’t have to download it and Contact form 7 is very popular plugin and you probably have it . There are 4 simple steps to complete this:

• Inserting ThickBox css and javascript files
• Creating appropriate contact form
• Inserting contact form
• Linking to the form

Inserting ThickBox css and javascript files ThickBox is a dialog widget written using jQuery. It’s part of Wordpress and it’s used in admin area when we try to preview a theme. So there is no need to download it and to change the css file in order to get it work. We just need to insert the code for .js and .css file. Go to your theme folder and find header.php open it up and just before closing head (</head>) add this:

<script src="<?php bloginfo( 'url' ) ?>/wp-includes/js/thickbox/thickbox.js"></script>

Creating appropriate contact form Login to your blog, find Contact Form 7 settings and customize the form. I created mine with just an email and message field. After you done note somewhere the shortcode for the form you will need it later. Inserting contact form Now you will need that short code just insert it instead of mine in the code and don’t forget to put the name of the form in correct brackets. Again find header.php and open it, and right after closing head tag insert:

<div id="cform" style="display:none"><?php echo do_shortcode("[contact-form 3 'Feedback']"); ?>
</div>

This div will only be shown when someone clicks on the link that we will prepare. Linking to the form Find the place where you want link to be shown and insert this:

<a class="thickbox" title="Feedback" href="#TB_inline?preview=1&height=350&width=410&inlineId=cform">Contact me</a>

Change it to your needs and enjoy. You can test mine by clicking the feedback button.

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This video covers a lot of basic things about jQuery like:

• Manipulation
• Selectors
• Attributes
• Events and other

Enjoy!

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<?php
global $wpcf7_contact_form;
if ( ! ( $wpcf7_contact_form = wpcf7_contact_form( 1 ) ) )
return 'Contact form not found!';
$form = $wpcf7_contact_form->form_html();
echo $form;
?>

Just change the number 1 in wpcf7_contact_form( 1 ) to number of your contact form you need.

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3. About author at the end of the post

At these days it’s a little trend to put short information about yourself on the bottom of every post. That is very easy thing to do even for blogs with multiply authors. Login to your administration panel of your blog find Your Profile.

At the end of the page there is a text box near Biographical Info enter some short information about yourself and click Update profile.

That probably will not be visible now on your site because very low number of themes is using these informations somewhere. But that is not the problem it can be easily attached anywhere. Go to your current theme folder, find single.php and open it for editing. After category of a post is printed add this:

<div class="about-author">
<h3>About author</h3>
<?php the_author_description(); ?>
</div>

And that’s it now you will have your information show on every post, but not on pages if you have about me page or contact me it will not be show on those only on posts.

If you want to style it a little bit for example add these css code:

.about-author{
border:1px solid #C5DBFF;
background:#f3fffF;
height:110px;
padding:5px;
}

Later when you need to change the text in your bio just go Your Profile again and change it no need for changing theme files.

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<object width="640" height="505"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/fhyApMVm9Rs&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/fhyApMVm9Rs&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="505"></embed></object>

If you go to W3 validator you will get a lot of errors. I created a simple page with just one embedded Youtube video and if I validate it I get 24 errors and 4 warnings.

There is a solution for this, you can use this code to make that embedded video XHTML clean:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/K5Y8s_HzuD8" width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/K5Y8s_HzuD8" /><param name="FlashVars" value="playerMode=embedded" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /></object>

You need to change the K5Y8s_HzuD8 with ID of a video you need to embed and change the size of video. There are 3 parameters that you need to change and all 3 are repeated once, so you need to do 6 changes or 2 if the size doesn’t matter (of video) .

To make this easy I made a shortcode to simplify this and now it’s even easier to embed clean XHTML video than coping code from Youtube. Find functions.php in your theme folder and put this:

function youtube_embed($atts, $content = null){
extract(shortcode_atts(array(
'size' => 'm'
), $atts));
if($size=="s" || $size=="S"){$width=320; $height=265;}
elseif ($size=="m" || $size=="M"){$width=425; $height=344;}
elseif ($size=="l" || $size=="L"){$width=480; $height=385;}
elseif ($size=="xl" || $size=="XL"){$width=640; $height=505;}
$content = str_replace("watch?v=", "v/", $content);
$output='<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="' . $content . '" width="'  . $width . '" height="'  . $height . '"><param name="movie" value="'  . $content . '" /><param name="FlashVars" value="playerMode=embedded" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /></object>';
return $output;
}
add_shortcode('youtube', 'youtube_embed');

Shortcode API is something like [music] if you insert something like this in your post it will call a function that is declared to handle this code.

Now for embedding youtube videos we will use a short code like:

And it will embed your video in the default size (width 425 and height 344). To change the size use it like this:

You can use:

1. size=”s” (width 320 height 265)
2. size=”m” (width 425 height 344 : default)
3. size=”l” (width 480 height 385)
4. size=”xl” (width 640 height 505)

So here are examples of embedding video and by the way watch that video it’s very funny .

Size S

Size M

Size L

Size XL

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Anyway if you want to shorten the url and display the short url on the page you can do that with some php code. There are 5 api methods to do that: shorten, simpleshorten, post and schedule. First two are just shrinking the url, last two are shrinking url and posting it to twitter or facebook or both. Schedule can be setup to post later. If you want to want to display the url I don’t suggest using post or or schedule because every time the user visits the page it will post a tweet, if your followers click the link it will produce a new tweet and so again and again.

Every method except simpleshorten returns JSON object. I will show how to get the short url using shorten method. First if you’re not registrated at su.pr I suggest you do that because you will not be able to track number of clicks to link if you are not registrated.

Here is the PHP code insert it somewhere before the place you want your link to show, it will not post anything just get the link:

<?php
$title = the_title('', '', false);
$title_enc = urlencode($title);
global $post;
$permalink=get_permalink($post->ID)
$posturl="http://su.pr/api/shorten?longUrl=".$permalink."&login=username&apiKey=yourapi";
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/class-snoopy.php');
$snoopy = new Snoopy;
$snoopy->fetchtext($posturl);
$results = json_decode($snoopy->results, true);
$shrink = $results['results'][urldecode($permalink)]['shortUrl'];
?>

Instead of username and yourapi put your username and apikey for su.pr.

If you wont to use su.pr short links on your own domain to have something like yourdomain.com/asdf, read instructions on su.pr site and also there is now a bug at su.pr that adds su.pr/ inside of the short link, so my link looks like http://su.pr/skepo.info/p8BR instead of http://skepo.info/p8BR. You can fix it by adding the line:

  $shrink = str_replace("su.pr/", "", $shrink);

After the line line

  $shrink = $results['results'][urldecode($permalink)]['shortUrl'];

Later when you need to show short link just paste this in your theme file:

<a href="<?php print($title_enc); ?>">Short link</a>

If you have any trouble try entering in the browser http://su.pr/api/shorten?longUrl=URL&login=USERNAME&apiKey=APIKEY, just change the URL, USERNAME and APIKEY. The JSON object you receive is easy to read and it will be easy to understand why it’s not working.

If you want to use short link using shortcode go to your theme folder and find functions.php and paste this code at the and before ?> :

function supr_link($attrs){
$title = the_title('', '', false);
$title_enc = urlencode($title);
global $post;
$permalink=get_permalink($post->ID);
$posturl="http://su.pr/api/shorten?longUrl=".$permalink."&login=username&apiKey=yourapi";
$snoopy = new Snoopy;
$snoopy->fetchtext($posturl);
$results = json_decode($snoopy->results, true);
$shrink = '<a href="'. $results['results'][urldecode($permalink)]['shortUrl'] . '">Short link</a>';
$shrink = str_replace("su.pr/", "", $shrink);
return $shrink;
}
add_shortcode('supr', 'supr_link');

Now you can use [supr] to show the shortlink to the current page. Again you need to enter you username and apikey, change the text Short link on 10th line to something you want. If you’re not using su.pr on your own domain delete 11th line.

Here is an example: Short link

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Not only that, it also tracks the Social Activity on many social media sites like: Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and many more including Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers, it displays Alexa rankings and tracks number of backlinks.

According to their blog there will soon be a iPhone app that will let us easily check rankings from our iPhones. Cool

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