Recently, Facebook enabled anyone to add a little bit of code to their site to enable the “Like” feature on their site, which allows friends to quickly tell everyone about your site and also for users to see if any of their friends like the page their on. It’s a very social way of spreading word around about your site.

Adding the code

First, you need to decide where to put the button – it might be before your content, after it, or perhaps in the header or footer. If you want it before or after your content, you’ll need to place the code in single.php and if you want it in your header or footer, you’ll need to put it in header.php or footer.php respectively.

Once you’ve opened up the file for editing, just insert the following code where you want the button to appear:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:60px;"></iframe>

Now you also have a few configuration options that you should be aware of. Change the following values to customise your button:

layout=button_count

This will just show the button and the counter, as opposed to adding text next to the button showing who else you know likes it

show_faces=true

Will add the friends icon underneath the button.

action=recommend

Change the wording from Like to Recommend

color_scheme=dark

This might better suit your color scheme.

Did you give it a go? Did you come across any problems?

UPDATE: Evidently this code also works on BlogSpot blogs. It is only intended for WordPress sites, but there have been reports of it working on BlogSpot too.

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5. What is the Loop? [WORDPRESS]

While using their site today, I noticed a news update showing that they now have an iPhone app that does everything that the website does, providing the same results in an easy-to-read fashion and even providing links to information on the top-level domain (TLD) and links to a list of registrars that are able to register the TLD you are interested in.

If you’re considering a self-hosted WordPress installation, you should take time to select a good domain name and domai.nr is the perfect tool to do so, and now you can use it on the go.

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Essentially, all you need to do is paste the URL of the video page on its own line with nothing else on it and if the video hosting site is on WordPress’ whitelist of video providers, the video will be embedded. As it stands, the list of whitelisted providers is as follows, which includes all the major players:

If for some reason, you are trying to embed a video from a site not listed above, you have the option of locally adding a provider to your own whitelist by following WordPress’ instructions. This requires some PHP knowledge to implement.

And now, to show how it works, I have posted the URL of a YouTube video in the line below. Of course, you won’t see that – you instead should be seeing one of this year’s biggest viral videos.

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5. Contact

For quite a while, this threw me because often articles are written for experienced users without taking beginners into consideration (something I try to avoid), so they will tell you to put the code in the loop, without ever telling you what the loop is.

Well, the loop is simply a portion of your theme files that display the main content on each page. It (should) always start with a specific piece of code and end with a specific of code.

The start of the loop is identified by

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

And the end of the loop is identified by

<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<p><?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

So, the loop is everything between these two lines of code. These lines will appear on template files such as index.php, single.php and archive.php. If you are trying to add code to the loop it is because you are trying to add functionality to the way posts are displayed and what is displayed in them. So you will need some PHP and CSS knowledge to know where to put the code and how to apply it appropriately so that you achieve the desired result. There’s always help on offer over at the WordPress Forums, but honestly, the best way to learn (rather than just have someone help you fix an immediate problem) is by experimenting. You might not want to do this on an important live site, but if you do, just be sure to backup everything first!

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The trouble is that you when you write code straight into a WordPress post, WordPress will assume that it is intended to be read as code and not as plain text, which is what you are trying to achieve, so that readers can see the code, rather than WordPress trying to make sense of the code.

You need to use a plugin so that when you paste the code into your post, WordPress knows not to see the code as code, but rather, as text.

I have found that the best plugin for the job is SyntaxHighlighter Evolved, written by viper007bond, based on the original project by Alex Gorbatchev.

Installing the plugin

The best way to install plugins now is to use the built-in installer within WordPress, rather than downloading the zip file and uploading it to your server. It’s much cleaner this way. From your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins and then Add New. Search for the plugin and follow the steps to install and activate it.

Once installed, you may want to modify the options so that code is displayed exactly the way you want it to appear. There’s many options that you can include in the shortcode every time you want to display code to tweak each instance of code. These options are located under Settings> SyntaxHighlighter.

Using the plugin

Now whenever you want to display code, you just need to write a little shortcode in your post editor, depending on what type of code you are trying to paste. For example, if you want to display some html, you would write the following:

[html]HTML code here[/html]

And if you wanted to paste some PHP, you would write this:

[php]PHP code here[/php]

There are shortcodes for nearly any code you could possibly want to paste and a full list of shortcodes is available from the project’s Wiki. However, you can also include some options within your shortcode to tweak the display of the code. The full list of these tweaks can be seen at the bottom of your SyntaxHighlighter Options page, but for example, if you wanted to highlight lines 4 & 12 of your PHP code, you could write this:

[php highlight="4,12"]PHP code here[/php]

Feel free to let me know if you have any issues using this plugin, or whether you have a better way of showing code in WordPress.

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3.0 was an immensely stable version in my opinion, and WordPress even went on to state that it was as a result of the beta testing by the community. Nonetheless, minor bugs are bound to get through, and this release resolves these issues.

It is recommended that all WordPress installations be upgraded to the latest version, which can be done by clicking on the link when you log in to your dashboard.

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• It’s WordPress update time. 3.0.1 is now live. (thenextweb.com)

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I had struggled for a while with trying to figure out how to use them in WordPress, but when it came down to it, it was merely a case of adding a little HTML. Here’s how to do it:

First of all, create all the text on your page, including where you will be linking from (a list of FAQs) for examples and where you will be linking to (the anchor – a set of answers for example). Bear in mind that you can use anchors to link to another page altogether, so the link does not need to be on the same page as the anchor.

Create the anchor

Once you have created all your text, go to the place that you want to place the anchor. This is most likely some text, but can just as easily be an image or any other part of your WordPress post. Making sure that you are in the HTML editing part of your WYSIWYG editor, put your cursor before the text/image/code. Once there, you will need to “mark” the text, so that the place of the anchor is specified. You should do this by putting the following code ahead of the text/code, changing the word label for any string you choose (this could be descriptive, or simply sequential numbering):

<a name="label">Text and/or code here...</a>

Repeat this process for every part of the page that you want anchors, using a different label for each one.

Create the link

Now that your anchor is in place, you are ready to create the link to it. This is done by using the href HTML tag. As such, use can use relative or absolute links accordingly. The href tag syntax is made up like this:

<a href="URL you are linking to">Text that will link to URL</a>

Therefore, in this case, you will create a link such as this, replacing the appropriate parts so that it suits your application:

<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/faqs/#label">Text linking to anchor</a>

If the link and the anchor are on the same page however, you can use a relative URL, which involves deleting everything between the first quotation marks (“) and the hash symbol (#), leaving a much simpler href:

<a href="#label">Text linking to anchor</a>

Now by way of example, you can go to the top of this post using this anchor link. Let me know if you have any problems or suggestions, but even more so, let me know if this helped you out.

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5. Automate WordPress Database Backups for Care-Free Protection

I’m sure you’re sick of hearing everyone reminding you to backup your database, usually before performing any upgrades to your site. Well, this is largely because irreparable damage can be done if something goes wrong with your database and far too many people rarely, if ever, backup their database.

I used to be in the same boat, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t regret it on more than one occasion. As your sites and their content and comments become invaluable and irreplaceable, you’ll see the value in backing up your database, where all the “meat” of your site is contained including post content, settings, categories, links and taxonomies.

There are many ways of doing this, but for most people, the following method I’m about to show you will more than suffice and you’ll never find yourself with lost content.

Get a GMail account

First off, you’ll need to get a new GMail account (or your personal one if you frequently have loads of free space left). You can use any email account really, but I recommend GMail because the free space provided is huge and you’ll need the ability to filter email like GMail can.

Install WP-DB-Backup

Now you need to install the plugin that is going to perform the backup for you without your input. Install the WP-DB-Backup. You can either search for and install it from within your WordPress console, or download it directly from WordPress.

Set up WP-DB-Backup

Tools menu

Once the plugin is installed and operational, head over to the settings page from your admin console, by going to Tools->Backup.

Once in the settings panel, you’re going to set it up so that the plugin performs a SQL dump (export of all your database data) on a regular basis and emails the resulting .sql file to the email address we set up above.

The page is split into three sections – ignore the first two for this tutorial – we’re interested in the scheduled backup section.

Make sure that you select all the tables listed (unless you’re concerned with file size and are certain that you wouldn’t miss the data if it disappeared). Then you’ll need to set up a frequency for performing the backup: this will largely be a function of how often your blog changes and how large your SQL database is (and thus how much storage you will need to keep an archive of SQL databases in your email account). My SQL backups tend to be about 700KB, so a 30-day archive, based on once-a-day backups will only use about 21MB of storage space (compared with GMail’s 7GB+ of storage).

For most people, once a day is more than adequate. Unless you’re running a high activity blog, you’re unlikely to need anything more. Bear in mind that performing this function weighs down your server periodically, so if you’re doing a large backup every hour, you might notice a degradation of service.

Now that you’ve selected your backup frequency, enter your email address that we set up earlier and hit Schedule Backup.

Set up GMail filter

Creating your GMail filter

I set up my GMail account so that it will keep 30 days worth of backups and then automatically delete them. I figure that if there’s a problem with my website, I’ll figure it out within 30 days! Again, this is done completely automatically (after setting up this filter) so that once you set it up, you never need to do anything again. Of course, if you want to keep more than 30 days of backups, that’s simple to do as well.

Setting your filter settings

Login to your GMail account and head over to the Settings page, and then head over to the filters tab. Now you’re going to “Create A New Filter”. Now insert the information as shown in the images to the right. Bear in mind that you will need to change the From address to reflect your own domain (wordpress@yourdomain.com).

Now before you start freaking out once you notice that I’ve checked the “Delete It” box, listen up. What this filter does is it takes all of your backup emails, marks them as read and sends them to your Trash folder. The reason you do this is because GMail account automatically delete anything in the trash folder after 30 days. This means that your trash folder will hold 30 days worth of backup emails before automatically trashing them for you, thus you never need to touch it.

What your GMail Trash folder will start to look like

Should you ever need to retrieve a backup, just head to your trash folder, and you’ll see 30 days worth of database backups for you to download and restore to your server.

Of course, you can perform this on multiple WordPress installations using the same mail account, as I do. You are only limited by the amount of space in your email account. However, even though I backup seven or eight databases, I still use just 1% of my GMail storage, so you’re not likely to encounter any problems.

Going the extra mile

I can’t say that I’m so paranoid that I’d suspect there’s a chance of my database being compromised and on the same day, GMail happens to lose all of my data, but if you really are that concerned, you could always modify your filter to forward each email to another email address hosted by someone else.

Alternatively, you could also do something more labour-intensive and just download the attachments every day.

Feel free to post any questions in the comments, and if you found this useful, let me know or share the article.

UPDATE: Bear in mind that if you install new plugins which create tables in your database, you will need to add them to the selection of tables to back up as new tables are not automatically added to the selection.

UPDATE II: As Paul rightly pointed out, you can achieve the same effect using another plugin – WP-DBManager – which also includes other functions, such as DB optimization, repair and dropping/emptying tables from within WordPress. I have since changed from WP-DB-Backup to WP-DBManager, but understand that there is nothing wrong with WP-DB-Backup – it’s just that WP-DBManager does more. Thanks for the tip Paul.

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Until now, I was forced to rely on either American news sources (which I despise) or use the old BBC mobile site, which was pretty abysmal:

Now however, they have produced a beautiful and easy to navigate app for staying up to date with the world’s most neutral and reliable news source. In future updates, I’d like them to consider push notifications for breaking news, or further customisation of news sections (like news from the UK regions, as you can do on the BBC News website, for staying up-to-date with news in my home county), but all in all they’ve made a great (albeit late) start on adopting the iPhone platform.

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Now, to help the days in the office pass by quicker, I wanted a way to download programs onto my iPhone so I could watch them during the day and while I’m out in the field / on holiday etc.

Well, I found just the ticket. By using tactics already described in the posts above, coupled with a couple of new techniques, it is easily possible. Here’s how:

1. Follow the first four steps in this article to get Vidalia installed on your machine. (P.S. I have since switched to a Mac since writing that article, so if you have a Mac, you can find your config file under <> – Library – Vidalia – torrc). To check that Tor is working correctly, go to any BBC iPlayer show and see if you can watch it.
2. Now download Get iPlayer Automator from Tom Tech. (Please note that this program is only available for the Mac – there are alternatives for PCs)
3. After you have installed this program, launch it and head straight into the preferences.
4. Under proxy, ensure you select “Provided” and enter 127.0.0.1:9050 into the box shown. Feel free to set the remainder of the preferences to suit your setup. I personally find it very handy to automatically add shows into iTunes and add Series-Link Programmes to Queue to startup (see below for explaination).
5. Now just enter the name of the show that you want to download in the search box and the program will show you all the available shows for download (note that occasionally, high-cost shows including American series such as Heroes, or films are not available for the iPhone because of licensing costs).
6. Now just select the show you want to download, add it to the queue and then hit start to start downloading the files. The files will be downloaded to wherever you specify in the preferences.
7. Now a feature that I really love about this awesome piece of freeware is the Series-Link feature. If you want the program to automatically download all available episodes of a certain show as and when they become available, hit the PVR (Personal Video Recorder) button across the top of the screen to enter the PVR Manager. In this window, you simply search for the series you want to record and then select auto-record to add it to the list of shows you want to download automatically. Now every time you launch the app, it will search for new episodes of these shows (provided that option is selected in the preferences).

The last thing you need to do is to be sure to donate to Tom for the excellent work he has done on this software, only to provide it to all for free.

If you have any questions about these methods, are having trouble setting it up, or want to share your own tips, please leave a comment, or get in touch with me.

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