Let it be known. I am back on the project and will be releasing a new version for WordPress 3.4 and above. If you have not upgraded yet, it is recommended that you do.

Now to the problems I had before. Mostly this was “paging” problems. It was, and still not is my strong suit in scripting a plugin. I tried to get too fancy in the paging parameters, and got lost. Maybe tried to be a little too fancy.

I wanted to have nice permalinks based on top/jobtype/location or something like that. It became apparent that was not going to happen. Even though I made successful attempts on a couple of WordPress boards … it was still failing.

With the arrival of WordPress 3.yada, custom pages came into the mix. I am now able to adapt my previous coding into this highly adaptable environment. I am close to a solution. You need to just bear with me.

As with the previous version, this is still a structured plugin. That is, it will meld with your WordPress blog. Being that, I am NOT writing a plugin that you can just blast millions of jobs onto your blog. You will still need to structure your job pages that fit with your theme (theme meaning your type of blog). If you think that you can easily throw up hundreds-of-thousands of pages with this plugin, then this plugin is not for you.

For the developers out there, if you look inside the old plugin, there is a Php Class for the SimplyHired API. This is still open. I would like feedback, or improvements sent to me as you deem worthy. It is the central part of this plugin.

I am also developing another class to “wrap” the SimplyHired API class to be used by WordPress. This will also be open, and would like to hear from any other developers out there that would like to join me on this project.

Again, I am sorry for letting a lot of you down. Be assured that I am back behind the screen and working the kinks out. I am also going to try to address all of the pleas on the WordPress forums and any personal emails that were sent to me.

Best Regards,

Ronnie

Version 0.2.1 of the WP-SimplyHired API WordPress Plugin finalizes the framework & widget feature. This version also moves the plugin out of Alpha status and into Beta.

Changes in version 0.2.1 include:

• The widget now has SimplyHired attribution per their terms.
• SimplyHired click-tracking javascript added so you can get paid for clicks.
• Main stylesheet introduced.
• Minor Html and Admin code cleanup.

Future 0.2.x changes coming very soon:

• Add search form to widget
• Add “post a job” button to widget
• Add IP geo-location to widget

Coming in version 0.3 will be added shortcode functionality. This is a precursor to the automatic page generation for the job board section. Having the shortcode functionality will be useful at any rate, and you can start creating a foundation of niche job listing pages now.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, you can leave them below.

Enter WP-SimplyHired API plugin for WordPress which gives you the capability to render job search results in real-time on your pages. While the API requires advanced web development skills to implement, the plugin will make it a breeze. It’s an excellent way to build more custom job search sites or add customized backfill jobs.

The plugin is currently in Alpha testing and is available at the WordPress Plugin Repository.

For latest information on the plugin, visit the WP-SimplyHired API WordPress plugin page.

Example of the widget from the plugin can be seen on the sidebar to the right labeled WP Plugin Jobs.

What to expect from this plugin can be seen at a niche construction job search website at Buildz.net. The API elements on this construction job site will soon be rolled into the plugin.

If you use this plugin, drop me a line below. Drop a comment if you are at all curious too.

I have 2 gigs of memory and it has been more than sufficient with the apps I was running. Lately though, the upgrades are demanding more of that memory. While I can not single out one or two apps in particular, it may be a combination of all the apps that are ganging up on me.

There is one program that was always demanding — Adobe Photoshop Elements. I am running version 3 of Elements, and never had a reason to upgrade it. By now Adobe has advanced Elements to version 8 or 9, maybe more. The fact is that version 3 served me well, and I had no reason for concern.

I believe in the “what ever is not broke, don’t fix” principal. I have Elements, Notepad++, Html-Kit, TopStyle Lite, and a host of other light weight tools that get me through the day. Now those antiquated programs are on their way out for bigger things — things I have no replacement for.

While I understand what is ahead of me, I can not get past what came before. I spent countless hours on finding a simple editor that would handle files on an FTP Server, thus the Html-Kit. That software led me to TopStyle Lite, of which I have always crafted my CSS in. Notepad++ came out of the blue one day, it satisfied a need and has been a staple for over a year.

My laptop is showing signs of wear. I can not recognize the E key. The J and F keys are fading due to my constant hovering. Forget about the bumps on the G and H keys. Truth told, I never needed that tactile response.

There is grime around the edges of my trackpad. The trackpad keys stick, even though I never used either.

My keyboard sticks at the most inopportune moments. I just got an electrical notice that my battery is failing. And hell, I never did like my screen display after mail-ordering it.

I am now in the process of moving all known data offsite. I will have to purchase a new computer. I will not like any part of this process.

If anyone leaves a comment, you had better be sympathetic or have gone through this before. I am not in the mood to deal with your own personal problems, nor do I have a solution for them.

One night, on a whim, I decided to enlist into the ranks of Elance. Registration was easy and painless, but it soon became apparent that I would have to fork over some cash to really get anywhere here. Out came my credit card and I purchased a basic plan with 25 connects.

Connects are a method for Elance to control providers from bidding on every project that they come across. You will need at least one connect for a jobs under $500, two for up to $1000, and so on. You can buy extra connects of course — it takes money to make money.

Learning the system was not that difficult. As with any system, they have their quirks. Some things did irritate me though. Their messaging system sucks with endless new windows and unread message flags that you have to clear manually. But all in all, Elance is very nice to navigate and work with.

Cold feet and butterflies
My biggest fear was not landing a job at all. Not to be anti-global, but the Eastern market has the manpower and the lower rates to out-bid me on every project I was seeking. Looking at past jobs, where they were hired, and the rates, this was more than a fear. It was plain reality. I had begun to wonder why I was here.

A couple days into Elance, I had landed my first job. It was a small one for a couple hours of work. Guess where the employer was based? In India! Wait a minute. Yep. India. All my fears went out the window or at least they were flapping in the breeze off of the curtain.

My bid was not the lowest by a long shot. I saw what the client wanted, what was attainable, and what was not. I was detailed and methodical in my approach.

The proposal dealt with the Thesis framework, which I knew nothing about. It also dealt with a product feed that I knew nothing about either.

I spoke of technical details that were achievable and non-achievable based on past experiences with similar scripts, frameworks, and criteria. It did not matter if I knew the actual scripting underneath, I knew what I could achieve given the chance. And that shown through to the client’s eye, as I soon found out afterwards.

Steeled determination
After this initial contact, I became more confidant in my bidding process. I have since landed three other jobs this month for a personal WordPress website, a conversion of an Html website to WordPress, and a unique WordPress plugin for related content that includes modules for YouTube, Twitter, and Digg (well Digg is down right now, but testing is still being conducted).

I will blog later on about my experiences with Elance in the hopes that others may want to take a leap. And no, I am not an affiliate of Elance, nor would I actually recommend them unless you are gung-ho developers who may be in a pinch. There are opportunities to be had and worth going after.

Before Firefox 3 came out, there was a great little add-on that would resize form elements on the page. Firefox was updated and so did I,but the add-on did not. I missed that little thing.

Just installed a new theme and was updating a slew of post excerpt boxes, so I just had to go see if there was an alternative out there. And there was. It is called the Text Area Resizer & Mover oddly enough. It is well worth the download. Especially if you work with quite a few forms on a daily basis. You can even move the box to a different position on the screen.

Here is a WordPress tip for enlarging the main content textarea box for the posts and pages. There is an in the backend under Settings>Writing were you can set that to how many lines tall. I have mine set to 20 and it gives me a pretty tall box to work in.

Yoast’s Sociable plugin for WordPress is a popular tool to display social bookmarking buttons to quickly Digg, Stumble, Tweet, or otherwise share your posts with the World.

My problem, or maybe it is just a preference, is that I do not like teeny-tiny 16×16 icons. I want large in-your-face icons that just shout out “click me now”.

The current design is great for a location inline with your post heading. But the Sociable block of code follows your post or page content.

Assuming that your reader has ventured to the end of the post and has been interested, then shout at him/her with larger-than-life calls to action. Make it easy for them to see the buttons, do not dim them. Make them want to click that button now!

First replace the default icon set, two methods

Venture around on the web and look for a set of social bookmarking icons that will fit in nicely with your theme. There are several free icon sets out there – Google it. Or, you could just create your own (I can’t, not that graphically talented.)

Once you have found your icon set, rename image filenames to match the Sociable icon filenames. You may do this to none, some, or all of the files. Depends on the set.

Method One: Upload all of the new icons to the Yoast Sociable image directory, directly overwriting them. Keep a backup of your new icons for safe keeping in case Sociable update resets or you want to use for other theme designs.

Sociable image directory can be found in:

(WPInstallDirectory)/wp-content/plugins/sociable/images


Method Two: Create a directory for your new icons inside of the Yoast Sociable image directory.

Open and edit main Sociable file sociable.php per the following:

// Find the following line around line 600:
$imagepath = $sociablepluginpath.'images/';

// Revise $imagepath to point to new directory
$imagepath = $sociablepluginpath.'images/newdirectoryname';

Hey Joost: It would be great to allow the user to set a custom directory for icon image sets. It would extend Sociable very nicely, allowing people to plop image sets in easily.

Image filetypes: The image filetypes of your custom icon set may not match the hard coded filetypes in the Sociable plugin. Filetypes are mostly PNG though, with some GIFs here & there.

You can either convert your icon to the Sociable image type, or edit the plugin code

I was lazy and edited the plugin! But you should probably convert to the correct type, and preserve the transparent areas of the image as well.

Another suggestion: Since most freely available icon sets on the Internet are PNG format, perhaps converting all icons in the default Sociable set to PNG? This would facilitate easy swapping of PNG icon sets. Might even spur some graphically talented individuals to develop sets for Sociable — that would be kewl.

And now, the CSS for “in-your-face”

This is the easy part.

First go into WpAdmin->Settings->Sociable and make sure the option for using the Sociable stylesheet is unchecked. Save your settings.

Add the following into your main theme stylesheet:

/*---:[ Yoast Sociable Plugin ]:---*/
.sociable { margin: 16px 0; text-align: center; background-color: #dcdcdc; border: 1px solid silver; padding: .7em 0; }
.sociable_tagline { padding-bottom: .7em;	font: bold 1.6em Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;}
.sociable ul {	display: inline; margin: 0 !important;	padding: 0 !important; }
.sociable ul li {display: inline !important;	list-style-type: none; margin: .3em; padding: 1px;}
.sociable img {width: 48px; height: 48px;	}

.sociable-hovers {opacity: 1;	-moz-opacity: 1;filter: alpha(opacity=40);}
.sociable-hovers:hover {opacity: .45;-moz-opacity: .45;filter: alpha(opacity=100);}

.sociable a { border:0 !important; }			
.sociable a:hover {background-color: #dcdcdc; }	

Feel free to edit CSS to your own preference. This is just a basic, not hard to notice type of style.

Play close attention to the width/height of .sociable img class. I am using 48×48 here. If you have a lot of icons, you may want to adjust .sociable img to 32×32, thereby reducing the 48′s if you get squeezed for space.

I suggest using only buttons for the social sites you frequent regularly, if at all possible, plus a couple of the biggies & email. Focus on your crowd and give them the buttons they know and want to see. Too many choices for your users, and they may not notice their call to action.

You will also notice that I reversed the hover opacity. It is set to be fully visible, and will fade when hovered over. The reasoning is that some people, myself included, find it hard to see what is there without hovering over each icon individually only to find out there is no Stumble or whatever.

Hopefully, this will make it easier on your readers (less difficult actually) and will spur more clicking from them. You want them to smack that button, so show it off. Dimming and diminishing the size of these icons seems counter-productive, silly.

And feel free to test these buttons for me right now.

Have you seen the following code inside the HEAD section of your WordPress blog source code?

%MINIFYHTMLb9d0767049069fa6a647af31550c53680%

Ever wonder how it got there, and how to get rid of it?

The inline style gets injected into the head section when you use the Recent Comments widget. The widget applies a filter to wp_head() when it is activated.

In order to get rid of the inline style, short of modifying the core file (not advised), is to apply a filter of our own. Let’s get to work on that.

Move the styling to your theme style.css file

Copy the following code to your theme css file:

.recentcomments a{display:inline !important;padding: 0 !important;margin: 0 !important;}

Once you have the code inside your style.css file, you can edit it to your hearts content.

Add a filter to remove a filter (Pre 2.8)

The wp_head filter for wp_widget_recent_comments_style was dropped in WordPress 2.8, and was renamed to recent_comments_style. Why it was not removed altogether is a mystery.

Yep, seems a little crazy, but we are going to add a filter to remove the stock WordPress filter.

Add the following to your theme functions.php file:

function remove_wp_widget_recent_comments_style() {
   if ( has_filter('wp_head', 'wp_widget_recent_comments_style') ) {
      remove_filter('wp_head', 'wp_widget_recent_comments_style' );
   }
}
add_filter( 'wp_head', 'remove_wp_widget_recent_comments_style', 1 );

Here we are adding a filter via the WordPress add_filter() method. The first argument, wp_head, which is the hook where the style filter gets applied in the first place.

The second argument is the callback to our custom filter, remove_wp_widget_recent_comments_style().

The third parameter is the priority of when our filter will get processed. We are setting this to 1 to insure that it takes priority over the WordPress core function. If this argument is too higher of a number, then we run the risk of our filter not taking precedence.

Our custom filter is simple, it first checks to see if the WordPress filter is present. If it is present, then we simply remove the filter. The remove_filter() function takes the same arguments as add_filter()

Add an action to remove an action (2.9.1 and on)

After reading later comments that were recently posted, it became clear that later versions of WordPress caused the original filter fix above not to work. Investigation reveals that the original filter was dropped in 2.8, renamed and is now an action that fires during widgets_init.

Why they did not just drop this altogether is a mystery. It is something that should be handled via a stylesheet. In fact, if you look at the TwentyTen theme that comes with the later versions of WordPress 3.0 and on, you will find that theme addresses this issue with the following snippet of code in their functions.php file:

function twentyten_remove_recent_comments_style() {
	global $wp_widget_factory;
	remove_action( 'wp_head', array( $wp_widget_factory->widgets['WP_Widget_Recent_Comments'], 'recent_comments_style' ) );
}
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'twentyten_remove_recent_comments_style' );

Drop this code into your functions.php file and the styling will be removed from your Head section.

The history of this snippet was originally suggested by Andrew Nacin in a comment to a bug that Artem Russakovskii opened up in the WordPress tracker. Artem’s solution for removing the inline style for the Recent Comments is exactly the same as what the TwentyTen theme uses.

What is odd with this whole thing is that the styling disappeared for a short while during 2.8 and magically showed up in 2.9.1.

Some thoughts

While the inline style does not hurt anything, some purists just hate seeing it there in the first place. It is one of those quirky things that WordPress code does to you.

The remove_filter() WordPress function can come in handy for other things that bug the heck out of you. One example would be the curly quotes that replace normal quotes inside of your posts and pages.

You can remove the wptexturize filter from any of the following hooks for example:

remove_filter('category_description', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('list_cats', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('comment_author', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('comment_text', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('single_post_title', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_title', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'wptexturize');

You can think of remove_filter is to WordPress, as reset.css is to style sheets. Wonderful world it is.

The list is in no particular order. It is first found, first listed. Newer findings at the end.

• Tutorial Outpost Digg style bookmarking site.
• Good-Tutorials.com User submitted and ratings site.
• PhotoshopCAFE Ugly site. Active forum area.
• Photoshop Tutorials Slightly dated, but original tutorials.
• Photoshop From Tutorialized User submission and rating site.
• CreativePro Photoshop Articles Original, but slightly dated.
• Photoshop for Photographers A few digital photography tips (CS2, CS3)
• Axialis Tutorials Integration with Axialis products.
• HeathRowe Photoshop Tutorials Basic tips and tricks. Outdated.
• TeamPhotoshop Tutorials & Tips Original submissions and user forum.
• Grafika PS Tutorials (Czech) Original tutorials (Czech only).
• BioRust PS Tutorials Original tutorial community.
• CBT Cafe PS Tutorials & Articles Wide topic range. Some video tutorials.
• Photoshop Lover Submission and rating site. Massive.
• Planet Photoshop Tutorials Excellent, original. And in video!
• Computer Darkroom Misc. digital photography tutorials. Still being updated.
• Phong PS Tutorials Very detailed.
• Magic Pixel PS Workshop Very dated.
• Informit Photoshop Articles Sample chapters from popular books.
• Digital Photography Tutorials Dated, but good digital photo information.
• The Makeshift Miracle Tutorials Techniques from a cartoonist.
• Shanzcan Photoshop Tutorials Downloadable tutorials. Somewhat dated.
• Photoshop Brushes Tutorials More than just brushes. Seems to be updated.
• GrafX Design PS Tutorials Original tuts, updated on a regular basis.
• Pegaweb PS Tutorials Very original. Retro-web effects too.
• RetouchPRO Tutorials Restoration and retouch techniques.

The new kids on the block.

• PhotoshopTutorials.ws Includes Elements. Plans for older versions of PS.
• Layers Magazine Photoshop Tutorials How-to for everything Adobe.
• PhotoshopStar Very original and lesser known gem.
• PSDTuts Original. Paid submissions. Very popular.
• Absolute Cross Original and organized.
• Free Online Classes Original and easy to follow.
• Abduzeedo Original tutorials and design inspiration.
• PSHero.com Original tutorials, custom shapes and more.
• Tutorial9 Original, with photography tutorials.
• Photoshop Talent Exclusives Large community driven site, with contests.
• Adobe Tutorialz Original. Includes photo editing techniques.
• Maciej Kwas Young talent from Poland.
• PSD Fan Original and very active.

There are probably more out there than listed above. If you have a suggestion to add to the list, drop a comment below.

There are a couple of avenues you can take to get a handle on this twitter overload. Probably more than a couple, but I will cover two of them right now.

Group your tweets with TweetDeck

If you haven’t heard of TweetDeck, then it is worth investigating. TweetDeck has a neat feature for creating groups. Once a group is created, then you can add any of your tweeps to the group.

I have a few groups. One in particular is a group that I labeled uber-friends. This group displays tweets from people that I really want to follow daily.

Another group I have for technical Php broadcasts from places such as Zend and other noteworthy people or sites. This type of group is just great for daily goings-on in the Php sector.

I have other groups, but I think you can get the idea of how groups in TweetDeck can work to your advantage.

Filter your tweets with Twitter Throttle

If you are used to your web based Twitter home page and want a viable solution for filtering out the noise, then I would suggest a new GreaseMonkey script for Firefox called Twitter Throttle by Jon Fox.

Twitter Throttle hides multiple tweets from the same person. Hidden tweets have an ‘expand’ link so you can still view the tweet if you wish.

If two or more tweets in a row are from the same person, then it will group all of those tweets into a single hidden, and expandable, box. If this is the case, the leftover room from the consolidated tweets are filled in with previous tweets until 20 lines of tweets are filled.

Setting up Twitter Throttle is fairly easy, if you are used to working with GreaseMonkey scripts. The only thing you need to edit in the script would be your username and password.

How do you filter through the noise?

If you have any hints or tips on how you use Twitter more efficiently and filter through the noise, drop a comment below. I would be interested in knowing your thoughts.