Wordpress

Image via WikipediaWe’re now up to 1.7!! I got fed up of ” characters and other punctuation characters getting turned into ? by magpie, also, no display of Chinese or Turkish characters (thanks http://blog.mukispace.com and http://blog.mavikalemler.net/ I used your sites url to test the output of foreign language characters in UTF-8

I moved the determining of the feed location to my server now so the plugin code is a little shorter and neater. Now it should always pick up the feed location from the head of the target site, if it can’t find one there, it searches through the page content for the most likely link to a feed so as long as a feed is linked in the page, it will be picked up and parsed by commentluv.

The plugin itself should be more stable, as long as your blog hosting has the ability to CURL or access external files then it should work. If your hosting wont allow external access to files from within your scripts, be sure to ask them to whitelist the domain www.commentluv.com .

I’m running it on this post from now on so please give it a test especially if you have had problems before or you have a foreign language character set on your site.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I had to do some playing around with my wordpress database when I wanted to move my install from a shared hosting to a dedicated server (which turned out to be quite easy!) and I went in a bit further to phpmyadmin to see what other things I could do.

With the current release of my new contest game, Aqua Craft, I wanted to let everyone that has visited here know about it and rather than wait for every single commenter to come back and see the post, I thought it might be easier to extract the email addresses of all commenters from the database and send them all a message. (luckily, only one person replied saying it was spam!).

I checked my wp_comments table and it had a few thousand entries, yey! I thought. I’ll send them all a message! I extracted the table into a csv file and was disappointed to see literally hundreds and hundreds of spammer email addresses in there…

Not being a mysql database geek, I did some searching and found a way to extract all the addresses of the commenters that had been approved… here’s how…

1.) Log in to phpmyadmin
2.) select the wp_comments table on the left and click the “browse” button on comment_author_email

3.) Click “edit” on the mysql statment at the top of the page and change it to the following

SELECT * FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ‘1′

That will show you a list of all the comments made that have been approved.

4.) Click on the “export” tab and select these options..

This will give you a large .csv file ready to be opened by Excel

5.) Open the file in excel which will give you this..

This is a lot more than we need, so delete the columns for comment id, comment content etc so you’re left with comment_author, comment_author_email and comment_author_url

6.) Your excel file should look like this…

Now there will be a lot of duplicate email addresses from multiple commenters but if you have a decent newsletter or mass email program, you should be able to import this file and let it filter out all the dupes and discard the trackbacks and pings.

Easy peasy! I ended up with a few hundred email addresses who I could tell about my latest contest.. awesome…

Popularity: 3% [?]

I am so excited! This weekend there will be some changes to FiddyP.

I am having a theme professionally designed by an Indonesian designer and it’s looking really good! It’ll have curved corners, drop shadows and double span sidebars hovering over two fixed height sidebars! yey.

The guys name is Sunaryo and I am most impressed with his ability, he has been able to create a fantastic theme based on a screen grab I made of a theme I liked. I gave him a bit of a headache by asking for all sorts of extras like a double sidebar with double span divs and to top it all, a single sidebar’d single post page and more. I’ve seen a great mockup picture and there’s even a demo of it working, coded completely from scratch from a jpeg image. awesome.

here’s a little peek of the main page..

and one of the single post page..

Why a single post page with only one sidebar? Well, I wanted to do things backwards. I know the general rule is to plaster your adverts on single post pages as they are the ones that get linked to by the search engines but on a few blogs that I have seen, I have really liked a single post page that has just the information on it and not too many flashy things saying “buy me!” it encouraged me to look around the blog a bit more to see what’s there.

This is what I want to do with FiddyP;

• I want to provide valuable information in a format that will be easy on the eyes with a little bit of personality thrown in.
• Provide a ‘fun’ place to go to read tutorials and learn things that can make life easier
• Run contests that encourage community participation
• Throw the limelight on other blogs that I particularly like
• Have a series of posts that run concurrently like an AJAX series of tutorials taking someone from ‘hello world’ to a fully functional useful plugin
• Regular guest spots for writers with talent
• Real reviews of products that I use, not just kiss-arsey-buy-it-so-I-earn reviews, good ones that also mention bad points!
• more… MORE!

I hope to have something up by the weekend (oo-er!) so if you visit, please be patient while I tweak, tweak, tweak!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Here are a couple of plugins that have really saved me some time since I installed them.

1. One Click Install

Install and update plugins and themes with one click of the mouse.

2. Absolute Comments

Reply to comments directly from the dashboard or email.

The first one, One Click Install, is a great little plugin that works with a Firefox extension enabling you to install a plugin or theme by right clicking a link to it’s zip file.

I didn’t install it at first because I felt I had enough plugins already but, this is especially useful for updating plugins from within the WP dashboard. Whenever I saw a plugin that needed updating on the plugins page I would make a mental note to visit the plugins’ page, download the zip file, extract it to my hard drive, upload it with ftp and finally check that it shows as activated on the plugins page.

9 times out of 10 I would forget the mental note until such a time where I would be missing one tool required for the update process (at work or on the road). Now it’s a simple process, to get started install the plugin and the OneClick Install Firefox Plugin. Do the Firefox restart that is required after installing an add on and then visit your Wordpress plugin page to activate the One Click Install plugin.
Next, visit the admin page for the plugin at Dashboard/One Click Install

And look at the bottom of the page for your oneclickURL

Paste it into your Firefox addon by visiting Tools/Addons/ and selecting the Oneclick Installer for Wordpress addon ‘options’ button.

And you’re ready to install any updates to plugins that you have. Visit your dashboard and check the plugins page for any that need updates (WP2.3 and up)..

You can see the message saying “There is a new version of..” and a link to the official Wordpress plugins page, click that and you get to the plugin’s page at Wordpress.org.

Then just right click the Download Plugin button and choose to install as plugin..

As long as you’re logged in to your Wordpress, you will be taken to the Oneclick page and informed that your plugin was installed successfully.

Yey! note: you don’t actually have to use the Firefox addon, you can just paste the zip file URL into the box on the plugin admin page and install it from there or upload a zip file from your computer by clicking the ‘browse’ button and selecting it that way.

Very useful! Nice one Anirudh, thanks for a truly useful plugin.

The other plugin to save time especially if you get a lot of comments on your blog is the Absolute Comments plugin. I really like this one because it allows you to reply to comments directly from the comments page of the dashboard. No more do I need to visit each individual post to reply to comments! You can even reply from a comment notification. I haven’t used this part though as I have always got access to the dashboard if I have access to my email.

Just click on ‘reply’ from within the comments dashboard page..

Popularity: 4% [?]

Here is a widget and plugin combined for Stumbleupon and Wordpress. I rewrote it from scratch to be a little better, thanks to the suggestion of mcangeli in the comments!

This will display a list of titled links to up to 10 of your last pages that you gave a thumbs up to with Stumbleupon, it can also show as icons for web page, image, flash file, quicktime. Use it as a widget or as a plugin.

Upload it and activate it to see a widget called 'Stumbled' in your tray, drag it to where you want it to be displayed on your blog and click the options square to add your Stumbleupon username, how many of your last thumbs up sites you want to display, choose to display as Text links or Icons. If you chose to display as text then you can put in the maximum amount of characters to show.

You can also use it as a plugin if you don't like widgets, see below for code examples..

here's what it looks like in the sidebar as icons..

here it is as text..

and the options....

Just download the zip file below and extract the folder, upload the whole folder to your plugins directory and activate it in Wordpress, then, visit the widgets section under Presentation and drag it to the sidebar, click the square to change the options and that will be it!

For non-widget-ers, you can use it as a plugin by using this syntax..

stumbled_as_plugin(username,quantity to show,text or pic,html before list, html after list,max length of characters);

ie. for showing text links with a numbered order..

will show this...

Or as images with no numbering..

will show this...

[?]

If you have any problems with it, please let me know!.

Download Stumbled Widget & Plugin For Wordpress

Popularity: 10% [?]

I have been tinkering with the idea of a professional redesign for some time now, I am capable of doing one myself but I'm too lazybusy! I think it would take me a lot longer than would be healthy anyway! so I am committed to spending up to 400 USD for a new design of FiddyP... You can help even if you're not a designer yourself and get a $25 gift certificate to spend where you like!

I've seen quite a few designs that I like the look of so I thought I would share some with you and get some feedback!

My definite wants are:

• 3 columns
• 2.0 colours but not clinical
• unique sidebars that can be widget enabled
• incorporate my own 50p logo somewhere
• easy to read text
• a full 1024 wide theme, maybe with the main content resizable for bigger screens
• space for a promotion box or featured product
• all the files required for a 2.3 wordpress theme folder like 404.php and sitemap etc

This is the style of boxes that I like

Here's a mocked up from an existing template in photoshop, the double span box on the top part of the sidebar should be repeated below the two widget enabled sidebars and a big footer to show other things like blogroll, archives etc. It looks like this:

A cross between the two would be perfect! What do you think? is my budget enough?

Here's how you can help..

If you know a theme designer that does this type of thing, ask them to take a look at these two pictures and the needs of the site and give me a quote, either by commenting here or using the contact me page.

Get them to mention that you sent them here and if I go with that person, you get a 25USD gift certificate for an online store like Amazon or even one local to you.

It's almost like a contest because you can get paid for participating even if it's not you that does the designing! You'll also get a chance to help out someone you know if they are a designer. I get a new site, they get paid and so do you. win win win

just some testing of AJAX here to see if I can grab a last post from an author url while the user is still on the page..it's a prelude to me adding some AJAX functionality to commentluv, below is a test version of the comment form once the comment authors site has been entered and they go to the next form field, the ajax should call a php file to find the title of the authors last post and put it in the pink box.

now all I have to do is find a way to make an event listener for the actual comment form author url field without adjusting the comments.php file....

Popularity: 4% [?]

Here is a list of plugins that I have used on my old blog and couldn't live without when I moved to FiddyP.

• SH-autolink
  An excellent plugin that can make keywords automatically link to whatever you want. Just install and avtivate. Go to Manage/Sh-autolink and you can add a word and it's corresponding link, you can also choose to open link in the same window, new window, parent frame or top frame. I use it all the time for words like uvme or elottery or vwd.
  I like the fact that the html for the links isn't saved with the post so if you want to change where a particular word links to, you can and anywhere that word is in your posts it will link to the new url
• Deans Permalinks Migration Plugin
  This saved my life, I had my permalinks set to the old ?cat= and I wanted to change them to a more search engine friendly version without ruining the old links and this did the job, it makes the old links report a 301 page moved and the search engines will index the new one and you don't lose any page rank and all the old links still work.
• Feedburner Feedsmith
  Makes all your feeds point to your feedburner feed so you can track the amount of subscribers and also see what posts they clicked through to and more. It makes it much easier for surfers to subscribe by providing links to all the major feed subscription services like google reader and yahoo.
• Instant Upgrade
  I hated updating Wordpress, there were too many chances of overwriting the wrong files. Fortunately, this plugin takes care of all that for you. It's reported to work with the 2.3 upgrade too.
• Popularity Contest
  This assigns scores to your posts based on comments, pingbacks, permalink views and more. You can also display the top posts in your sidebar. Nice to have the most viewed posts up for display to new visitors.
• Related Posts
  I've found myself clicking on related post links when I have clicked through to a single post on someones blog so I installed the plugin here and the related posts links have been getting clicked, especially on a single post that's getting a lot of hits from Stumbleupon. It may take a few posts before it starts getting better at relating the content but it works quite well.
• Samsarin PHP widget
  An easy peasy way to add php scripts to your widget enabled blog, just past your script in the widget options and drag it to the sidebar to have it execute along with the wordpress core php on the server side. Good if you use widgets on your sidebar and have a plugin that requires you to edit the sidebar template with the plugins procedure name.
• IG:Syntax Hiliter
  Probably the best plugin for showing source code on your blog, it can do html, php, javascript, perl and much more. Very easy to use, the way to add buttons to the post page isn't really needed if you only show one type of language, just use the [] [/]tags with the language name to enclose the code.
• Live
  Adds a really nice AJAX real time stats page to your admin pages. Shows visits, referers and comment entry.
• Top Commentators
  Encourage people to make more than one visit and comment, reward them for joining the discussion with a list of top commentators on your sidebar.
• Subscribe to Comments
  An easy way to allow surfers to subscribe to the comments of the post that they comment on.
• WP-Online Counter
  Shows how many visitors on your site at one time and keeps a total of unique visitors over time.
• WP AJAX edit comments
  How many times have you made a comment on someones blog and noticed a typo after you submitted? lol, it happens to me all the time. This plugin allows your commenters a few minutes to edit their comment.
• DoFollow
  Allows the links to your commenters sites to be followed by search engines, another nice incentive for people to join in the discussion of your blog.
• SpamKarma 2
  A lot of people use Akismet to combat comment spam but I have found SK2 to be a much better and easier experience. I very rarely have to moderate a comment or flag one as spam and on my old PR5 blog, it caught dozens a day and had a fantastic success rate on authorizing legitimate comments through all the mess of viagras and elargment spam.
• CommentLuv
  A nice way to spread some lurv to the readers who comment by adding a titled link to their last blog post. Like BlogRush but for people who you know, why link to strangers blogs with a widget when you can reward your commenters and provide links to people that are in your community?
  I made this one! I'm not a pro PHP coder and this isn't at a full 1.0 release but it seems to work nicely on the blogs that I've seen it on and I'm going to keep developing this as my blog progresses.

Phew! and that's not all of them, just the ones that I have found to be useful and above all, easy to install and use. Props to all the coders who provide the plugins that Wordpress is famous for.

Popularity: 8% [?]