One thing that’s always bugged me in writing Posts/Pages content within WordPress is that you have to cater for different presentation possibilities. If you’re into web-standards, then that makes life difficult for things like headings (h1, h2, etc), when a block of content is presented in different contexts.
Ideally, your page should be structured with an h1 tag around the title of the most important concept on the page, an h2 around a sub-topic/concept, etc. On your home page, the h1 usually ends up going around your logo/site title, since that’s the over-arching concept. Then under that, you might have a listing of recent posts. Each of those posts should probably have their titles in an h2. No problem so far, right? You just set up your template like that and you’re good to go. Read the rest of this post…
I just saved yet another link in my Delicious account, and suddenly thought — “man, it would really suck if Delicious one day disappeared and I lost all of this”.
Indeed.
According to my stats, I have 1,164 bookmarks, mostly with descriptions and manually crafted (to some extent) titles, 1,813 different tags in use, with some being used 187 times. That’s a lot of rich, valuable data that I’ve collectively invested a lot of time in. I want control over it. I want insurance.
Read the rest of this post…
I’ve been doing a lot of work with LiveJournal/WordPress lately, and have been seeing that there are some passionate LJ users who are loyal to the platform largely for a few specific reasons/features. It seems like those features would mostly be pretty easy to replicate on WP though, given its flexible plugin system.
The main features that LJ supports that WP is (or was) “missing” seem to be:
- Robust permissions (create a group of people, grant them access to view a post, but no one else, etc)
- Support for integrated “metadata” on posts such as Current Music, Current Mood, etc
- Reply to comments directly via the notification emails you get
- Threaded comments
- Userpics
Read the rest of this post…
I’ve just released a plugin I’ve been working on called “Sparkplug”. It’s quite simple (although some of the code turned out to be a lot more complex than I expected!), and just gives you a small sparkline graphic indicating the number of posts per day for the current “view”. This is particularly handy on multi-author blogs which are split up into discrete sections via category or tag.
It was specifically written for/tested on the as-yet-unreleased Prologue Projects theme from Automattic, so when that comes out, it’ll be ready to go. Check out all the details about Sparkplug.
I was talking to Blake the other day about Plaxo, and about how the need it tried to fill (keeping everyone’s contact details up to date) was a valid one, but that it really didn’t live up to that goal. That got me thinking about how a big hole in the distribution of contact details was that you couldn’t “subscribe” to a vCard (contact details) in the same way that you can to an iCal (event/calendar details). Let’s fix that.
I’m imagining an online service (perhaps even just a WordPress plugin?) where you can set up URLs that point to either vCards that are online, or web pages that contain hCards. The system would then periodically (daily?) parse those URLs and load the details into a local cache/database.
The contents of the local cache would be exposed via an LDAP directory, allowing you to connect products such as the Apple Address Book to that directory. Those details would automatically be up-to-date, based on the last time their source URLs were parsed.
This would effectively eliminiate part of the need for services like Plaxo, and would give each person control over their contact information. Ideally the requests could be authenticated so that people sharing their contact details could control their distribution. With DiSo on the way, this would be hot.
While I was poking around in a pre-release version of WordPress 2.5 (which has been slightly delayed for actual release), I found out that the Admin panel (everything under /wp-admin/) is now pretty easily customizable through CSS.
Basically what they’ve done is extracted all the color-based information from the admin CSS files, and put them into pluggable files called “Admin Color Schemes”. The cool bit is that it looks really easy to add your own! It looks like the Admin Color Scheme is one of the last (core) stylesheets loaded into a page as well, which means you’re really not limited to only changing the colors.
So how do you do it? Here we go:
- Download this plugin: WP Admin Color Schemer 1.0
- Install and enable the plugin, which will look for CSS files inside its own “/schemes/” directory (/wp-content/plugins/wp-admin-color-schemer/schemes/*.css).
- Create your own CSS file and drop it in that directory. The filename of the CSS file should be a lower-case, letters/numbers only, dash-separated version of the name of the scheme. For example, a scheme called “Billy’s Amazing Scheme” would be in a file named “billy-s-amazing-scheme.css” (replace everything that isn’t a letter or a number with a dash, but only ever have a single dash at a time). Make sure the first line looks like this (with “My Admin Scheme” being the name you want to give your scheme, and each hex value representing one of the main colors used in your CSS palette. This must be the first line of the CSS file, be commented out as below, and must contain commas, but the spaces are optional):
/* My Admin Scheme, #000000, #111111, #222222, #333333 */
Once you’ve done that, go to your profile page within the Admin Panel, and you’ll see your new scheme and should be able to easily select it. When you hit the Update button, your Admin Panel should take on the new colors immediately.
If you’d like to use one of the built-in Admin Color Schemes as a starting point, then they live at /wp-admin/css/colors-classic.css and colors-fresh.css.
Now you can easily style your Admin Panel to match the rest of your site (and hopefully Theme authors out there will start packaging Admin Color Schemes to match their Themes).
Well, Fletcher has been flying away at the karma plugin we discussed and has got a version 0.3 going already. This one
has the following features;
- Show number of visits/votes
- Show positive and negative votes
- Show Controversy Index
- Show Karma Index
- Show Visits Index
- Only show posts with minimum of ‘x’ for;
- Karma
- Controvery
- Interest
You can download karma 0.3 and drop it in as a plugin immediately. It’s pretty self-explanatory if you understand the concept. To figure out the way that controvery and interest are calculated – have a look in the code for now, I’ll post the formulae when I get a chance 
I emailed the blosxom mailing list and suggested a new plugin, which I am just calling “karma”. The idea was to allow people to click a + or – and indicate if they thought a post was good or not. This is similar to the system used on some other sites.
I got an email back from Fletcher Penney, who said that he’d develop it, and half an hour later we were chatting on MSN about the details. He’s already knocked out 2 draft versions and we are sorting out some great stats and uses for the information!
blosxom and its developer-community rules!
