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.

In the content of each post however, this means that you’re down to an h3 if you have sub-sections within the post. No problem, just use that markup and everything’s golden. Until you view a single-post/page and then your structure doesn’t really make sense any more. Ideally, on these pages, the title of the post would be an h1 and those h3s would now be h2s. What to do?

Easy, drop the following code into your functions.php file (within your theme, or I guess you could turn it into a plugin if you were into that) and it will dynamically adjust your headings for your homepage (and archives, tag pages, etc).

function beaus_dynamic_headings( $content ) {
 if ( is_singular() )
 return $content;

 $content = str_replace( array( '<h5', '</h5>' ), array( '<h6', '</h6>' ), $content );
 $content = str_replace( array( '<h4', '</h4>' ), array( '<h5', '</h5>' ), $content );
 $content = str_replace( array( '<h3', '</h3>' ), array( '<h4', '</h4>' ), $content );
 $content = str_replace( array( '<h2', '</h2>' ), array( '<h3', '</h3>' ), $content );
 return $content;
}
add_filter( 'the_content', 'beaus_dynamic_headings' );

So when you’re writing a post, write to target a single-page view, where the title of the post/page itself is h1, and your structure within the post should start from there. The code above will take care of fixing it up for the homepage, archives etc (bumping all heading tags “down” one level).

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.

The basic idea here is that WordPress has a built in system for storing bookmarks (Links), so why not use it? I like Delicious, and I like the plugins and whatnot that pull its content into my browser, but not necessarily enough to give them all my data and not retain any control over it. So how about this:

• Add a new taxonomy, let’s call it link_tags,
• Add an entry box to the Add New Link page, allowing you to enter tags when you create a new Link (don’t forget to use some sexy AJAX suggestions for previously used tags to help control your vocabulary)
• Select a specific Category for all your links, let’s say “Bookmarks”
• Build a simple page that looks something like this screenshot of the Delicious one, and include a bookmarklet so that you can open it in a new window and post to your new link-system just as easily as using Delicious.
• When you use that UI, have it automatically select your Bookmarks category (behind the scenes) and also cross-post into your Delicious account, which you’ve pre-authorized somewhere else.

Voilà, you now have all your links stored in your WordPress installation, so you control the data, and you also have them stored in Delicious, so you can make use of the cool things like the Firefox plugin, which pulls those links directly into your browser.

For bonus points, it would be absolutely awesome to also include an Importer (Tools > Import > Delicious Links) that would suck all your existing Delicious links into this new system, so that you weren’t starting from scratch.

Any taker?

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

Some of these features (threaded comments, userpics) are already at least partially supported in WP, and there are ways of supporting the others that could perhaps be rolled into a single plugin (which I’m calling “LiveJournalish” for now).

• Customize the Post UI to include specific fields for music/mood, but save them as normal Custom Fields (postmeta).
• Add a filter to the_content that appends a specific set of Custom Field values if they are set (or just make them more readily available via a different template tag)
• Use IntenseDebate, which allows you to reply to comments via email, or perhaps roll up something new that includes the comment posting form in an HTML version of the email?
• Threaded comments are available in core as of WP 2.7

This leaves the permissions system as being the main thing missing, and I believe that’s going to be addressed in the near future. WP already has a Roles and Capabilities system, it just needs to be extended to be more robust as far as being used for controlling permissions. Some of the DiSo work being done also requires this, so now we have another use-case for it.

Just some random ideas, if you have another other suggestions feel free to put them in the comments.

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’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.

• TwitterProxy: Which allows you to do some cool filtering on your Twitter status feed (and then use it for whatever you want), and
• Gravatar Shortcode: A quick WordPress plugin that gives you a shortcode that you can use to inject a Gravatar into your Pages or Posts.

Check them out and let me know what you think.

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:

1. Download this plugin: WP Admin Color Schemer 1.0
2. 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).
3. 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).

1. Show number of visits/votes
2. Show positive and negative votes
3. Show Controversy Index
4. Show Karma Index
5. Show Visits Index
6. Only show posts with minimum of ‘x’ for;
   1. Karma
   2. Controvery
   3. 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 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!