Hotlink 2 Link Plugin

Posted by on Feb 20, 2009 in WordPress Hacks | 2 comments

Hotlink 2 Link Plugin

Here is my latest WordPress plugin – Hotlink 2 Link for WordPress

This plugin will show a popup window if somebody right-clicks on an image and asks them to use specific code which will link to your article.

Below is an image example.

Benefit from hotlinking in WordPress

You can read more about this on my blog post:

Hotlink 2 Link WordPress Plugin

This plugin is based on and uses the JavaScript widget “LinkMyPics“

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Generic Statistics WordPress plugin

Posted by on Feb 20, 2009 in WordPress Hacks | 9 comments

Generic Statistics WordPress plugin

Do you have the urge to SPY on your visitors?

The Generic Stats WordPress Plugin is a plugin that allows you to add any statistics tracking code to your WordPress blog without having to edit your WordPress Template’s code.

What does this have to do with spying on your website’s visitors? Well, you could easily sign up for the Performancing Metrics statistics service, and EASILY let you add the statistics tracking code to your blog, without you needing to change ANYTHING ELSE on your site.

This plugin also allows you to specify whether you’d like the code to be place at the top of your page (before the <body> tag) or at the bottom of the page (just after or just before the closing </body> tag).

This option is due to the fact that some statistics packages, like Google Analytics, prefer that you place the statistics tracking scripts at the top of the page, whereas it is actually recommended that you place all external scripts (external to your site) at the bottom.

The reason it’s better to place the code at the bottom is just in case the external site is down, it won’t prevent your site from loading.

Click on the image at the below to see what the plugin looks like on the admin side:

Generic Stats WordPress plugin Admin Page

Click here to download the plugin

To be kept aware of updates, please subscribe to the comments feed on this page.

Oh, and Click Here to sign up and try out Performancing Metrics. You will SERIOUSLY get addicted to watching your visitors moving around your site, IN REAL TIME!

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Checking Domain Availability

Posted by on Feb 20, 2009 in Internet Utilities | 0 comments

Don’t Alert Others of your Ideas!

There is one MAIN thing you want to be careful of when checking to see if a domain is available or not, and that is alerting others that somebody is searching for it.

You see, there are some people who monitor searches for domains so that they can quickly register the domain in the hope that you will buy it from them at more than they paid for it.

A good way to prevent this is to use tools available from respected and well known Domain Registrars, such as GoDaddy and Moniker.com.

Tools to help you

To facilitate this (because I register domains quite often now, IT’S A DRUG I TELL YOU!) I have created to search tools that you can install if you use IE7 (Internet Explorer 7) or FireFox web browsers.

You will then be able to just type the domain that you want to check it’s availability of, and press enter.

To install these “search engines”, just click on the “down arrow” at the top right of your browser and click on the “Add DomainCheck“. This Search Engine will use Moniker.com’s Domain checking service to see if a domain is available to be registered.

The reason I use Moniker.com is because it can check more than one TLD at a time, for example, if you type in “james” (without the quotes) and click on the magnifying glass, the Moniker.com results will show you the results for james.com, james.info, james.org, etc. etc. etc…

You might have also noticed the ability to add the “CoZaDomains” Search Engine.

This search engine will check the availability of “.co.za” (South African) domains, using the tool provided by www.anno.co.za (the site that hosts my website).

Anyway, let me know if you find these tools useful…

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Shell Script for Automating WordPress updates for multiple blogs

Posted by on Nov 27, 2008 in wordpress | 0 comments

Many moons ago I read Joost de Valk’s blog post about upgrading and installing WordPress from SVN. Since then, every blog I maintain I use the WordPress svn repository to check out, and to update using the simple command of “svn sw“.

But even with that ease, it can get a bit tedious to upgrade 10 blogs, for instance.

So, as all “script writers” that are in between TV Series do, I wrote a script to automate this.

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Stop Excel Using Scientific Notation on Numbers

Posted by on Nov 25, 2008 in tips | 30 comments

Excel is brilliant!

It is so brilliant, that it’s helpful.

Excel is SO helpful THAT IT SUCKS!!!

Probably for 99.9% of the general population, all of Microsoft Excel’s cool features that help you format your data into something legible are something really cool. But I think Excel should have a “data only” setting.

What do I mean by “data only”? Have you ever tried debugging data in excel using all the cool functions, etc. to find duplicates, or sort the data only to find that Excel has gone and removed a leading “0″, or changed the number into Scientific Notation?

Apparently Excel has a 15 digit precision limit. But most of the time, I’d prefer it if Excel just treated the number as text until I want it sorted. Am I being TOO fussy?

Anyway, I found a great way to do this in 4 easy steps (once you’ve imported the data as text – see the comment below made on June 7th 2010 for reasons!):

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Creating your Google Reader Application with Google Chrome

Posted by on Sep 3, 2008 in google, interesting | 3 comments

Google Chrome was finally released, and I’ve been playing around with it for a few hours.

I decided to try out creating a “Google Reader Application” by making use of the “Chromeless Chrome” functionality.

In the images (click on them for a larger look) you will see the 4 basic steps to creating the Chrome-less application:

1 – The initial web site (Google Reader) in a basic/standard Google Chrome browser. You can see it’s still in the normal browser chrome because of the tabs and URL bar, etc.

2 – Click on the “page” icon to the right of the URL bar and click on “Create application Shortctuts…”

3 – You will then have a couple of prompts to answer and you can save your shortcut to the desktop. You can see that Google Chrome has chosen the Favicon as the “application icon”.

4 – In this last screenshot you can see what the Google Reader app will look like, now that it doesn’t have the usual “browser chrome”. (See my previous article about Google Chrome for more info on that).

And, we now have a “Google Reader Application“, especially since we don’t really need an internet connection if you’ve enabled Google Gears for this site.

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Google Chrome – Google’s Free Web Browser

Posted by on Sep 2, 2008 in google | 0 comments

Looks like all the MANY, MANY rumours of Google releasing their own web browser have finally come true.

Welcome, Google Chrome. (the link is live, go download Google Chrome)

Some Cool Features in Google Chrome

The developers of Chrome have really gone all out on the performance of this browser, especially with regards to JavaScript. Which is a GREAT thing, considering Google’s biggest apps use AJAX/JavaScript heavily.

One of the things I’m looking forward to seeing is the “Task Manager“. This window shows which tabs (and therefore, which sites) are causing the most CPU usage and memory usage. FireFox 3 really improved it’s memory handling, but every now and again, when I have about 15 tabs open (which I often do, while I’m writing this I have 9 open) FireFox hangs when opening GMail and Google Reader…

Here’s a screenshot of the Google Chrome Task Manager at work (click the image for a full-sized version):

The world has really been “raving” about IE8′s “porn mode“, which Microsoft have officially named “InPrivate”. While browsing in this mode your session will be undetectable (theoretically), and no trace of that session will be left on your computer. Google Chrome seems to have a similar feature, except you can select a specific tab that will browse without leaving any trace of it’s session on your computer. Great stuff if you’re reading personal ads while on your work’s computer. ;-)

Tabs and the way we use them have also completely changed. They’ve been inverted so they appear at the top of the browser, but that’s not just a UI change. You can now drag tabs between browser windows, and all of their history goes along with it. Effectively, each tab is it’s own browser (with it’s own URL bar, named “The OmniBox“), so it doesn’t matter where it sits…

Talking about the OmniBox, personally it looks like Mozilla’s Ubiquity has some similarities, being able to search and translate and complete your bookmarks…

Chrome without Chrome

The “Chrome” of a browser is the actual window with the toolbar, the URL bar, the bookmarks/links area.

Google Chrome looks like it now allows you to “create a GMail application”, in that it removes the browser chrome, so that you only see GMail’s website. This means that you hopefully won’t realise you’re using GMail inside a browser.

And, with the speed of the JavaScript rendering engine (and broadband), hopefully it won’t feel like you’re on the internet as well.

Of course, what about if you CAN’T connect to the internet? Well, there’s always Google Gears, which is built into the browser. Now, we only need GMail to support Google Gears. (If you’re looking for an example of the benefits of Google Gears, read my article “WordPress 2.6 and Google Gears“).

Here’s a pic of an example with Google Reader (so that I didn’t have to go blanking out all my email addresses for a GMail example). Click for a full-size version of the image:

(All these features are obviously available for any website, not just GMail).

The Usual Suspects

And, of course, along with the 2 cool features above, there seem to be some other more expected features, like “Autocomplete in your address bar”, funky favourites, and built in functionality that you needed extensions in FireFox to do.

Interesting Notes about the Development

You could probably just read all this from the comic (linked to below), but here are a few things that stood out.

The testing of the browser took place on millions of websites. But, probably not only the little lame homepages that would obviously look good (or look bad?). Because Google caches so many web pages while crawling the internet, AND, because they rank web pages, they know which ones have more chances of being visited, and they have easy access to them. So they were able to run automatic (and manual) tests against MILLIONS of sites.

The JavaScript Virtual Machine is supposedly SUPER FAST! Of course, that means browsing your mail in GMail and reading my blog in Google Reader just got a whole lot faster. ;-)

References

So, to see other people’s opinions on this, go visit Philipp Lenssen’s “Google Blogoscoped” blog.

You can also read Google’s official announcement.

Or, read the comic from Google with more info about Google Chrome: Google Chrome Comic (or download the PDF version – which doesn’t seem to work, oh well).

And, I’m eagerly awaiting Matt Cutts’ post with more info for advanced users (which I would consider myself :D ). He’s apparently been using the browser for a while now, so he should definitely know his stuff.

Final Thoughts

I guess it’s a good thing that Google and Mozilla signed their ad deal recently, renewing the deal until 2011, because with Google’s brand behind them, this will DEFINITELY give FireFox and hopefully Internet Explorer a run for their money.

It all benefits us, because the more competition, the more we’ll get from the browsers while trying to be won over…

Speaking of competition, I can’t wait for a Mobile Google Chrome. All I can say is, when that comes out, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini (which I love) better watch out…

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