Please Link 2 Me WordPress Plugin

Posted by james on Mar 16, 2008 in WordPress Hacks | 56 comments

Introducing my next WordPress plugin: Please Link 2 Me

I’ve personally wanted this for quite a while, and I’ve seen it on other blogs before, but when I looked for it, I just couldn’t find it.

So i created it myself… That’s the beauty of WordPress

What does this plugin do?

This plugin adds a little text box below each post on your WordPress blog containing the code required for somebody to just copy and paste it to their blog or website, and create a link back to your article.

This means the reader doesn’t have to know how to get the URL of the article, or even have to know how to make a link out of it.

An example?

Here is a screen shot of this plugin in action (just in case I’ve disabled it on this site for whatever reason, like testing something):

And, here’s a screenshot of the admin page (in WordPress 2.8.5). Click on it to see the full shot…

Where can I get it and what do I do?

You can just go to the plugin repository to download this plugin. Here’s the link: “Please Link 2 Me Download”

Then, just upload the zip file into your “plugins” directory, unzip it, and activate it…

Then all that’s left is to enter the settings in the plugin’s admin page.

Updates?

To get notified of updates, just subscribe to the comments feed of this specific blog post. If there are other comments here as well and you decide to unsubscribe, then you’ll still be able to see the update requirements via your admin “Plugins” page…

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WordPress SEO Title Tag for Theme Designers

Posted by james on Feb 25, 2008 in wordpress | 7 comments

Everybody knows that H1 tags are supposed to “highlight” the most important heading on the page.

Whether this really helps with a site’s SEO is still up for debate, but in my opinion, having a good document structure can only help.

In most (if not all) WordPress themes, it’s the Blog’s Title/Name that gets the honour of wearing this badge. But your Blog’s Name shouldn’t necessarily have this honour on page’s that have a “main topic”. i.e.: Single Post pages.

So, what I recommend that all WordPress theme designers do is use H1 tags for your post’s Title on the post’s page, and use H1 around your Blog’s Name for all the other pages.

Here’s the code I use to do this:

For the Blog’s Name

a.k.a. bloginfo(‘name’) – This is usually in the header.php file, just replace the “H1″ before and after the Name with the following:

<?php echo (!is_single()) ? "h1" : "h2"; ?>

So, your Blog Info tags might look like the following now:

<<?php echo (!is_single()) ? "h1" : "h2"; ?> class="blog_title">
    <a title="Home: <?php bloginfo('name'); ?> " href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a>
</<?php echo (!is_single()) ? "h1" : "h2"; ?>>

(Of course, this doesn’t take into account that you’ve replaced the php calls to your Blog’s Name and URL with hardcoded versions once you’ve implemented a theme on your site).

Replace the H2 tag for your Post Title

And now, of course, you need to do the opposite for your post titles.

You need to replace the H2 tags that normally surround the Post Title (a.k.a. the_title()) with the following:

<?php echo (is_single()) ? "h1" : "h2"; ?>

This is usually in the index.php file, unless you have a template page specifically for single posts, in which case it will be in “single.php” (and then, you could probably just put “H1″, as this template will only be used for the Single Post pages).

So, you might have something that looks like the following now:

<<?php echo (is_single()) ? "h1" : "h2"; ?> class="title">
    <a id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
        <?php the_title(); ?>
    </a>
</<?php echo (is_single()) ? "h1" : "h2"; ?>>

CSS Styling your titles

If you’re using a theme designed by somebody else, it might not be as simple as just replacing the H1/H2 tags with the above code, because you might find that the H1 tag has it’s own specific style, as opposed to the Blog Title/Name having a style class.

Now, I’m no designer, so this might not be the best advice, but here’s what I’ve done to work around it.

In the H1 tag (well, the Blog Name tag as it stands after the changes above) you can see I added a class=”blog_title”. And in my style.css file, I changed all the references to “H1” to “.blog_title“.

I hope this makes sense. Let me know if you agree or disagree with me.

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Install WordPress on your Windows Machine

Posted by james on Feb 17, 2008 in wordpress | 10 comments

Whether you downloaded WordPress 2.5 or you would just like to test your theme or plugin on your own machine before uploading it to your site, I feel having an instance of WordPress running on your machine is a must.

Anyway, I’m sure there are quite a few tutorials for this out there, but I’ll write it here for my own reference, as well as yours…

Download WAMP

WampServer, in short, lets you run a webserver and database (which obviously WordPress needs), on your Windows machine. If you’re lucky enough to be running Linux or an Apple OS, then you can skip this step.

So, anyway, go download WampServer, install it, and you can accept all the default installation settings.

It should install to “c:\wamp”, which makes things nice an easy. If it doesn’t install there, just make a note of where you DO install it…

Once it’s installed, start it by clicking the shortcut. You should see that it’s running by the icon in your task bar next to the time, as seen in the screen shot below:

Create a Database for WordPress

We’ll use phpMyAdmin for this step, which is a a Database (DB) admin tool that comes with WampServer.

Click on the icon that I showed you above and you should see the following menu:

Click the “phpMyAdmin” option to open the application up in a new browser window.

In the window that opens, click on the “Add a new User” link, as shown in the screen shot below:

On the next screen, in the section “Add a new User” fill in the following information:

1 – A user/database name, like “wordpress25” (without the quotes)
2 – Change the “drop down” to say local, and it should populate the field with the value “localhost”
3 – Choose a password for your user to access the database, like “wp25”
4 – Select “Create database with same name and grant all privileges”
5 – At the bottom of the page, click on “Go”

You can use the following screen shot for guidance:

If this was successful, you should see the following screen:

Download WordPress

Now that your Database is setup, you just need a copy of WordPress to install. You could either download a test version of WordPress 2.5, or download the latest stable version of WordPress.

You can save it in the WAMP directory (see the first section of this page) in the “www” directory. For example: “C:\wamp\www”

Then, just unzip it. If you downloaded the WordPress 2.5 copy from this site, then there should be a directory called “wp25“, otherwise it will create a directory called “wordpress“.

Install WordPress

Go into the directory, and edit the following file with notepad (or any text editor): “wp-config-sample.php“.

Replace the following “words” with the ones you used above in when creating the database:

putyourdbnamehere -> wordpress25
usernamehere -> wordpress25
yourpasswordhere -> wp25

If you look at the file, the 3 lines you changed should look like the following (I made the changes bold for ease of reference):

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress25‘); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘wordpress25‘); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘wp25‘); // …and password

Then save the file as “wp-config.php“. Note that you took out “-sample” from the file name. You can do this by clicking on “File” then “Save As…” and taking out “-sample” from the file name.

Logging into your new WordPress Installation

In your browser, you will now go to the WordPress installation page by going to the following URL/link:

http://localhost/wordpress25

If you’ve been doing everything above while you read, then you should just be able to click the link and you’ll see the following screen (though the screen below is from a WordPress 2.3 installation):

Just enter a blog title, like “Local WordPress Test”, enter an email address (not that you will really need it to be real) and click on “Install WordPress”.

You should see the following screen:

And, you should have a working copy of WordPress on your Windows Machine.

Just a note, make sure you write down the password that you are shown (or change it straight away in the admin section of WordPress). You won’t be able to recover a lost password via email (without a bit more hard work)…

I really hope this has helped you in some way. If it has, let me know.

And, if you have any questions, let me know as well!

UPDATE:

Shane left a link to his video on this process in the comments below. Here’s his video, which I think is excellent because of how thorough it is.

Another Update:

I was contacted by Hendry from blogbuildingu.com saying he had a tutorial for installing WP under nginx on your windows machine. Here’s what he had to say:

Recently, I’ve written a tutorial on how to install WP under Nginx, soon lighttpd and other options as well, including virtual machines.

The benefit is, nginx only takes 2MB of computer memory, which is much more friendly for desktop environment.

Go check out the article here: http://blogbuildingu.com/wordpress/install-wordpress-wemp

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Try out WordPress 2.5

Posted by james on Feb 16, 2008 in wordpress | 2 comments

In my post entitled WordPress 2.5 Admin Theme Preview I thought I’d give you a bit of a preview of WordPress 2.5′s new Admin Theme.

Of course, it’s better to touch than just to look, so for people who’d like to try installing it somewhere, I’ve got a zip file containing the latest version of WordPress 2.5 from SVN.

Click here to download WordPress 2.5 test!

Matt has just announced a Release Candidate that’s available for download here: “Download WordPress 2.5 RC1“

If you’d rather download a version from WordPress’ SVN site, then for Windows users I recommend TortoiseSVN. If you’d like help using this software, let me know in the comments below…

UPDATE: I’ve written a tutorial on installing WordPress on your Windows Machine. Go check it out!

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WordPress 2.5 Admin Theme Preview

Posted by james on Feb 12, 2008 in wordpress | 0 comments

I’m not sure why I never thought of it, but I finally decided to download a test version of WordPress 2.5 so that I can see the new WordPress Admin theme that people are talking about.

It is DEFINITELY a lot more modern than the current look and feel of the Admin section, even if it is a little chunky for my liking. But, I think it’s “pretty”.

You can click on the thumbnail below to open the images for viewing…

WordPress 2.5 Login Screen

Dashboard

Write Post

Plugins Screen

Design – Template Screen

Settings Page

Your Thoughts?

So, what do YOU think of the new look?

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New blog using Prologue WordPress Theme

Posted by james on Feb 6, 2008 in wordpress | 0 comments

Well, I just killed 2 birds with one stone…

1st bird – Useless Knowledge:

Anybody who knows me knows that one of my favourite sayings is “useless knowledge dot com”. I say it after I’ve given a fact that I think might bore some people, but I find extremely interesting.

Unfortunately, uselessknowledge.com is already registered and has been for as long as I’ve been saying it. Which is MANY years…

But, for some reason, I’ve never thought of registering UselessKnowledge.co.za

I am now going to change my phrase to “Useless Knowledge dot Coza“.

I’ve set up a WordPress site that I can easily update every time I have a new little “interesting fact” that I’d like to share…

Which leads me onto…

2nd bird – Prologue WordPress theme:

The Prologue WordPress theme is a GREAT, simple looking theme that I decided to try out as the theme for UselessKnowledge.co.za.

My main reason for this is because the facts that I would post would be too small that any other theme might drown them out…

Matt Mullenweg gives his ideas on what the theme’s main use would be, but of course it’s not restricted to twitter type use…

So please let me know what you think…

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Something Interesting for Week 5 of 2008

Posted by james on Feb 2, 2008 in internet | 0 comments

Ask.com and your custom skin

I’ve mentioned before that I think Ask.com has the nicest UI out of all the Search Engines, and now you can make it look a whole lot better.

Well, you could if you had skills… You can now “skin” your personal version of Ask.com by uploading a photo and using it as a sort of “desktop background” to Ask’s search home page.

Here are a couple of examples using photos that I took:

I took this photo of an Elephant in the Kruger Park last year. One of my favourite photos of all time.

A photo of Basil Flowes growing in my herb garden… I’m quite proud of this one as well…

Thanks to InsideGoogle for this

XKCD Comic for geeks

XKCD. A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language

Well, that’s what they call it. I prefer to call it by what it really is.

XKCD. A comic for geeks.

I’ve been reading this comic strip religiously for about 3 months now. The humour is super dry, yet hilarious. Here’s a strip from this week:

Just a note: I use vi. That’s what REAL programmers use

Make a mobile friendly version of your webpage

Digital Inspiration have a cool post on making a mobile version of your blog with Google Reade.

I’m a GREAT fan of Google Reader, as I read about 30-100 blog posts a day, depending on how long it takes me to eat breakfast and lunch… I REALLY appreciate the mobile version of Google Reader as that’s how I get a lot of my blog reading done, because I’m not always in front of a computer (believe it or not)….

Found via GoogleTutor

Get 12 months advertising and only pay for 6

Lee Dodd stumbled on an interesting take on calculating advertising rates.

It seems that Red River Moms has a media kit for their website (available here: http://www.redrivermoms.com/media/RedRiverMoms_Sales_Brochure.pdf) that gives cheaper rates for a 12 month package than it does for the 6 months package.

I wonder if that was intentional, making people get 12 months advertising because they thought they were scoring!

WordPress SEO plugins

If you use WordPress for blogging, then Vinny Lingham has an interesting post for you to go read entitled “WordPress SEO Plugins“.

I’ve always been thinking of coding a plugin similar to what Vinny says “Landing Pages” does, so it’s a great find if it does what I need. Going to check it out when I get a chance…

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