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Quick and Easy Popular Posts for Your WordPress Blog – in Only 1 Line of Code
Adding a list of popular posts to your website is a great way to increase user engagement on your site. It shows your readers what people are reading and interacting with the most – which in turn should encourage people to browse around your website more.
There are lots of posts across the blogosphere describing how to do this. Some look at the number of comments, and others track the page views, ...
Prince of Persia – Sands of Time Trailer
Another film I am looking forward to. A lot.
The Prince of Persia, Sands of Time, is an awesome video game. The beauty and simplicity of the game makes it a joy both to watch and to play. It’s one of the few series where I have played and completed every single one of the games – so naturally I am interested in the new film.
Using the Yahoo Weather API (in your WordPress themes)
When developing our Hyperlocal WordPress theme called The Local Darren came up with the idea of adding the local weather to the themes header. After a bit of research I decided that the Yahoo! Weather api was the best solution.
Before writing the code I Googled around to find something that would speed up development but all the solutions I found were overly complicated and cumbersome. I wanted some small fast code – so decided to write my own.
WordPress Http – Read Content From Other Websites
Recently I have been doing a lot of work with API’s and these often involve loading text content (rss/ xml/ json etc) from another website and then displaying the results – for instance the Twitter feed at the bottom of this website uses the Twitter Search API to get my latest updates.
There are all sorts of ways to access this data, but different servers require different methods so it’s good to ...
How to Use Akismet in your Plugin or Theme to Stop Spam Dead
So far I think I have been rather lucky, there hasn’t been much spam on WPVote, and that’s great. But I know these types of sites can be a haven for spammers, so I have used a few different tricks to stop the spam in its tracks. One of those is adding Akismet support.
The function below is something you can add to your plugin without any customisation. The code is only really useful in certain situations but I ...
February Film Reviews
Recently I have been getting back into watching movies. I have a whole stack of them to catch up on and I am now finally reducing the stack. 3 of the films I watched in February were, Kung Fu Panda, The Invention of Lying, and The Soloist. Read the article for mini reviews of each.
Creating Your Own WordPress Permalink Structure For Custom Content
The latest feature I have added to WPVote is a page that shows you all pages submitted to the site for a specific domain. Below I will show how I created the custom permalink structure without creating custom pages.
The process took me a while to work out but it ended up being quite simple code. I wanted to have the urls in the format ‘http://wpvote.com/domain/www.domain.com/’. I didn’t want to have to ...
An Intro to WordPress Filters: How to Add Custom Stuff to your RSS Feed
Recently I have added some custom content to the RSS feeds on 2 of my websites.
Here on Binary Moon I have added a notice that tells people if a specific post is in the Art Directed category, so they know to visit my site to see something styled a bit differently, and over on WPVote I added an automatically generated thumbnail to show a screenshot of the website ...
An Automated Way to Take Screenshots of any Website – Free
When I was building WPVote I wanted to have screenshots of the webpages that were submitted. Clearly I didn’t want to take the screenshots myself so I spent some time searching for an automated method to do the work for me. There are a few websites that do this but they cost money, or watermark the images, or limit the amount of requests, so I wanted to find something better.
And ...
Building WPVote Part 7: Almost Done
Building WPVote has been a really interesting process for me. I have learnt stacks of new things, and through developing WPVote have added a pile of improvements to my WordPress theme Elemental. In preparation for the sites release on Monday here is a summary of what I’ve done so far…
New Theme, Accumulo, and New Free Plugin
In my plans for 2010 I said I wanted to release 3 premium themes, and earlier this week Darren Hoyt and I released the first of the bunch.
Accumulo – WordPress themeAccumulo is an RSS aggregation theme designed to imitate sites such as Popurls.com and Alltop.com, and in particular Darrens own WPTopics.
The unique selling point of Accumulo is the tabbed homepage on which you can place any ...
Building WPVote Part 6 : Planning for Lift Off
Now that the WPVote site is almost complete I need to prepare it for release.
Since I have developed online all I really need to do is redirect the DNS from the current site to my own servers. However there are a couple of things I should take care of.
The sites old content needs to be copied over to my installed version Set up a new development area ...Building WPVote Part 5 : Programming
I’m nearly finished with the design of my new WordPress voting site, WPVote, so now need to look more closely at the programming.
I enjoy dissecting WordPress themes, and since I also like code simplicity and minimalism (and am working with a child theme) I decided to strip out as much of the original WPVote theme as possible.
First I had to go through the theme files and work out which were ...
Building WPVote : Part 4b, The Logo Revisited
Last time I wrote about WPVote I got a lot of feedback on the design of the logo. I was actually quite happy with how it was looking but the comments got me thinking and I soon realised it wasn’t as hot as I first thought…
So I spent some time coming up with new variations and thought it would be interesting to get some feedback on them as well.
I designed the variations based on the feedback I had received. ...
Building WPVote Part 4 : Design
Once I had finished researching similar voting sites I was ready to start designing and building the WPVote theme.
To decide basic page structure I went with Balsamiq mockups and knocked out some quick reference designs. I had a firm idea in mind for how the theme would function so it wasn’t that hard to make the images, and Balsamiq is REALLY easy to use so I had my reference images built quickly.
As I mentioned in part 3 ...
Back and Forward: Plans for 2010
Of my ‘goals’ in 2009 I only officially finished half. This year I plan to do better.
I mentioned that I wanted to release 4 themes, of which I actually released 2 Mimbo Pro 2 and theme framework. Of the others, Regulus Pro is on hold and the Prologue style theme is banished into obscurity – however some of the code will be showing up on WPVote.
This year I plan to:
Get married Blog more – particularly WordPress hints, ...Building WPVote Part 3 : Research
After receiving the WPVote domain and theme from Jean I moved on to stage 3. Researching ‘competitors‘ websites.
I must admit I tend not to do too much research when building a website, but this time I did decide to do some look into similar sites for inspiration.
WPVote is essentially a Digg clone, so I knew what to make, but at the same time I wanted to make it something ...
Building WPVote Part 2 : Planning
In part 1 of Building WPVote I mentioned how I have recently purchased WPVote from Jean-Baptiste Jeung.
The first thing I did before I even spoke to Jean was trying to think of simple things I could do that would add greatest value with least effort. This was a project I wanted to monetize from the start, and I didn’t want to spend months and months developing it.
I intend for the ...
WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide review
WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide surprised me positively. To be honest, I did hesitate before accepting a review copy from the publishers as I fully expected it to be “just” a beginner’s guide to WordPress mu (the multi user version of WordPress) – essentially the same as a beginner’s guide to WordPress, only with a couple extra characters in the name.
I was wrong.
Yes, it covers WordPress mu, but ...
Building WPVote Part 1: The Beginning
About a month ago Jean-Baptiste Jung (author of the WordPress Cookbook) put his website wpvote.com up for sale.
I saw a lot of potential in it but wasn’t sure I had the time to offer so had a long hard think before doing anything. A couple of weeks ago I had a chat with him and after a bit of back and forth we came to an agreement… so I am ...
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