Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category
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, ...
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 ...
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…
