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I'm not by nature a particularly jealous person, but seeing other people get loads and loads of Twitter followers I can't help but be a little envious. It's human nature - we all want to be more popular or more successful than we are. That said, I am also rather introverted and this makes growing my followers a lot harder than it could be. So what I want to do is increase my Twitter followers without seeming like I am [...]
Speeding up a websites loading time is so good for so many reasons, so it's understandable that people want to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve their images, however in the case of TimThumb there's a right way and a wrong way. Below I am going to explain how I use a CDN to speed up TimThumb on Binary Moon. Content Delivery Network? A CDN or Content Delivery Network, is a method for serving website content. Your content [...]
I often get asked questions about TimThumb and why it doesn't work in certain situations. I can generally tell what is wrong with the script within about 60 seconds of being sent a demo url. Below are my top tips for debugging TimThumb issues. Keep TimThumb up to Date This is super important. TimThumb should always be kept up to date. I regularly publish bug fixes and improvements and often the problems listed below will actually be fixed already if [...]
It's no longer spring but it's always worth spending some time tidying up your website. In this article I am going to show an easy way to clean up the dead articles on your site which will increase the overall quality of your posts, and stop any SEO leakage you might have. Recently I installed the Broken Link Checker plugin and it has helped me tidy my site up quite nicely. It has actually allowed me to do 2 things. [...]
In my never-ending quest to improve Binary Moon I have investigated hub pages, an easy way to link relevant content. Hub pages are a single page on your site that is targeted to one specific keyword or key phrase. This keyword should be something you want to rank well in, and that you have written about a lot. In my case I decided to target TimThumb. Since I have taken the development reins from Darren I thought it would be [...]
I am currently beta testing a new website called Optimizely - a super simple A/B testing product... and it's gotten me thinking. A/B testing is a process that allows you to optimize your website for your users. You create one or more variations of a page and then measure and compare the interactions on the new page against the old. The bit that got me thinking was creating the variations. When you design the tests you have the option to [...]
It seems like forever ago now but I have just realised I haven't yet announced Nominate here on Binary Moon. Anyway, at the start of July, I released a new theme called Nominate. This is the public version of the theme that is based upon my website WPVote.com. The theme runs the exact same code that powers WPVote.com. The different design for WPVote.com is applied using a plugin, so everything you can do with WPVote.com is now possible on your [...]
Moving the crop position around is by far the most popular feature that has been requested for TimThumb. And today it has been officially released! To be honest the cropping code was something I had put off as I wanted to keep things nice and easy to use; but then a month ago I found a comment on the TimThumb Google Code page that gave me a nice simple method for adding the alignment code. TimThumb Cropping Alignment/ Positioning The [...]
So far I have documented the basic TimThumb functionality, and how to resize images that are on external domains and now things can get interesting. In this part I will talk about some of the features that have been available for a while, but never officially documented - Image Filters. Image Filters When I talk about image filters I mean the types of effects you can get in Photoshop or most other image editors. Things like altering brightness and contrast, [...]
Of all the TimThumb feature requests the most popular are being able to crop an image from a specified location, and being able to load images from external websites. Resizing images from external images was added at the start of 2010 and seems to be working really well. Like all things TimThumb I tried to make it as easy as possible to use the external images feature, however I had to keep security in mind. Opening up external resizing would [...]
TimThumb has always been built with simplicity in mind. However there are a few things it can do that have not been exposed before. Inspired by a comment from RBhavesh I have decided to write a series of posts in which I will show you how TimThumb should be used - and introduce some new functionality. In this post I will discuss the basic usage of the script - the minimum parameters to send, and some examples of usage. Basic [...]
Saw an interesting blog post on Twitter today about storing WordPress FTP information in wp-config.php. The article was written in German so I sent the author an email to ask if he'd mind me translating it. Phil, the author, very kindly said yes - so my translation is below. Since the addition of the automatic updates in the WordPress core became available, there has been the possibility of FTP data in the backend. Then you can get both plugins and [...]
It's cool to have the WordPress login page customized to fit your own website branding. This is even more significant for multi author blogs, or sites you have set up for clients as it adds that little extra something. Since writing this post in 2007 I have released a plugin called BM Custom Login which does everything described below I was actually inspired to write this post because of a [...]
Regulus has been far more popular than I ever imagined it would be. So popular, in fact, that I have already created version 2.0 Changes Version 2.0 has been created specifically for WordPress version 2.0 (hence the name change) and features a number of new features. From the outside it looks the same, with the exception of the 4 new header images and the extra colour scheme, but underneath it [...]
TimThumb is a popular image resizing script that was created for Mimbo Pro - but it's never worked properly with WordPress MU, so I wanted to change that. The reason it doesn't work is quite simple. Because of the way WordPress Multisite (formerly WordPress mu) runs multiple blogs it uses a server rewrite rule to point to media uploads. This in turn means that the file paths for the images [...]
Regulus has it's own theme page here Towards the end of the Bubble Blitz developement I started work on my first WordPress theme. The making of it kind of stopped and started for quite a while since there were things I wanted to do that I couldn't. The idea behind the theme was to create a very simple to customise theme for the novice blogger. One of the problems with [...]
A couple of weeks ago I posted a brief history of TimThumb, the image resizing script I am responsible for. I said in the conclusion that I was looking for beta testers, and I am, however I have been a bit slack at sending out the script to the people who ask. So, I thought I would upload it for everyone to download so that we can give it to [...]
A small update with a few new features. The reason for this post, rather than updating the last post, is that I now consider Regulus complete. Barring any show stopping bugs there will be no new updates to Regulus, it's time to more on. The change log since the last release is (this includes the changes for version 2.1.1 which went out silently) ... fixed widgets unregister bug fixed search [...]
About BenMy name is Ben Gillbanks. I'm a lover of Video Games, WordPress, Web Development and everything in between.
I have been working on the internet since 1998, and working with computers even longer. I am a hardcore Nintendo fanboy and have owned most of their consoles at one stage or another.
Read more about me on my about page.
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