Tag: plugin Posts

I spent yesterday mostly sitting around and watching movies, which was a nice change from the norm. I also started work on a new BuddyPress Chat plugin that will allow user-user chatting, similar to Facebook style. When I was down in San Francisco at WordCamp, I told Andy Peatling that I really wanted to contribute something to BuddyPress if I could, so I thought a chat feature might be a cool feature. I still have a ways to go, but I have the code which takes a user from “Offline” to “Online” chat status working now. Next step will be to display a list of Online friends, and then obviously open up a small chat window to allow chatting with them. As you can see, I’ve also planned out a History section, so you can see your past conversations. I’ve also debated how to do group chats, which I think […]

I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last few months trying to understand how search engines work, and how sites get indexed. In my last article, I recommending that the XML Sitemap generator for WordPress should be installed on sites to help with search engine crawling. On this site, Google has gone from around 400 indexed articles (about 20%) up to around 1600 articles (about 80%) for my website — a substantial increase, entirely due to the sitemap. I want to write briefly about WordPress title tags in the context of search engine optimization. Most default WordPress blogs are configured to output the blog name first, followed by the article title (for example, reading an entry called “Things to do in Vancouver” on the blog MyBlog would have a title that looked like “MyBlog – Things To Do In Vancouver.” There are several problems with that approach. First, […]

As you can see, I’ve been trying to push out some of these plugins that have been on my plate for a while. The Media Burner one is now officially in beta. Media burner automatically extracts media files (MP3, FLV, YouTube, etc) from your blog posts and creates a site-wide player. An example in action If you want to test it out, click on “Media” in the menu bar up top of this site, click here to test it. Head on over to the main page listed below for more information or if you want to download it. The standard WordPress plugin database just fell over, so I have no way to tell the world about this. So if you check the plugin out and like it, please forward the link around or do a blog post about it. Head on over to the Media Burner Plugin page for more […]

I’ve been dabbling with a new caching engine for WordPress over the last few weeks. While WP-Cache does a pretty decent job, it falls short in a few areas, and it’s something I’ve been trying to fix. In particular, here’s what I don’t like about it: It relies on the entire WordPress engine to do it’s caching It doesn’t make use of proper HTTP caching headers The problem with the first item is that even if you have a cache hit, the entire WordPress PHP core is parsed and partially executed. What that means is the caching system will always be limited by how fast the PHP parser is on the host machine, and how bloated the WordPress code-base is. The second item is a little more subtle. If you request a page from a website using WP-Cache and it registers as a cache hit, basically WP-Cache reads a file […]

About six months ago I released the Crossroads wordpress plugin. I haven’t really kept up to date with the usage statistics for it, but today I stumbled upon them. There are currently 370 authenticated users, generating around 20,000 API calls a day to Flickr. Not bad.

Last week, John got a hold of me on iChat and let me know about a WordPress plugin competition. Since I have written a few of them, I thought I might as well enter the Crossroads Flickr plugin into the competition. While the contest winners haven’t been announced yet, they have announced all the participants over at one of the sites. If you are a user of the plugin, head on over and give it an honest rating.

I took a quick break this afternoon from work and decided to hash out a quick WordPress plugin that would push my blog entries into my Twitter feed. The end result is WordTwit, and it’s available for download if anyone wants to try it on their WordPress blog. Drop me a comment or two and let me know what you think.

I’ve really been trying hard to get a new release of Crossroads out for quite some time, but with my job at work, it’s just so hard to find a few hours to spare these days. That being said, I’ve up-reved the plugin to version 2.0, and am making the changes I’ve done available as a download. This is an early alpha, and for sure it has a few bugs, so please don’t expect it to be perfect. Compared to version 1.0, here are some changes: Added support for GreyBox image gallery Added support for HighSlide JS image gallery Fixed a few changes with how the scripts were loaded to improve compatibility Added more adminstration options Removed Flickr comments from posts, as these were very slow — you can re-enable them via the admin panel if you want The original plugin page for Crossroads can be found here, and it […]

I created a new plugin for wordpress that scans excerpt entries and adds photo and video icons for related posts. You can read more about it here.

Well, it’s only been a little over a week since I open sourced the plugin used on this website. So far, based on the flickr API key statistics, it looks like 25 people are using it, which is pretty cool. A couple of people have emailed me a few suggestions, so I’m gonna try to release a new version soon incorporating some of them. If you are using it, then drop me a line and let me know!