Archive for the ‘wordpress’ Category

Responsive Design, WordPress Security and Ghetto Coding

November 29th, 2011 - Jeff Turner

Here are a few WordPress  highlights from my Twitter surfing over the past week. FYI:  I used the Dashter Premium WordPress Plugin to help me curate the tweets and add my commentary as I stumble on them. The people mentioned in the post are being alerted automatically, using the Dashter twitter queuing system.

Responsive Design Themes are beginning to show up in larger numbers. 

Ahmed EsamAhmed Esam – @drtemon
Good Minimal A Responsive WordPress Theme. #wordpress http://t.co/tj017Vr9

As responsive design continues to move into the mainstream, we’re going to be seeing a lot of themes pop up with responsive design characteristics built in. The Good Minimal theme’s menu breaks down at one point in the page width adjustments, but it’s a good example of what’s to come in this area. What are your favorite themes that have responsive design built in?

Dre Armeda on WordPress Security

bkmacdaddy designsbkmacdaddy designs – @bkmacdaddy
#WordPress End-User Security by Dre Armeda – http://t.co/iOvaLm0g

Dre Armeda is our favorite WordPress security expert. If you’ve never seen one of his security presentations, here’s a chance to see him in action online. Even if you have seen his presentation before, chances are you’re not doing everything he suggests, so watch it again. :)

WordPress 3.3 is on its way

beAutomatedbeAutomated – @beAutomated
As of today, we are a steamroller paving the way to WordPress 3.3 launch http://t.co/m9qixnCw #web #cms #WordPress

Yes, WordPress 3.3 is on the way. For those of us lucky enough to have been given indepth tours and insight into coming features, the update is eagerly awaited. This is a great post by Jane Wells, and she rightly comments, “For the people working on the release, most of whom run trunk on their own sites for at least a month or two (if not longer) before each launch, it’s easy to forget that features we had done months ago — flyout menus, drag and drop uploading — are still being hoarded by us (and more recently by the lucky recipients of a merge onto wordpress.com) and are not available on the sites of regular users.” This kind of sentiment is what makes the WordPress community and platform so great. We at Zeek are proud to be a part of it.

And some thoughts from Mashable on important 3.3 features:

dean guadagnidean guadagni – @deansguide
Do you use #wordpress for your business? http://t.co/1mrtmIUZ v. 3.3′s 11 most important features

Resist the urge to take shortcuts

Todd CarpenterTodd Carpenter – @tcar
How ghetto is it to use an HTML table to format a WordPress Page? #idontwanttowriteacutompagetemplate cc @housechick @zengy @ReggieRPR

The answer, and I know that Mr. Carpenter knows this, is yes, and it’s also just a bad practice. “The problem with using HTML tables,” according to Steve Zehngut, “is that page sizes are much larger, the tables often take longer to load and by using tables, you’re not really future proofing your site. In addition divs are simply more SEO friendly.”

And A New Feature in Jetpack 1.2 – Email Subscriptions

beAutomatedbeAutomated – @beAutomated
How to use Email Subscriptions in Jetpack 1.2 http://t.co/qqMB8es3 #WordPress #Automattic #Jetpact #Email #Subscriptions

According to Automattic, “All features in Jetpack 1.2 are on by default. So subscriptions, like all other features in Jetpack, requires no magic to activate. Visitors to your blog can choose to subscribe to new posts, or to subscribe to new comments on a post they have already commented on.”

Where will the email subscription links appears on your blog? ”Two places. One is on by default, the other you have to activate manually. By default, you will see two new checkboxes on every blog post, at the bottom of the comments form. To add the Subscriptions Widget to your sidebar, go to your Dashboard. Then click on Widgets. You will see a widget called ‘Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)’. Click on it, and drag it to the sidebar on the right.”

 

The Promise Of WordPress 3.1 – Easy

February 26th, 2011 - Jeff Turner

“Blogs don’t work for most people.”

That was one of the reasons Tumblr founder David Karp gave to TechCrunch this week when asked why he created the Tumblr blogging platform. “All blogs took the same form,” he notes. “I wanted something much more free-form, much less verbose.” And the beauty of micro-blogging platforms like Tumblre and Posterous is how easy they are to use. Tumblr’s bookmarklet is beautiful and the foundation of Posterous is email, but both have moved on to created incredibly simple to use iPhone apps the compliment their original ease of use propositions.

Another beauty of Tumblr, specifically, is the way it handles different post formats. Highlight a selection of copy in an article and click on the Tumblre bookmarklet and it knows you want to make a quote. It presents you with a dialogue that makes sense for that format and then posts using a style that enhances that format.

I’ve been using Tumblr to drive Just Dug Up (see the image to the right) for many years now. I use it because it’s simple. I use it because it makes the tidbits I find during my web wanderings look better than they actually are. I don’t have to think hard, I don’t have to format anything, I just click. Easy. Fast. Painless.

Similarly, I’ve used Posterous for JeffTurner.mobi since Posterous was launched. I use it when I’m on the go or when I want to do a quick review of a mobile app that requires multiple screen shots. Again, Posterous makes is simple. Email the group of screenshots or use their iPhone app and it takes care of creating an image viewer, like the one below, without any intervention on my part.

Why can’t WordPress be that simple?

I’ve wondered out loud about this in the past. Why can’t the existing WordPress ”press this” bookmarklet be turned into something more intelligent, like Tumblr’s bookmarklet? Why can’t it sense that when I’m highlighting text, I probably want to format it like a quote? Why can’t I post multiple photos and have WordPress understand that I want them shown in a slideshow format? And herein lies the promise of WordPress 3.1, at least in part.

When Matt Mullenweg announced the live version of WordPress 3.1, he said, “There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts…”

And there are some really promising Themes ready to carry out that task, including Wumblr, Lightbright, and from WooThemes,  Auld, each of which do a great job of taking advantage of this new post format feature. Auld distinguishes itself already by taking advantage of a slew of “Tumblog” utilities that WooThemes has provided for some time now, including Express App for iPhone, extensive multimedia support, and their advanced QuickPress funtionality that is built into the theme.

The good folks at WooThemes have made their Tumblog Plugin available to everyone. And their documentation on what to do to make your blog tumblog read is extensive. So, you can tune any theme to take advantage of the power of the new WordPress 3.1 features. The Tumblog plugin automatically enables their QuickPress widget. Combine that with their Express App and you’ve just taken a huge leap toward the ease of use that distinguishes platforms like Tumblr and Posterous.

Here’s the problem. Something is missing.

All of that is excellent, but  the main reason why I’ve been excited for the release of WordPress 3.1 is the hope that it wouldn’t require me to run to so many different sources for plugins and widgets to get to this kind of functionality. The problem? Something is still missing. It’s a better bookmarklet.

I don’t do most of my content creation on the go. I pick through my feed reader in the mornings looking for good content to talk about and love the ease of getting that content to Tumblr. The Tumblr bookmarklet is what makes it so simple. And while there are rumors that a new Press This! bookmarklet may be in the works for the next release of WordPress, I’m sad it didn’t make it into this release.

I’d rather be posting slightly longer reactions to content right here on Zeek.com, but I don’t want to have to continually jump back and forth between the wordpress dashboard, my feed reader and the post I’m reading. I want to highlight a quote, add my comments and hit send without having to think about formatting. That’s what Tumblr provides right now.

We’re so close.

The promise of WordPress 3.1 is ease of use. We just need a better bookmarklet.

 

Why Should This Headline Be My Status Update?

October 20th, 2010 - Jeff Turner

I want a different way to post updates about my blog to the social web directly from WordPress.

The universally accepted “send an update to Twitter using the headline via the one allowed account tied to my blog when I hit publish” option just ain’t cutting it for me anymore.

Can we be smarter about this? A headline is not always the best status update message. I may want to hit publish and send a message out to Twitter or Facebook at a later time or to each one at different times. I may want to make sure a second or third update gets sent out later in the day or the following week. I might want those to highlight the post from a different angle.

And I’d like to do all of those things at the same time that I’m writing the post, so I don’t have to think about it or remember to do it later. Let me choose from several different Twitter accounts. Let me publish to those different Twitter accounts at different times, with different messages, suited for their specific audiences. Is this too much to ask?

One more thing… add this same functionality to the Press This bookmarklet. This would make me happy. For now.

If you know of a plug-in that will make this happen right now, let me know.

Import Your ActiveRain Posts To Your WordPress Blog

May 28th, 2010 - Jeff Turner

A few weeks ago, ActiveRain released a feature that allowed it’s members to “archive” their ActiveRain blog posts. Utilizing that file, however was not a simple task, so we’ve created a WordPress Plugin to make the process simpler.

Click here to download the plugin immediately.

This video will walk you through the process of exporting your ActiveRain XML file and importing it into your WordPress blog. This is for self-hosted wordpress blogs only.

YouTube Preview Image

May OC WordPress Meetup Live

May 24th, 2010 - Jeff Turner

Tonight’s Orange County WordPress meetup is a “back to basics” night. So, I thought I’d give the live blog app another run through the paces. Tonight, we’ll be sending photos through as well.

6:46 pm: And the crowd begins to gather for the OC WordPress meetup.

6:56 pm: Just another photo test. :)

Let’s Get This Party Started

7:01 pm: @zengy is explaining the Live Blog app. This will be tweeted.

7:04 pm: The crowd is much larger tonight.

WordPress 3 Beta 2

7:09 pm: WP3 Release candidate 1 should be “any day now” according to @jefferyzinn

7:12 pm: The big update in WP3 beta 2 was an update to the menus customization. Allows custom creation of different menu types and positions inside the appearance panel. Top. Sidebar. Wherever you like.

7:13 pm: The menu types and nesting features in WP 3 are hot.

Installing WordPress

7:26 pm: Start by creating a new, empty mySQL database, then install a clean version of WordPress in the new directory. Then in wp-config.php change your mySQL host location, name and password.

7:29 pm: Once installed simply visit the site, give it a name and… It’s hard to live blog and answer phones and let people in doors at the same time. :)

7:34 pm: When you set up a WP blog, are there plugins you use by default? “Yes, one of them is Vipers Video Quicktags.”

7:36 pm: Photo-

7:39 pm: @mac_boy recomends seeing if a plugin author is respondingb2 comments on download site.

7:41 pm: Feed WordPress, WP Print and WP EMail are other plugins @zengy will install by default.

7:43 pm: Crowd advice: if you can’t preview a WP template, don’t activate. Bad things happen.

8:01 pm: Feed WordPress is a plugin that allows you to syndicate any rss feed into your blog. To use Feed WordPress you have to update to their recommended version of rss.php. The instructions are contained in the plugin warning.

8:24 pm: Looks like something I did in last update freaked out the Live Blog app.

8:25 pm: It may have been the ampersand. We’ll check that out.

8:33 pm: Just seeing how this handles a panoramic shot.

8:43 pm: Anton recommends css-tricks.com for great WP training videos

8:57 pm: Speed up WordPress w/ caching plugins – WP Super Cache, Squid and W3 Total Cache.

8:58 pm: WordPress is very data intensive. Caching dramatically reduces the database calls.

9:07 pm: Great crowd at OC WordPress tonight. Thanks!

Testing from the iPad version of the app now. (no timestamp)