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 ...
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 ...
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 actionIf 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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! ...
I finally cleaned up the main plugin for this website enough that I’m ready to release it to whoever wants to test it out. You can read about it and download it from the Crossroads Page. Basically all the flickr pieces on this website are handled by that plugin, so if you like what you see on this website, then feel free to test it on yours.
I still have a ton of work to do on it, mainly in the speed optimization area, but I figured it’s good enough now for some people to test out. Enjoy. ...