Crowd Favorite has released an open source WordPress plugin ^* that changes the Admin UI and sets up standards for a few different post formats. Here, their description is better:

“The plugin is a completely additive solution that leverages the default WordPress functionality, while improving the UI and standardizing the names and presentation of custom fields that support the various post formats.”

Post formats has limitless possibilities as you extend WordPress from a simple blogging tool to a much more powerful CMS… but this plugin seems to focus on the modern day blogger.

This interests me in that I use categories to handle my different post formats. Which is how everyone that has ever used WordPress had to do it. I’ve got mobile photos, links, videos, and longer posts I call notes, and larger photos. It would be great to start using post formats to post different types of formats – I’m looking forward to digging into this.

* Side note: So glad Crowd Favorite switched to Github. I hope other WordPress developers quickly follow suit. In fact, I think WordPress.org should change the way they host WordPress plugins to git.

Oh, I’m using Mark Jaquith’s Markdown on Save WordPress plugin and it works great.

For a long time, actually ever since I got an email from Marisa McClellan stating that she replied to a comment I left on her blog, I’ve wanted to be able to reply to a comment on my blog and have it automatically sent to the person that I’m replying to via email without changing the workflow for me. In other words, I didn’t want to have to copy/paste my reply and email the commenter or reply to the default WordPress comment notification email. I wanted to simply click reply on the comment, type in my message, select who I would like to email (or not) and click send.

With CommentMailer I can do just that. Although it is only at version 0.1 (so it is a little bit rough) it works great and I am happy I can finally let people that are kind enough to comment on my blog know that I’ve replied via email.

Update: Prompted by Katy Widrick asking me, via Twitter, how to set up Comment Mailer I’ve decided to post my response email syntax here.

%previousmessage%

My reply:
%currentreply%

%signature%

%notes%

– end –

The %notes% keyword is the one that will ultimately put a link in the email back to the original blog post. It would be nice to have %link% available though.

/via Simon Willison.

My thoughts on URL shortening services are pretty public but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a need for them. I prefer Bit.ly over any other URL shortening services that I’ve used to-date.

With Tr.im dying I thought that there was always the possibility of Bit.ly going down the same path. It was time to create my own URL shortening service for short URLs pointing to my site using my own domain. I browsed around, found two WordPress plugins that could have been candidates – but ultimately decided to use nothing but vanilla WordPress.

The Short URL plugin makes it very easy to take any URL and make it nice a short, track clicks, etc. I have this installed in case I want to shorten URLs that are not ultimately here on my site. (Though I still plan on using Bit.ly for these links). Short Post URLs is a plugin that seemingly does exactly what I want – which is make a shorter URL automatically for every post here on my site. However, the problem is that by default the plugin does not redirect from the short URL to the long one. This means that my posts would have two URLs. This isn’t what I was looking for and I didn’t want to hack someone else’s plugin.

That is when I saw it, right under my nose. The default link for any post on any WordPress blog is domain.com?p=postID. For instance, the short URL for this post is http://cdevroe.com/?p=2682. If you link to that URL WordPress will automatically forward that request to the full URL. Simple. Beautiful. Exactly what I need.

Occam’s Razor in full effect.

Update: Dean Robinson, maker of the fine mobile Twitter client Hahlo, suggests in the comments adding a simple line to your .htaccess file (if you’re so inclined) to pretty up your URLs. I’ve decided to add this for mine so that now both the original, default WordPress URL of ?p=postID works as well as /p/postID works now. Thanks Dean.

Glims, a plugin (read: input manager hack) for Safari, enables a lot of preferences around searching that Safari simply doesn’t have built-in. I originally installed it because I wanted to play around with Bing, Microsoft’s latest version of their search efforts. However, it came with a caveat that I can’t seem to find a solution to no matter what combination of preferences I choose. Keyboard shortcuts, such as those found in Google Reader, do not work when I have Glims installed.

So, I’ve uninstalled Glims – for now. The benefits of keyboard shortcuts in my most used Web applications outweigh those of trying out other search engines besides Google. I’ll be watching Glims for an update.

We didn’t stop at just squashing a few bugs, we added two very big features to the plugin.

In addition to the ever-popular video commenting portion, we’ve also added two WordPress administration areas to the plugin that add features to your WordPress dashboard, and to the Add media panels.

If you are using WordPress 2.5, give it a spin, and then comment on The Viddler Lab with your feedback.

Source: Help test our WordPress 2.5 plugin: Version 1.1 Beta 1.

A few things that become apparent quickly is that the interface is pretty heavy, making load time a bit annoying. The interface is usable, but slow. Also typing a link to anything is really tedious. With the iPhone not having copy/paste (yet?), and the characters needed to write an HTML link hidden beneath the iPhone’s keyboard layout hierarchy – I am not sure I’d ever bother to link to something.

A possible fix for this could be a button to create a link. Or, I could use Safari Mobile’s built-in email link feature and post to my site that way.

I’m still figuring all of this out, but as always I’ll try to report my findings. Next up, mobile photos.

Update: Edited to include links now.

Update: This plugin is now available to everyone!

I’m happy to announce that as of ten minutes ago, we’ve distributed a private-beta to a few friends that use WordPress. Having worked on this quite a bit I’m happy to get it into other’s hands, even if they come back with a ton of bugs for me to fix, at least it will allow me the feedback to make the plugin better.

If you use WordPress and are interested in allowing your audience to comment with video, and you didn’t get an email from me today, contact me and I’ll be glad to get you a beta copy of the plugin. We’re eager to get people using it, but we just want to make sure we’ve dotted our Ts and crossed our… you get the idea.

Within a few days I’ll be writing more about this plugin on The Viddler Spotlight, the company blog, and by that time the plugin will be freely downloadable from our site for you to use. I’ll then provide some development notes, how we pulled it off, and other tidbits. For now, if you’re interested in working with flash-video online, look no further than Viddler’s API.

To test the plugin click “Record a video comment?” below the comment form. This will paste the appropriate code into the comment form to include your video. See, I told you it was simple.

Update: Thanks to all that have emailed me and commented so far. This last test has truly been very fruitful. I was able to squash a bunch of bugs last night, and I’m hoping to put the hammer to a few this morning. I’m expecting to release 1.0 beta 2 early this afternoon so please update your respective blogs when it comes out. Again, if you’d like to beta test this plugin, just send me an email.

Update 2: Looking for more testers. Version 1.0 beta 5 is now in the hands of the current group of beta testers and appears to be really stable. I’d like to expand the number of blogs this is installed on by about double the number of blogs we have currently. Anyone interested should comment below or send me an email. Thanks again everyone for testing this out.

He took the time to write what he did, and didn’t like, about the plugin and why he chose to fix it. Read his entry where he introduces Slugger+.

To me, this is the perfect example of why I love writing these little plugins. I may not personally be the best person to write some of these plugins (due to my inability to watch for things as detailed as someone like Justin obviously is), but I did have the idea and at least I was able to “get it out there” so other people could improve on it.

And that is exactly what Justin has done. He took what he thought was a good idea for a WordPress plugin, fixed what needed to fixed, and offered a better version of it to everyone for free.

Thanks for updating the plugin Justin. I’ll use it religiously.

Not in this case.

I’ve tried a few Safari plugins over the years and most of them, if not all of them, have ended up making Safari not perform properly in various situations.

I’ve had plugins not load sites because of an installed plugin. I’ve had the user-agent for the browser inexplicably change to something else. I’m also hearing of other’s having upload problems when they have a plugin installed.

I think you will find that almost every plugin for Safari will somehow “break” your install. Perhaps not in anyway that you care about, or that you may even notice – but overall Safari plugins really do not perform well and are unstable.

As such – I can not recommend installing any Safari plugins. I know some of you will disagree, and that is ok with me, we can all agree to disagree on this particular issue.

[tags]safari, plugin, plugin, apple, macintosh, browser[/tags]
[slug]no-safari-plugins[/slug]

[tags]wordpress, wordpress plugin, plugin, slugger, chancecube[/tags]

I begged and pleaded that Simple Countdown would be able to do simple, easy, in-post countdowns and boy did Mike deliver. Check this out.

I will turn 27 on September 30th, 2007 which is in . How cool is that?

Go grab a copy, and let Mike know what you think.

I have the plugin activated here on my site, but haven’t decided how I am going to style my links yet. Fun fun!

[tags]wordpress, plugin, happy pals, open source, chancecube[/tags]