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.

Although I wish the app supported Markdown format (rather than just HTML) I’ll take it.

Just in time for our trip to Ireland too.

Update: A small, yet very welcomed update, is that the Posts tab is now the default tab rather than the Comments tab. This makes things so much quicker. Again, a very, very nice update to WordPress for iOS.

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

And for the past few years I think this has settled down a little. The standards those few pioneers set in the beginning are still around. Most blogs today have a fairly similar feature-set and layout. Even when the layout is dramatically different than the status quo the feature-set is still just about the same.

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Several rather new trends are appearing in the pro blogosphere that started only a few years ago but are now becoming the new pro blog recipe. These trends simply weren’t there 7 or even 5 years ago. Disabling comments is seems to be the main dish (though 4 years ago it was debated). Having a podcast on-the-side is the side-dish. Add to that some sponsorship opportunities in RSS feeds, and a sprinkling of an ad network to taste, and you’ve got yourself the modern day pro blog recipe. Actually, all you really have is a direct mirror of what John Gruber has put together with Daring Fireball – but, nonetheless, these are the trends among pro bloggers and these must be taken into consideration when coming up with a brand new blog format that could set the trend for the next few years.

Syndication has also changed. It seems just yesterday that people thought full-content RSS feeds would destroy their ability to make money blogging. It turns out that could possibly be the most profitable part of their blog’s business model.

Having a Twitter account for your blog, or simply being selective with what is tweeted from your blog (which is my current model), is where things may very well be shifting. Today it would be unthinkable to see sponsored tweets in amongst the links to posts but give it a few years. Today’s Twitter feed is yesterday’s RSS feed. I imagine there will be sponsored tweets too and, in the near future, people will be just fine with that.

Exclusive, paid-for email newsletters had a spike earlier this year with a few services launching and some key figures in the industry taking a stab at them. I have no inside information on how those are turning out – but there is reason to believe that the blog could also do with some exclusive, paid-for content. It may not work for your blog about Hobbit-lore but perhaps it’d work for an incredibly good cooking, investing advice, design-and-code-tutorial, or architecture exam review blog.

Something I’ve always had issue with is that there aren’t enough “home pages” on blogs. That is why the home page for my site is my about page rather than a reverse chronological list of posts as most blogs are. I have that page too but people landing directly on cdevroe.com should not be introduced to my website by only seeing the latest few posts I’ve written. It wouldn’t be a very good introduction and, very well, may not even represent what my blog is about. Because this is a personal blog and not a blog about any one topic, the latest few blog posts would be a very bad representation about what this site really is – a personal blog.

Most blogs that try to earn a buck want to put as many clickable items on their home pages as possible. They probably feel that if they didn’t you’d never go anywhere besides the home page. I can say, after pouring over the stastics of my home page, that isn’t true. A fair percentage of the people that have come to my home page have stayed on that page for a few moments (presumably reading the page) and subsequently clicked on the blog or diet page(s), done a search, or gone to my Twitter account. All good things. I hope that someone solves this issue in a much better way than I have because I really do believe there is a lot of room for improvement here.

Advertising on blogs has simply never worked well. Yes, publishers have made money. Yes, advertisers have increased sales by purchasing ad space on blogs. However, for the core-subscribers to a blog the ads are just noise. Ad networks like The Deck do a very good job at striving to keep a higher quality product by controlling the ads and how they are displayed. But, arguably, even at that level of curation we still just end up with an ad in a sidebar on a blog. I wish there was a better answer for making content “free” to blog subscribers but – at present – advertising is our mule.

Some people claim the trackback is dead. I don’t believe that to be true. In fact, I rather like trackbacks. I like when blogs show me what others have written about a particular blog post. I like them even better than comments. Perhaps if blog software, and the theme of a blog, used the optional excerpt of the trackback standard better they’d work much more like comments (and be much more valueable) than they do now.

Reblogging, Retweeting, Sharing/Liking on Facebook, etc. are all ways to have a post be spread outside of a blog’s audience. The modern day word of mouth. There is no doubt that these tools work very well for some blogs while on others they do nothing. I have these options on my blog and, while I do get a few people using them per day, they serve little purpose then to remind people that if they’d like to share the post they can do it quickly and easily. But in reality, if a post is simply too good not to pass on it will be passed on whether you have a big Facebook button on your blog or not. These tools aren’t going anywhere in fact they are going to become even more ubiquitous – but it’d be nice if someone with an ounce of taste figured out a way to make these options pretty as well as easy to use and, as a hat-trick, much more valuable to all parties involved.

I know, I know, I’m going on and on about this but all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg as to why I believe that the blog format is ripe for someone to really begin innovating again. We have all of the tools and over a decade’s worth of content – all we need are some pioneers.

All good questions. Here is how I write on iPad.

First, I use an application called iA Writer. This application gives me a distraction free writing environment that has just the right amount of features to make writing easy.

I do not use nor own an external keyboard for iPad. Never have. In fact, the on-screen keyboard in Writer has a custom keyboard with few shortcuts that I find very convenient.

I also edit within Writer. I read and re-read (unless I’m in a rush for some reason) the post until I’m happy with it. At this point there is no HTML, no links, no images, no videos in the post.

I then copy and paste the text from Writer into WordPress for iOS. I immediately save the post as a Draft (just in case). At this point I’ll either add the links, images, or video. If there is a lot of media to add to the post I may wait until I’m on my MacBook Pro to finish the rest. Sometimes adding a lot of HTML to a post using iPad can be cumbersome. I’m hoping that WordPress for iOS, at some point, adds a custom keyboard for written HTML quicker.

When the post is finished I’ll then schedule it to be published, usually sometime in the morning the next day since I typically write at night or very early in the morning. This gives the post time to stew a bit and gives me a chance to yank it if I end up not feeling good about the post. It also gives my blog a feeling of consistent publishing rather than a sporadic schedule.

And that is how this post was written.

• Photo and video uploads now work on iPad 2
• Made the post status (such as “Draft”) more clear in the posts list

I use my iPad to write posts and, now that I have iPad 2, I hope to do it a lot more often while on the go. WordPress for iOS has been making very steady progress lately and this update is a very timely one.

Why are these updates key for me? Because iPad 2 would instantly crash when trying to add a photo to a blog post. I was able to work around it by using iPhone but it was pretty frustrating. Also, I write posts, save them as drafts, and then schedule them for publishing all from my iPad. This allows me to pick the time that a post gets published regardless of when I feel impelled to write it and also gives me time to edit them (which I did poorly on yesterday’s post). Being able to see which posts are in draft right in the posts list is a very welcomed update.

Thanks WordPress for iOS team.

I’m working on a relatively big update to Viddler’s WordPress plugin and something that doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere is how to test a Dashboard Widget if your plugin supports one.

It is fairly easy to add just a bit of code to make it pretty simple to test your widget. First, rather than only loading your WordPress Admin URL (ie. yoursite.com/wp-admin) you simply prepend the appropriate information to the end of the URL. Like this: yousite.com/wp-admin/index.php?page=viddler&noheader.

Then, somewhere within your plugin’s code, you add something like the following:
function viddler_page() {
if ( isset( $_GET['noheader'] ) )
return viddler_dashboard_content();
}

Obviously viddler_dashboard_content() is the function that I use to build the HTML for the Dashboard Widget. This will return the HTML you’re creating for your WordPress Admin Dashboard Widget sans JavaScript and CSS. But at least you’re able to test your output.

Chris feels…

• as though the GPL is not conducive to good business practice,
• that it is not an enforceable license,
• and that Thesis, a WordPress theme and the main product of Chris’ company, somehow steps outside of the bounds of the GPL and so it shouldn’t apply.

Those three main arguments would be great to debate, to discuss and to figure out definitive answers to. However, the way Chris went about it – by simply not distributing his theme under the GPL – is definitely breaking the law.

It is sort of like speeding down a highway because you don’t agree with the speed limit in that area and your arguments are that speed limits aren’t good for highway safety, that there are no cops around to write out tickets and that you are somehow exempt from the speed limit laws because you’re a remarkable driver.

Bringing up problems with a license or even saying that a license doesn’t feel right and you’d like to discuss it at large is always a valuable thing to do. Deliberately distributing software without the GPL on top of software that is protected by it is not a valuable thing to do.

Is the GPL good for business? Is it enforceable? Is Thesis somehow exempt from the terms inside of the GPL due to its complexity? I don’t know the answers to those questions but it’d be fascinating to find out.

If this goes to court it would set a precedent but I hope it doesn’t for everyone involved.

Recently Drew wrote up the backstory to how this all happened and it is a fantastic read.

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.

Today I was reading on WordPress.com’s blog about “Two New Stats Things”, written by the always fantastic and multi-talented Andy Skelton, and since I use WordPress’ free stats plugin as my primary means of tracking statistics here on First initial, last name I figured I’d show my appreciation to Andy and team for the upgrades being very welcomed.

When I scrolled to the bottom of the page (there were over 175 comments when I was going to post my own) the normal comment form you’d expect to see was not there. What was there was a message stating that I have to log in to post a comment. I did that. Then, I went back to the page and it said this:

“You must set a WordPress.com blog as your URL to post a comment. Please update Your Profile.”

I realize that WordPress.com is, in and of itself, its own community. It is a “service” built on top of WordPress. But I found this, as I said, odd and also a bit disappointing that I couldn’t leave a comment to say thanks. Oh, the reason I can’t just update my profile and leave a comment? I don’t have a WordPress.com blog but I do have an account there so that I can use the API key for both Akismet and Stats (two products I am extremely thankful to the Automattic team for). Otherwise I’d have just bit the bullet and left a comment with an ‘inaccurate’ URL. But I couldn’t.

So I’ll thank Andy and his team here. Thanks Andy. For my humble little blog your stats plugin has been just what I’ve needed and nothing more to track how people read here on my site. The most recent update of showing the home page stats is very, very welcomed. Thanks.

Hopefully this feature will be available via a plugin sometime in the near future?

/via Tony Schneider.

Back in June 2008 I added an oEmbed service to Viddler. That means that in the next version of WordPress you’ll be able to embed Viddler videos using a very simple embed code like this:

I’m looking forward to updating the Viddler WordPress plugin to support this new schema and make it even easier for WordPress users (such as myself) to embed videos from their favorite video sharing services.

That pretty much summarizes my morning. But even good things can come from bad situations so here are a few things I learned today after dealing with the WordPress.com situation this morning.

First, I should have never emailed TechCrunch about the issue before I had heard something from the Automattic team. If the problem that I was having was a real, widespread issue then I would have only made it worse by directing attention to it. Second, I probably shouldn’t have written the blog post at all – at least not until after to simply chronicle the issue for posterity. This way it wouldn’t have been inflated, ineffectual, over reaching, and panic inducing. Third, I was misunderstood on multiple levels and by not reacting the way that I did I could have avoided that. I was mistaken about the entire situation. I tried to be of assistance and I ended up causing much to-do about nothing.

I regret publicizing it, regret trying to notify the tech media, and regret how I was misunderstood. I can’t do too much to rectify much if any of this but I can learn and move on – which is exactly what I’m going to do.

— original post below —

This will be a live blog of sorts to keep track of the events taking place right now. About 25 minutes ago, at 9:30am EST, I logged into my WordPress.com account to check my blog’s stats for my post about WordPress Short URLs. I noticed that, in addition to my normal account statistics being there, I also had access to a very high profile, VIP WordPress.com account (who shall remain nameless until Automattic replies).

At 9:31 I called team Automattic’s 877 # on their contact page. Left a voice mail message detailing exactly what is going on and letting them know I’m willing to help in anyway that I can.

About 20 minutes later, after not having gotten any replies yet, I emailed Matt Mullenweg‘s personal email account. Knowing that he’s probably still asleep on the West Coast – I didn’t expect it to help too much but I thought I’d try anything.

About 10 minutes later I figured other people that have WordPress.com accounts should probably know – so I sent an email to tips@techcrunch.com detailing what was happening – but not giving out any restricted information (not even the name of the account that I currently have access to).

When Automattic has the chance to respond, fix the problem, and notify the account that I have access to about the breach – I will update this post with further information. I respect the team at Automattic and I want to give them the chance to fix the problem and address their customers and community before I go any further or release any information as to how this happened and what accounts were affected.

10:30am EST: I’m trying to find a good way for all WordPress.com users to protect themselves until the Automattic team can get to this issue. But I haven’t found much in the way of shutting off access to a WordPress.com account. If any one knows a way, please leave a comment. However, I can suggest that you should log into your account, check out the Authors & Users area and be sure that no one is in there that shouldn’t be.

10:45am EST: Suggestion from friend Chris Coleman: Back up your WordPress blog. Duh! To do this, log into your WordPress.com account, click on Tools > Export and download the file. At least if someone hacks in you’ll be able to restore your blog to normal once this is fixed.

10:55am EST: It seems that my access to the account that wasn’t mine has now been revoked (or fixed). Still no word from Automattic yet but I’m assuming that either the error fixed it self, that the team’s priority was to fix the problem before contacting me, or perhaps an employee at the company whose account I had access to noticed that my user account shouldn’t have been there, and so deleted it.

Stay tuned. I’m hoping to hear from them soon. I will release the account I had access to once they confirm the problem is fixed and they’ve notified that company. I also have screenshots for proof but I am not sure if they’ll want me to share them.

11:10am EST: Someone from Automattic, Hanni Ross (who I don’t see on the team page at all though is a team member), contacted me via AIM and said that this was human error. A one time, one account, issue. Somehow my account and the account of the company’s site that I had access to was – by a human somehow – connected.

To be completely honest I don’t buy it. [Edit: I don't mean for this to sound as though I don't believe Hanni. I just didn't believe that this was a one time thing. More below.] But, as I said earlier, I have a lot of respect for everyone involved with Automattic and so I will take it for what it is. I’ve asked that the company be notified of what happened and that, in some way, it be confirmed that this was not a widespread issue. Hanni mentioned that she’d rather not have me mention the company’s name (which I haven’t yet) but I plan on doing so once the company is notified. If they aren’t, I plan on notifying them. I’ll also explain my reasons why later.

11:40am EST: First, I’ve edited the above paragraph. I never meant to bring into question the integrity of anyone at Automattic. I simply found it hard to believe this problem only effected my account.

I had a chat with Toni Schneider who explained exactly what happened, why it was a one time thing, and what they are going to do to try to make sure it doesn’t happen again in the future.

It turns out that when new VIP accounts are created and imported (perhaps from other blogs) the WordPress team creates the user accounts, imports the older blog posts, and other tasks using their own tools to do so. It turns out that whomever was setting this one up accidentally put in my username rather than, perhaps, one that the company wanted. Either that or there is another cdevroe floating around out there. If there is I bet their handsome.

Toni also said that they’d notify the company about this situation so that they have the opportunity to go through their current user access list to be sure there aren’t any other mistakes. Also that they’d create a check when running this routine again to try to help verify no user error.

I asked Toni what the best way to notify the WordPress team about something like this was (since I tried everything that I could think of and had the power to do) and he said to email support@wordpress.com because they have people “checking that email constantly”.

I’m happy with the way this situation turned out. I’m glad it was me that got access to this account and not someone that would have been willing to fool around with blog posts or other content on that company’s high profile site. I’ll be thinking about whether or not to release any other details about this situation in the future but for now I’m glad to get back to work.

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.

I’m spoiled by a rich-editor in WordPress, that saves drafts automatically and even has multiple revisions, and so I’m sticking with WordPress for now. But if I was going to use an application to write with – it’d be MarsEdit.

Oh, and the latest version supports Tumblr now. Which is excellent.

Fortunately I have a complete back up of this entire site and all of it’s data including notes, mobile photos, tags, comments – everything.  So I can go through and restore any data I end up losing by experimenting. Again, I’ve yet to fully solve this problem.

This morning while I was watching Edwin Villanueva‘s March 4th, 2009 MeToday video I was reminded of a post I wrote in September 2006 and I wanted to link to it. After searching my site and, eventually, finding the post I was looking for – the page wouldn’t load. Then because of that error my admin wouldn’t load, then I couldn’t save anything, couldn’t find the post I wanted to edit in the admin, and a host of other problems.  I pulled up my local copy of my Web site and found the post immediately. Very odd.

Turns out I’m not alone. Other people have had this issue with versions of WordPress doing back as far as the 2.x jump. I found this post by onepack on the WordPress forums that helped me (at least it seems to have helped some). While the pages take a long time to load (old ones) it seems like they are not resulting in 500 Errors as often. But the problem still persists.

Thanks to this small .htaccess patch and to using WP-Cache to cache the pages here – the 500 errors are not appearing as often.  Has anyone else experienced this problem with WordPress? I’ve Googled and Googled and been unable to find anything that truly solves the issue.

Note to readers: If you’re looking back into my archives and run into this problem, I’m sorry. I hope to get it fixed soon.

Update 11:09am: I’ve turned off all plugins to see if this solves the issue temporarily.  I’m going to be turning them all back on slowly to see if the issue props up again. Sorry for any site slowness in the meantime as my site does not have caching on for the time being.

Update 11:31am: I’ve turned WP-Cache back on, deleted the entire old cache, and will let it run for a little while before turning anything else on. So far, so good – and the site seems to be very fast. If you find a page that errors, please report it here.

Update 11:47am: Now that I’ve had WP-Cache on for 15 minutes and the site has had hundreds of page views with no problem – I’m turning on Akismet so that we’re safe from any comment spam coming through during our testing. I’ll let this run for a few minutes though I think it only runs when new comments come in.

Update 12:06pm: Wow – in the amount of time I had Akismet off I received more than 30 spam comments. 30 in an hour. I wonder if that attributes to the problem?  Well, Akismet is back on. Going to let it run for a little while longer before pulling the trigger on another plugin.

As a side note: I think this is a good exercise to be doing regardless of the problems I’ve experienced. Going through each plugin to measure the effect it has on your site is one that, while a little tedius, might end up cutting some of the fat in the end.

Update 12:17pm: I’ve now activated the WordPress Related Posts plugin. We’ll see how this one does.

Update 3:00pm: I went back to work since playing with this. Seems the 500 errors returned. I am not sure if this is related to the Related Posts plugin or not. I have it disabled and have also switched to WP Super Cache since WP-Cache was giving me trouble.

Which is a great thing to see!

So, I’m both sick of waiting and terribly excited to take advantage of the offerings that WordPress 2.7 brings to the table – so much so that I’ve now upgraded my site to the latest version – which is 2.7 RC1.

RC stands for Release Candidate. This means that the software I’m running is, in the minds of the developers, ready to be used by the masses. It is – more than likely – the exact code that will be released as an official update to the WordPress software.  The only reason the code will be updated from RC1 is if anything rather high-priority is found (like a bug or security issue).

Upgrading to RC1 was painless (I came from version 2.6.3 I believe). I’m looking forward to fully kicking the tires on this new release and writing up a general review of my thoughts on this latest release. First impressions are incredibly positive.

In no particular order I present – the best of the Web 2008.

The Best Blog: Daring Fireball

John Gruber’s blog will, it seems, always win this award from me. I toyed with the idea of awarding Daring Fireball with Best Journalism but I don’t want to take anything away from the writers that are writing about much more important topics than the goings-on of the Apple community and marketplace.

The Best New Blog: The Big Picture

Boston.com’s The Big Picture is easily the best new blog of 2008. Jason Kottke agrees with me, or I agree with him maybe. The photos are always stunning and the topics always seem perfectly aligned with my particular interests at the time of publishing. Even though I’ve read Andy Baio’s interview with the author, Alan Taylor, I still don’t know how this blog is as consistently awesome as it is.

The Best Blog Redesign: Jason Santa Maria

Jason’s latest redesign for his personal site is inspiring. Each of his posts, as he so choses, are designed specifically to empower the content he is posting. Example. Example. Example. His site has made me rethink my random headers on this site and I’ve now begun development of a much more intelligent way to allow my site to choose the headers. And that is just a start. Jason’s blog is also one of the only blogs that I purposefully leave the Google Reader interface to read the article as he intends, on his site. Brilliant.

The Best Blogging Platform: WordPress

My love for WordPress isn’t a secret. But Automattic’s effort to continue the momentum of this open source project has certainly been a big win for it. Regular, scheduled, feature and bug fix rich updates to an already industry-standard-setting piece of software is refreshing in every way possible. Kudos to every single developer that works on WordPress.

The Best Feed Reader: Google Reader

I’ve wrote about Google Reader a few times. I know that this is a touchy subject for some – because we all have very different ways of keeping up-to-date with our subscriptions – but I feel that Google deserves the recognition of building what has quickly become the most popular feed reader on any platform. NetNewswire held that title for a very long time, and deservedly so, but I believe the throne was usurped this year.

Side note: Boy do I miss Ranchero in its original form.

The Best Company: Apple, Inc.

I’m sorry but I have to give this award to Apple for their apparent take-over of the entire mobile, computing, and music industries. Regardless of relative size and market-share as of this moment, I believe that we’ve all seen what it looks like to rip these things out from other holders. In a few years Apple will be on top of every single list not just the “this year’s top” lists. I’m not sure how this will effect Apple overall but right now I’m happy that it is happening. Check back in 5 years to see if Apple makes my Worst Of 2013 list when I hate Apple for being like Microsoft, or something.

The Best Mobile Twitter Client: Hahlo

For me this is a no brainer. Being an iPhone-owner means that I have many, many applications at my disposal for posting and keeping up-to-date on Twitter. Whether we’re talking about iPhone applications or web applications built for the iPhone – Hahlo is far and away the best mobile Twitter client.

The Best Twitter Account: @MarsPhoenix

Duh. The Mars Phoenix Twitter account is the only somewhat-non-human account on Twitter that I follow that I’m not directly related with in some way. I’m sure there are other great Twitter accounts that are out of my own echo-chamber but this just strikes me as the obvious choice because of the way it has fundamentally changed the way that NASA delivers its news about their programs.

The Best iPhone application: Handshake & Ocarina

Two bests? Yes. These two are tied for very different reasons. Handshake is probably the iPhone application that I feel should have been part of the iPhone all-along more than any other application that I have installed. Being able to share contacts with other iPhone users through the air is awesome. Ocarina just simply makes me happy in a way that no other iPhone application has done. I can’t play a lick of music with the thing. But the ability to listen to other people who are equally horrible Ocarina players makes this application get a dedicated spot on my iPhone’s home screen.

How’s that for subjective!

The Best Application: Coda

I don’t do near the same amount of programming as I once did. However, the one application that completely changed the way that I do programming has got to be Coda. It’s single-window environment has made working much more enjoyable, less frustrating, and much more focused than ever before. The latest update which allows other developers to extend its text-editing functionality will, I think, improve the built-in text editor at a much quicker pace. I’m really happy about that.

The Best Browser: Fluid

I don’t know what else to call Fluid and it needs to be on my list somewhere.  My normal browser of choice (that is, the browser that I use to ‘surf’ the Web) is Safari. But as far as creating a single site browser for my favorite applications; Hahlo, Brighkite, Gmail, Google Docs, and Basecamp – Fluid is the best choice.

The Best Preference Pane: Connect 360

This selection could also be categorized as The Best Way To Save Money By Not Buying An AppleTV. If you have an Xbox 360 and a Macintosh – I suggest purchasing a copy of Connect 360. You can use your Xbox 360 to view photos and videos and listen to music on the television in your living room. Painless. Perfect.

The Best Email Client: GMail

I switched to GMail this year, using the aforementioned Fluid, and haven’t looked back. My main reason for switching was because Mail.app was slowing down a lot. On my first-generation black Macbook, using Mail.app with IMAP for 3 email accounts, Mail.app was incredibly sluggish.  I’m fairly certain I could have done something to improve the performance of Mail.app – and I do appreciate its synergy with the Mac OS – but GMail has won me over with its speed and operator searches. To be specific, I use Gmail for domains and so does Viddler.

The Best Messaging Client: iChat

I do not know why people on the Macintosh use anything else besides iChat. Not mentioning any names, most of the other clients do far too much or suck up too much memory or have features that just do not work. iChat works, is simple, has small foot print, and has generally every feature I could ever want in a messaging client.

The Best Keyboard: Apple’s wired keyboard.

How did a keyboard make this list of obviously Internet-related things? If you don’t ask, I don’t have to come up with an answer. My Macbook’s keyboard is crazy-fantastic. Since I connect to an external monitor while working in my office, I needed a keyboard that would offer the same level of crazy-fantasticness. Apple’s new wired keyboard does that. It has not only reduced the noise of typing – which I appreciate – but it has done it in a way that has not taken away from the tactile response that I have come to love.

 

In an effort to get this list out the door – this is not an exhaustive list. I didn’t keep a list throughout the year so this is an off-the-top-of-my-head list.  I fully plan to add a few more ‘categories’ to this list, especially if you care to suggest any in the comments, and will hopefully have a much more revised list for 2009.  I will do one of these every year.

Thanks to everyone who made the list this year because, in some way, you made my technology experience much more enjoyable. You probably already have my money – but now you have my public applause too.

Suggestions, comments? Add them below!

THiCK is the very first premium WordPress theme that I’ve actually considered pulling my wallet out for. Not only is the structure of the theme refreshing but the number of options that it comes with out of the box should fit the needs of many a blogger.

You can preview the theme on Woothemes and Matt Brett has written a little bit about the experience he had developing it on his blog. He says this about THiCK:

“THiCK is a beast of a theme! It’s catered towards personal blog authors and packs a pile of features right out of the box, thanks to a number of a custom widgets created by the team at WooThemes. From a design standpoint, it’s extremely flexible. There are 2 main styles (clean and grunge) and a main colour scheme for each (light and dark). From there, you can choose from 5 variant colour schemes that change headings and links through-out the blog. There’s also 2 different header layouts that can be selected from the admin. THiCK is built on the 960 Grid System and the original PSDs are included in the bundle, so customizing further should be a breeze.”

If you are looking around for a theme, take a look at THiCK.

Source: THICK – A PREMIUM THEME FOR WORDPRESS.

“So that’s it. Before you even get into the technical merits of the platforms, think about the license, especially if you’re a theme developer. Slapping a Creative Commons license on your theme will work just fine for Habari. Doing it for WordPress is a violation of their license.”

He says this because WordPress is released under the GNU General Public License that states that if you create a work that contains any part of WordPress it must “be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License”. Which is pretty much anything built “on top” of WordPress, right?  Plugins, themes, small widgets, all have WordPress’ built-in functions in them.

Should this be a real cause for concern? Owen thinks so.  There is some interesting chatter in the comments of his post too.

Source: One Way in which Habari Absolutely Slaughters WordPress.

These changes are really, really small.  Unless you come to this site on a daily basis (you do, don’t you?) you may not notice any of them.  A pixel here, a color adjustment there, an array sorting issue here, a speed improvement there. But these changes were mounting up.  Even browsing my site myself, looking for old entries, I became annoyed with some of the existing bugs because I knew I had already fixed them on my local install.

So today, while I’m running out to spend the weekend in The Finger Lakes region of New York for a wine festival, I published these “little things” to the live site.  I wish there was a way I could calculate the changes (perhaps I should be using Subversion or something), but my guess would be somewhere in the hundreds.  I still have some things that I’d love to get around to adjusting, but they’ll have to wait for the next update.

So, if you’re feeling adventurous, go ahead and poke around.

From my investigation, it appears that WordPress 2.6 ignores the upload preferences that I have set.  By default WordPress likes to upload files, such as images, into a directory commonly located in /wp-content/uploads/.  From there it creates a hierarchy based on the date you upload a piece of media.

For some reason, I had changed my preferences a while ago to be /wp-content/mobile/photos/ ((Presumably because I thought the only photos I’d uploading using WordPress would have been from my mobile phone.)).  The only problem is now that this setting is ignored, when I want to upload a photo through WordPress’ “Add media” upload tool, it results in a broken image.

This is fairly easy to fix even while I write a post, since I’m able to edit the HTML of the post.  However, WordPress handles each piece of media the same as it would a post to your site.  So there is all types of data stored in the database for each media file uploaded.  Title, description, caption, thumbnail URL, original URL, being some of the metadata that is being stored.  Most of these I can edit through WordPress, some of them I can’t.

Take a look at my photos page.  There is a broken image there, not because the file does not exist, but because WordPress is looking in the wrong spot.  Unless I edit my database manually I will not be able to get that image to display properly.

I’ll do that soon, but I’m hoping someone sees this post that can address the problem for the next release.

Addendum: As db pointed out in the comments, the files are going to the correct locations. It just seems that the reference to the file, being written to the database, is in correct.

Update on July 18: As Simon points out in the comments, this is not necessarily a bug but it is unexpected behavior.  Read his comment for details on how to fix this in your 2.6 install, but it appears it will be “taken care of” in 2.6.1.

Second, is that I wanted to say that there are a few very well designed applications out there, and these are among that list.  I don’t want to confuse anyone with my last post on the matter.

Last, I wanted to try out WordPress 2.6′s “Press This” bookmarklet.  I like it, but I need to add excerpt and “slug”.  Both of these fields are must-haves for me.

Source: tap tap tap ~ tasty bits for your iPhone.

It is obvious that Aaron knows WordPress down to its very core, including even the unused code, and that makes him perfectly suited for these types of updates.  He probably does research on each release before it comes out because his previous job position at b5media demanded that he know what was coming on the platform.  He still uses WordPress on a daily basis as he is the cofounder and lead editor for Technosailor on which this article is written.

These lists are extremely useful to those that do not have the expertise nor the time to focus on what is coming in each release of WordPress before they are released.

A note about WordPress 2.6: This, like 2.5, is an excellent release and I’m really looking forward to it.  I’m hoping that Apple updates to a version of Safari that Google Gears can run on, since Google has said it runs in the latest Webkit nightlies, soon since I won’t be able to use the Gears integration with WordPress until they do.

Source: Technosailor: 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6.

But I think it is time to stop complaining and start helping.  How?   What if we created a list of “well built” applications that use the Twitter API?  By that I mean applications, tools, widgets, etc. that do a good job of not pummeling Twitter’s servers with requests.

The A-list of Twitter apps

I’m not foremost expert on scalability – but I know a well-built application from a bad one.  Any application, widget, or tool that does not use even the simplest form of caching, for example, will not make this list.

I will need your help.  So please comment below with any applications or tools I have not yet linked to, I’ll vet them a little, and add them to the list if it makes the cut.  If you are a developer – please include what you do to help Twitter with your link.

• MW Latest Tweet - by Eric Meyer – A WordPress plugin that shows your latest Twitter status anywhere on your WordPress-powered site.  In order to make sure that I am also helping Twitter, I’ve installed this here on my site.  You can see it on the sidebar of my front page.
• Twitterrific – by The IconFactory – A Mac OS X application that allows you to view your friends timeline and post to Twitter.  Twitterric only requests the Twitter API on a set interval (customizable, and I have mine set to every 15 minutes now).
• Twhirl – by Marco Kaiser and now owned by Seesmic – An Adobe AIR application, which means it runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms, that lets you follow Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, and others.  The highlight of how this application helps Twitter is that it has a requests-per-hour-slider.  I’ve got mine set to 10 (but I only have it check for new statuses every 15 minutes).

Do you have any applications you think should be added to this list?  Why?  Leave them in the comments.  As I update this, I’ll notify people through Twitter, FriendFeed, and Pownce.  ”Follow” me if you dare.

Miscellaneous tips

A few tips and tricks to helping Twitter out, regardless of the tools you choose to use.

 

• Decrease number of requests.  No matter what applications you use, increase the interval (or decrease the number of requests per hour) between requests to Twitter for updates.  The common “side effect” of doing this is actually being more productive.  Give it a try!
• Don’t manually refresh after update. I’ve noticed myself doing this too.  When you send in a new status, don’t manually update.  Chances are it will take a few moments for your latest status to appear in whatever application you are using.  Send in the new status, if there isn’t an error, wait for the next scheduled request. I can’t imagine how many requests this could potential get rid of.

 

First, he speaks about Michael Arrington’s crack at Blaine Cook of Twitter.  In short, Arrington puts a lot of blame on Cook for Twitter’s stability issues and then some “experts” reply in the comments.  Then, he talks about some of the opinions being spewed out about WordPress and its supposed downfalls as it pertains to scalability.

Lin is much more versed in the technology, especially the infrastructure, behind-the-scenes in both of these cases than I am – so I will not be offering my opinions here and ask that you read his.  Also, I will not be linking to the other sources of this story, because I’d rather you read them with his context.

Side note about this link: I found this article through Matt Mullengweg who wrote and published a post called Armchair Scaling Experts which has been taken down since and I don’t know why.

Source: random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition.

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.

Source: eBay Ink » an inside look at the wide world of eBay, Inc..

Upgrading

As with all WordPress upgrades, it is as easy as advertised. I was able to click Upgrade and in a matter of milliseconds my database was updated. Since I hadn’t upgraded since prior to 2.2 I had a few plugins that were now rendered obsolete, so I deactivated them, edited only a few template tags, and deleted a few template files – and I was done.

Quick tips for upgrading, that may save your life one day, are as follows:

• Back up your blog’s database
• Deactivate all plugins

Doing these two, rather simple, things will save you tons of time and the need to debug thousands of lines of code once you’ve upgraded and you see some errors from your plugins.

A few oddities

There are a few things I’ve noticed that seem sorta odd – but I think I have to do a little more investigating to be sure. The first is that I can no longer reorganize the “write panel” in the WordPress admin? Maybe there is a plugin or option somewhere to let me do this, but I’d much rather be able to reorder this page how I’d like it. Like, why is Slug all the way at the bottom?

The second thing is that, in my opinion, WordPress should have told me that I no longer need the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, and that I could just go to Manage > Import and quickly convert my tags into WordPress tags and be done. The process was really simple and I was able to disable a huge plugin, which I like, but even knowing that it was available wasn’t apparent enough.

I used to have two mobile categories here on my site, one for mobile photos and one for mobile notes. Each of them resided under a parent Mobile category. The URLs for these were /mobile/notes/ and /mobile/photos/. I can no longer structure my categories like this because WordPress 2.5, automatically, decided to rename my category slugs to photos-2 and notes-2. Very annoying. Is this a bug?

I don’t have “Add media”

The WordPress Admin needed a change and, while I’m not in love with the new design quite yet, any change was a good change and I’m sure that future version (and time) will go a long way.

Oh. I don’t have a “media panel” for uploading multiple photos/video, etc. Where is that?

Conclusion

Solid update and I recommend it for everyone that uses WordPress for no other reason than the inline plugin updating – which is something that WordPress should use to upgrade its own code base too!

Now I really need to get the new theme of my site completed so that I can take advantage of all of these new things I’ve been plugging in.

But that isn’t all, I can now post to this site using my iPhone (which I’ve tested once so far), using the mobile admin plugin. Although a little slow, even on Wifi, the interface works really well on the iPhone to write up quick mobile notes.

I’m really happy with these two solutions so far. Now I just need to get WordPress to recognize the iPhone’s email attachments (photos) and I’ll be well on my way to bringing it all together.

Update March 20, 2008: After using this mobile interface, I’m finding it way too slow even on Wifi on the iPhone. I’ve now begun searching for a simple, mobile interface that is optimized for working on slower bandwidth connections. Any suggestions?

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.

“The index page is no where near completed but I wanted to have at least a dozen posts published prior to me working on it. It will be a page showing off the title and thumbnail of the photos that have been published. Nothing too fancy but definitely a little nicer than what is currently there.”

Over the last four months I’ve managed to publish more than “a dozen” photos, so perhaps this small update is a little overdue but I wanted to get something out because, let’s face it, the old index page was absolute bleh. Although I have even more plans for what the Photo section should include, I think this version should serve its purpose until I have at least a few hundred photos up and tagged.

Left: Old Photo index. Bleh. Right: New Photo index. Yay!

How it works

For those of you that will no doubt end up asking me how I pulled this off, here is the incredibly boring and simple details. The Photos section is still running a fairly vanilla version of WordPress – it is just that I’ve now added a custom field value to each photo post (namely: thumbnail) and created a thumbnail for each photo (about 45 at the time of this indexes launch) I’ve published.

A side note about creating the thumbnails: I had a ton of fun creating the thumbnails for each photo. Each thumbnail is not just a smaller version of the photo, it is a re-cropping of the original photo. In some cases, I’m actually happier with the way the thumbnail came out than the photo itself. It is like having a second crack at editing the photo – with only your distance from subject changing. Anyway, I’m showing my photo geek side.

There really are no secrets behind the new index page except that I’ve managed to produce some custom HTML output for the Photos category on this blog and am obviously pulling in the thumbnails accordingly and styling them differently.

Known issues

As with this Photo section’s history so far, there are a few things that I want to change over time. Being that this isn’t the final version of the index itself, I’m looking forward to sprucing it up again in four to six months.

There is also the question of beating WordPress into submission regarding the URL for the second page of photos. I’m having trouble not having the word /category/ in the URL (if anyone knows a work around, send it my way). Once I fix that, I’ll be much happier with the index pages.

The second main thing I hope to fix in the coming days/weeks is the fact that the thumbnails on each page show up a little oddly due to the fact that I’ve chosen to show the most recently published photo a little larger than the rest. Being that I’ve made that decision, and I’m sticking to it for now, I will have to play with the number of photos show per page in order to pull off the grid properly.

So, that’s all for now. I am hoping now that when people come across my Photos section they aren’t turned off by its appearance quiet so quickly and actually take the time to explore some of the photos. Let me know what you think!

Update: So I had to make a few adjustments already. But one thing I want everyone to be sure of – if you are using Safari, be sure to hit refresh once or twice on the Photos section. For whatever reason Safari does not love to show you the latest version of the page without forcing it to do so.

If only Safari’s over-zealous caching would trickle its way onto the iPhone’s mobile Safari.

By the time 2008 rolls around I hope to be sporting a completely new suit. I’ve got a lot of work to do before I get there, which is why I’m setting this goal 60 days out. First, I need to update to WordPress 2.3.1 (or whatever version is out by the time I get around to updating from my current 2.2.1 build). This jump should be fairly painless besides changing some template code to include the way WordPress handles tags now, and since I am going to be building my site’s new template from scratch anyway, it won’t really be any extra work at all.

I’ve been using this “out-of-the-box” yet hacked template for far too long and I think it is beginning to wear on me. Don’t get me wrong, I really like this template and it has definitely served me well for the way I’ve structured things around here. But I’ve been poking around with some new front page features that simply do not work with the current template. That, and I’ve recently been giving the photos section a lot of attention and what I wanted to do there wasn’t working out with this structure so really I don’t have much of a choice.

Onward and upward. I hope for at least the next two months the recent changes (which are very subtle but were nagging me) serves me, and you, well. But I can’t wait until the beginning of a New Year and the beginning of the next iteration of this site – which I hope will serve me for at least a year.

As always if you find something wonky just let me know.

Update November 23, 2007: Ok, so maybe I lied. After playing with new layouts for a few days I’ve decided to stick with this one and just make small cosmetic changes to make the theme more my own, to update the markup, and extend the features. I’ve done 2 small things to this end over the last two days.

The first thing I did was add support for hAtom. I’m still experiencing some oddities with the dates, and I will continue to make adjustments as I learn how to pull off the date requirements for hAtom with WordPress, but for now the main page of this site will syndicate the latest entries via hAtom with no problem.

The second thing I did was reconfigure the navigation. I’ve been wanting to tighten up the vertical use of space for a little while – so even though this isn’t the final version of the navigation it is definitely a step in the right direction.

Next up is a new heading. Having ‘Colin Devroe’ as an H1 worked for a while…. but soon it shall read something entirely different and may even include some graphics! *gasp*. Until then, enjoy.

Don’t let the URI fool you, this is nothing more than a fancy way of displaying the photos category for my blog. I took out a wrench, screwdriver, and a filled up a few cups of coffee and sat down with my local WordPress install and went to work. It didn’t take me as long as I thought it might, but I am definitely doing a few hacks that I’m looking forward to undoing once the next version of WordPress is released. I have a few known issues (not necessarily bugs) with the current version of Photos (which is 1.0.3 if you are interested) so I will list them here so that you’re aware.

• The index page needs work (see below).
• When on the archives page the main menu item does not highlight properly.
• I need to put thumbnails on the home page.
• The Creative Commons license icon does not line up with footer text. (Yes, I’m that picky.)
• I need to improve the way this entire site display on the iPhone.

There are a few things that are not bugs that we might consider. One is that the “previous” and “next” photo navigation, found at both the top and bottom of each photo page, only links to the next and previous photo and not just the next post on this site while the “previous” and “next” links on posts (like this one) link also to the photos. This is completely on purpose though I’m still struggling with it a little.

If you find anything else besides the above that you think might be incorrect or could be done better, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments of this post.

About the photos

I debuted the Photos section on Wednesday and since then I’ve managed to post three times per day. I’m going to attempt to keep a schedule when posting photos but it will certainly not be every single day. On days that I do post, however, I will be posting three times. Sometimes posts will consist of more than a single photo. I’ll be posting two more photos today, but then my nine-day vacation starts (so I won’t be posting during that time).

The index page is no where near completed but I wanted to have at least a dozen posts published prior to me working on it. It will be a page showing off the title and thumbnail of the photos that have been published. Nothing too fancy but definitely a little nicer than what is currently there.

You may be wondering about the quality of the photos themselves. Let me be the first to say; I am not a good photographer. But then again I’m not good at drawing or painting but I sometimes enjoy doing that too. I enjoy taking photographs and also enjoy sharing some of them.

A note about the image quality of the photos thus far: Eliza and I “went digital” fairly early on. We’ve owned our fair share of crappy digital cameras over the years and we’re paying the price for being early adopters. Every photo that I’ve published so far was taken with a 2.1MegaPixel camera. As time goes on some of the more recent photos, which were taken with slightly better cameras, will show themselves – but please don’t be too put off by the quality. We also have plans to upgrade our current camera lineup as soon as we can – which we’re both looking forward to very much.

I hope those of you that take a look at these photos enjoy them. I’ve not turned on comments yet, and I’m not sure that I will. I think of my blog posts as the beginning of conversations (as we’ve discussed in the past) – but I think I’d like to allow the photos to speak for themselves.

Special thanks to: Jonathan Christopher and Alex Hillman for helping me test and refine the photos section. Your feedback is always spot-on.

Update October 16, 2007: I’ve turned comments on for the photos.

Update October 29, 2007: I’ve just released a new version of the entire site that addresses 22 known issues and adds 3 new ‘features’. All of the “bugs” from this post have been fixed.

The first is “related posts”. There are countless related posts plugins out there and all of them work fairly well but since I already use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for my tagging efforts, and it has a function for related posts, I’m using a slightly tweaked version of that. When WordPress 2.3 is released, and tags are included by default along with a way to import all of my UTW tags, I may need to adjust the way I handle related posts. Until then, these seem to work well enough.

The second was I’ve always wanted to utilized my Ma.gnolia bookmarks better. Bookmarks seem to come and go and rarely are they ever used as a really valueable resource. I think the way I am using them now will add a lot of value to bookmarks that I’ve stored on Ma.gnolia, even if I had saved them there a very long time ago*. What’s more is that I’m adding value to my posts too!

The way I am using my bookmarks is through “related links” which can be found just to the right of the related posts on the bottom of every post on my site. I’m using Ma.gnolia’s API to search my Ma.gnolia account for bookmarks tagged with the same tags as the current post and constructing a list of the latest five of those. I’ll be working on extending this somehow to show every applicable bookmark but I’ve found that five should provide enough of a resource in most cases.

So come to the site, take a look, and let me know what you think. I’ll be releasing this new “Ma.gnolia Related” plugin after I’ve let it run on my site for a little while and I’m able to clean up the code a little. Oh, and it uses an as yet unreleased method argument of Ma.gnolia’s API – so I may need to wait until the next version of their API is officially released. (And to those that will probably wonder, yes I’m caching requests. Expertly, I may add. )

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.

When we first arrived Jen Simmons, Owen Winkler, and Kel (Joseph Kelter) were already there talking about various topics dealing with WordPress.

At this point I kind of flew off the handle at my disgust in the current WordPress world and with Habari (which I didn’t know Owen was one of the developers). However, after Owen literally gave me his laptop, in cool tablet form, to use Habari – and I can definitely say that the project is showing signs of potential. With Owen at the helm, I think the project definitely has a chance. Perhaps someday I will write up my thoughts on both of these topics.

Rob Sandie and Tom Kim

At this point people started to trickle in until the entire room was filled with people, conversations, and card games. I ended up mingling with Josh, Mike, and Jason for the majority of the time (which wasn’t long enough) and didn’t get to speak with many people that I really wanted to be able to.

Next month I’m going to try to get back down to the meetup (though I think I’m going to Philly at least two other times during the month of March so I have to check on a few things), and hopefully I’ll be able to speak to those I missed this time (Tom and Tony I’m looking at you two).

To any of you that attended that I did not get to meet or talk to – please make it a point to say hi to me next month.

[tags]weblogger, meetup, philadelphia, pennsylvania, ten stone, mike stickel, matt regula, jason santa maria, joshua lane, jen simmons, owen winkler, chris fehnel, eliza devroe, wordpress, habari, tony g, tom kim[/tags]
[slug]meetup0207-recap[/slug]

Chris at Ten Stone Bar – April 15, 2006

So far Eliza, Mike, and Chris are coming with me. It looks like Rob, Tom, and Marisa are definitely going. Andrea and Jason might be going. And sadly Tony G. can’t make it. Update: Happily Tony G. is able to make it!

And, it appears we’re going to have a fairly full house.

If you are in the Philadelphia area (heck I’m 2 1/2 hours away and I’m still going) and you’d like to meetup with some great people to discuss WordPress, blogging, Viddler, or just sit back and enjoy a beer – sign up to the meetup and we’ll see you there.

Note: You can add this event to your calendar program of choice since this post is marked up using hCalendar. Enjoy.

Note addendum: It appears that the above link won’t work for Outlook users? Not sure why – probably because Outlook sucks?

[tags]philadelphia, meetup, webloggers, blogging, wordpress, event, pennsylvania, viddler, rob sandie, chris fehnel, mike stickel, colin devroe, eliza devroe, tom kim, marisa mcclellan, andrea, jason santa maria, tony green, microformats, hcalendar[/tags]
[slug]meetup-021706[/slug]

First, I grabbed a modified version of Cutline and made my own little tweaks (which I’m not quite finished with yet). Obviously I changed the way the headers work and brought back my featured headings in order to highlight certain posts randomly. I’ll be adding many more banners over time, since there are ton of posts that should be highlighted. I’ll be doing a little more of this by creating a “random note” area in my right-most sidebar soon.

I also edited the way that the sidebars work. I wanted a 3-column layout to allow me to pull in my flickr photos, some posts from Viddler, ChanceCube, and The uber geeks, as well as a place that I will soon be putting various other collections. However, I wanted to have only 2-columns on my single entry pages because I like having the width for things like photos. Also, some of the pages (like the new diet page), have 3-columns, while some only have 2-columns.

On the frontpage you will notice the latest posts from the other sites that I write on (mentioned above). This section is powered by BDP RSS Aggregator. Obviously I could have built this type of functionality myself but after seeing how well thought out this WordPress plugin was – it made the decision to use it very easy. BDP RSS Aggregator does far more than what I am using it for, and if you are looking to syndicate some feeds on your WordPress powered site, I highly recommend you looking into it.

My most recent Flickr photos, on the frontpage, is powered by FlickrRSS. Since BDP RSS Aggregator has so many options, I could have technically used it and ended up with the same result, but I chose to use something that was specifically built for grabbing my photos from Flickr. Obviously Flickr’s API could have been used for such a task, but all I really wanted was a cached list of my 4 most-recent photos, and using the API would seem like a little overkill. FlickrRSS does an excellent job, is easy to configure, and has just the right number of options. Another plugin that I highly recommend.

For my recent comments I’m using a highly modified version of the recent comments plugin. I’ve added support for Gravatars and a few other options that it didn’t have out of the box. Once I clean up the code I hacked to get it done I may submit the changes, but since it is reliant on someone using the Gravatar WordPress Plugin (site currently under repair as of today) too, I may not. If you want this, just give me a shout.

For my archives I’m using Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives plugin. I like my archives simple, and this plugin allows me to have just that. I see now that its been updated recently, so I may have to get me a fresh copy.

For my keyword tagging I can’t do without the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin – which in my mind is the best keyword tagging plugin for WordPress. It allows me to use MarsEdit to write my posts and put my keywords inline – which has increased the accuracy and ease of searching quite a bit too. There are many benefits to using this plugin.

I’m using Shaun Inman’s Widon’t plugin to help clean up the straggling words on my post titles. This layout doesn’t succumb to these problems as much as the last one did, but this plugin is handy nonetheless. Plugins that work completely behind the scenes and yet make such big differences in your site should really be applauded.

My feed is being delivered through Feedburner via the Feedburner WordPress plugin by my friend Steve Smith. It is all transparent to you on your end, but to me it adds a nice little layer that allows me to pull some nice stats on how many people and who are subscribed to my site’s feed. If you are using Feedburner and WordPress, this plugin is a must have.

Obviously I’m using ChanceCube‘s Slugger plugin to help me never to see WordPress’ administrative area as well as HappyPals to take advantage of my XFN relationships in my links. I also have Mike Stickel‘s Simple Countdown plugin installed and activated, but you’ll have to wait till the weekend to see why. These three plugins have become indispensable for me in how I publish, Slugger the greatest of these. I could never stand using WordPress’ admin (or any administrative area that I’ve seen) to write my blog posts. I’m happy I don’t have to anymore.

I think I covered pretty much everything. Poke around, if you see anything outta whack just let me know. Other slight tweaks will have to wait till the weekend as I have a fairly busy week this week.

Oh! For those of you on the diet that have recently been contacted by me (which most of you have, and if you have not then it probably means you’ve been fairly active in the dieting area over the last few months) – I’ll be updating everyone today or tomorrow but suffice to say that Tuesday begins another 20-week (minimum) run of updates. More soon.

[tags]cdevroe.com, redesign, shaun inman, wordpress, plugins, chancecube, mike stickel, slugger, happypals, simple countdown, ultimate tag warrior, justin blanton, smart archives, flickrrss, gravatar, recent comments, bdp rss aggregator, viddler, theubergeeks, cutline, theme, steve smith, feedburner, flickr, api[/tags]
[slug]cdevroe-v0207[/slug]

If you experience any problems, let me know. If you don’t, upgrade your own blog to the latest version because, from what I’m seeing so far, it is definitely a lot faster and cleaner than it was previously.

UPDATE: One of the features that I didn’t see documented elsewhere, but I have found to be a really nice addition, is that now when you post a comment you are automatically redirected back to your comment instead of just the post’s permalink. So, if I’m the third comment on a page – I no longer need to scroll down to make sure my comment was recorded properly – WordPress forwards me right to my comment’s bookmark.

Go ‘head, give it a whirl here on my blog on any post. Pretty cool.

[tags]wordpress, open source, upgrade, ella, mysql[/tags]
[slug]wp21[/slug]

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