Polaroid Photo

Sun
8
Jun '08

Now with Tags and a Dictionary

I know I’m a little late to the game, but I’ve finally added tags to my website. Oooo….

We also, if you are inclined to comment, have added some toys to the comment section. If you look right above the comment box, you’ll see a button with two arrows on it. Click that and you’ll get a bank of buttons that will make it easy to add formatting to your post. There’s even a dictionary.

Sorry…no spell check yet.

Mon
2
Jun '08

Posting by email

Well, I seem to have the whole posting by email straightened out. At
first glance, it didn’t seem like something that I needed for my site
to do, but I’ve recently come upon several uses for it. For instance,
I can now post from my cellphone to my website, which is useful in
those cases when I’m stuck in the airport without wifi. Handy, yes?

I also always pasted stories into gmail to convert them to plain text
before copying and pasting them to the website. Now, I can just paste
them in here and post straight away. Such convenience! Granted, it
took me half an hour to figure out why it wasn’t working, but now, now
all is golden and glorious.

I think. I’m about to hit “send” and see if it all really works.

Mon
19
May '08

Trying out a new WP theme

My old theme was having trouble with the new WP install, nothing major, but I was annoyed with trying to track things down and figured, hey, why not try a new one. Your thoughts?

Edited to add:
I’ve got the old theme back up, trying to figure out what’s causing the polaroid picture to not display.

Even further edited to add: So… when I moved the random image folder to the main directory it started working again. Got no idea why it wouldn’t work where I had it, but there you go. We are back to my old theme, which I’m now going to tweak to introduce some elements that I liked from the other theme.

Sun
13
Apr '08

Random pages

I added a link over in the sidebar for “Random page” which will take you to a different random post every time you click on it. I thought it might make an easy way to browse.

Fri
11
Apr '08

My plugins

Several people have asked me what plugins I use in my Wordpress installation, so I thought I would do a list here for reference.

Nr. Plugin Version Description
1. Akismet 2.1.8

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.
By Matt Mullenweg.

2. Audio player 1.2.3

Highly configurable single track mp3 player.
By Martin Laine.

3. BiblioFly 0.31

Allows management of a bibliography through WordPress. Stores data in the database, features a variety of functions to allow display of publications in a list (eg for the sidebar) or on a page. Styled through CSS.
By damselfly.

4. Comment Quicktags + 1.1

Inserts a quicktag toolbar on the blog comment form. js_quicktags is a slightly modified version of Alex King’s newer Quicktag.js plugin modified from original found here.
By Dan Cameron.

5. Comvatars 2.4

Shows avatar images on user comments to uniquely identify the author much like various bulletin board systems do. The Gravatars plugin by Skippy and the Favatars plugin by Jeff Minard must be installed and activated to achieve the full functionality. Please visit the plugin homepage for further documentation.
By Sören Weber.

6. Dagon Design Form Mailer 5.4

The WordPress plugin version of my secure php form mailer script
By Dagon Design.

7. Event Calendar 3.1.0

Manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar. You can subscribe to the calendar from iCal (OSX) or Sunbird. Change settings on the Event Calendar Options screen.
By Alex Tingle.

8. Event Calendar Widget 3.1.0

Adds sidebar widgets for Event Calendar and Upcoming Events. Requires the EventCalendar and Widget plugins. After activating, please visit Sidebar Widgets to configure and arrange your new widgets.
By Darrell Schulte.

9. Google Ajax Search 1.003

Adds a Google AJAX Search box on your site. Example found here. Options include searching your site through Google Blog Search and/or straight up Google, a second search option is available that is perfect for flickr. Widgetized for your pleasure. MAKE SURE TO CONFIGURE your options and enter your API key.
By http://dancameron.org.

10. Gravatars 2.6

This plugin provides an administrative interface to control default gravatar options. Registered users can also (optionally) define local gravatar images that will override their gravatar.com default. Copyright 2005 Scott Merrill; Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License'>GPL.
By Scott Merrill.

11. In Series 3.0.12

Gives authors an easy way to connect posts together as a series.
By Travis Snoozy.

12. LiveJournal Crossposter 2.0

Automatically copies all posts to a LiveJournal or other LiveJournal-based blog. Editing or deleting a post will be replicated as well. This plugin was inspired by Scott Buchanan’s Xanga Crossposter
By Evan Broder.

13. My-Plugins 0.2

Displays all the plugins - just insert [my plugins] in post where you want to display a table of plugins that you use. Example here.
By Matej Nastran.

14. Photopress 1.0

Photopress adds some image handling tools to Wordpress, including a popup upload and browse tool, a random image template function, and a simple album. Installs and uses new database tables. Works with WP 2.1+.
By Isaac Wedin.

15. ProgressFly 0.60

A plugin which stores work-in-progress data in the database, and displays a graphical progress-meter
By damselfly.

16. Random Quotes 1.3

This plugin allows you to embed random quotes into your pages. It also has a spiffy management tool in the administrative console.
By Dustin Barnes.

17. Random Redirect 1.1

Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion. You can also specific in the URL `random_post_type` or `random_cat_id`.
By Matt Mullenweg.

18. Related Posts 2.04

Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches.
By Alexander Malov, Mike Lu & Jon Bourne.

19. Simple Tags 1.5.7

Simple Tags : Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags !
By Amaury BALMER.

20. Subscribe To Comments 2.1.2

Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess
By Mark Jaquith.

21. TFS Acronymit 1.1

An acronym tagging filter. (Requires TFS Core)
By Dougal Campbell.

22. TFS Core (Text Filter Suite) 1.1

Adds advanced text filtering functions which can mangle text in amusing ways.
By Dougal Campbell.

23. TFS Fudd 1.0

Elmer Fudd filter. (Requires TFS Core)
By Dougal Campbell.

24. TFS Jive 1.0

Jive filter, sucka! (Requires TFS Core)
By Dougal Campbell.

25. TFS Kraut 1.0

Ein Kraut Filter. (Really bad pseudo-German) (Requires TFS Core)
By Dougal Campbell.

26. TFS Pirate 1.1

Pirate filter, me matey! Arrrr! (Requires TFS Core)
By Dougal Campbell.

27. TFS Swedish Chef 1.0

E Svedish Chef Vilter, Bork Bork Bork! (Requires TFS Core)
By Dougal Campbell.

28. TTFTitles 0.4.2

This plugin provides two new template tags to replace plain text with styled images. This is primarily a reworking of the Image Headlines plugin. Of course, THAT was a reworking of another plugin by Joel Bennett. The main changes over Brian’s plugin are (a) a richer admin interface, (b) the ability to predefine multiple image text styles, and (c) using template tags instead of depending on arguments to the_title. Anything that works really well probably came from Brian’s code. Anything screwed up is probably my fault.
By John Leavitt.

29. Wordbook 0.13.5

Cross-post your blog updates to your Facebook account. Navigate to Options → Wordbook for configuration.
By Robert Tsai.

30. WordPress.com Stats 1.3.2

Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.
By Andy Skelton.

31. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade 1.2.2

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. Go to Wordpress Automatic Upgrade to upgrade your installation Thanks to Ronald Huereca for making the plugin run in automatic mode.
By Keith Dsouza.

32. Wordpress PDA & iPhone 1.2.6

This plugin helps the users to view your blog in a pda and iPhone browser.
By Imthiaz Rafiq.

33. WP-Footnotes 3.3

Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post.
By Simon Elvery.

34. WP-Polls 2.31

Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.
By Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan.

35. WP-Polls Widget 2.31

Adds a Poll Widget to display single or multiple polls from WP-Polls Plugin. You will need to activate WP-Polls first.
By Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan.

36. WP Ajax Edit Comments 2.2.1.0

Allows users and admin to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments.
By Ronald Huereca.

37. WP Super Cache 0.8.2

Very fast caching module for WordPress. Once activated, you must enable the cache. Based on WP-Cache by Ricardo Galli Granada.
By Donncha O Caoimh.

38. Yet another threaded Comments plugin 0.6.5

This comment allows to have newly created comments relate to existing comments, so you can comment on a comment. This information allows to display the Comments in a hierarchical fashion (e.g. a Tree).
By Joachim Praetorius (yatcp@organisiert.net).


Output generated by My-Plugins plugin by Matej Nastran.

Wed
9
Apr '08

Secure Form Mailer Plugin For Wordpress by Dagon Design

It’s the simple things in life that make me happy. I love the idea of ReCaptcha, which stops spam and helps identify the text in hard to scan books, so I’ve been wanting to implement it on my contact form for awhile. Finally, today, I found Secure Form Mailer Plugin For Wordpress by Dagon Design which does exactly that. It was easy to install and seems to work like a charm.

Mon
31
Mar '08

Wordpress 2.5 and LiveJournal Crossposter

I uploaded to the new Wordpress 2.5 last night and was aggravated to discover that my beloved crossposter was incompatible with the new version. Fortunately, my googlefu is strong and I found a hacked version of the plugin that works around the incompatibility issue. For those of you who also crosspost from Wordpress, you can pick up the new version of the LiveJournal Crossposter plugin, here.

Wed
9
Jan '08

A commenting test

For some reason, since I upgraded to the new Wordpress, I haven’t been getting notifications when people comment on posts. Could you help me out by commenting here? I’ll update this when I get it figured out.

Also, if you use the subscribe to comments feature, are you getting notifications?

Thanks!

Edited to add: Thanks to Jim Stitzel who told me to add wordpress@[mydomain] to my server. Miraculously that fixed it.

The subscribe to comments also seems to be working just fine.

Mon
7
Jan '08

Hackers

Spending an hour after I get home from work to clean out a list of porn from my site is not my idea of a good time. It was code hijacking on an otherwise perfectly good plugin. The plugin is uninstalled. I’ve reinstalled Wordpress and am now going to bed.

You’ll have to wait one more day to hear about the boat and the harpy.

Edited to add: The compromised plug-in seemed to be PodPress.

Sun
2
Sep '07

When insults had class

There is a lovely list of insults at Angry 365 Days a Year. I don’t think one should re-use these insults, but I do think that they will serve as a useful model for creating a classic insult of one’s own.

Some of my favorites:

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time in reading it.” –
Moses Hadas

“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” –
Samuel Johnson

“He had delusions of adequacy.” –
Walter Kerr

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” –
Billy Wilder

Sat
17
Mar '07

ProgressFly - a progress meter

Oh happy day, I’ve been looking for a while for a Word Press progress meter that doesn’t require me to update the code all the time. Behold Deborah McDonnell made ProgressFly, which is available on her site, scribbling damselfly which does everything I could ask it to do. There’s an easy control panel for customizing the look of the meter and updating your wordcount. And the output is very clean and simple. See.

[pfmeter id=1]

If you use WordPress and want a wordcount meter, I highly recommend this.

Wed
31
May '06

Tobias S. Buckell

Tobias S. Buckell Online » Blog Archive » Listen to a story of I read: Waiting for the Zephyr can be heard online for free at the Spoken Alexandria Project.

The story is narrated by the talented Mary Robinette Kowal of the Willamette Radio Workshop.