Category: WordPress
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Persona
I’ve been playing around with Mozilla’s Persona a bit lately, so I was thrilled to find a WordPress plugin that makes integrating it ridiculously easy.
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So Simple
So Simple is an extremely minimal, responsive WordPress theme focused on readability. And it’s just $1.99. At that price, I’m tempted to get a license just so I can dick around with it…
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Poster
Normally, I ignore iOS based WordPress post editors, but I was tipped off to Poster while listening to this week’s episode of Systematic and it actually looks crazy nice. Besides being easy on the eyes, it’s got Dropbox integration, Markdown support, custom fields, post format selection and even slug editing. Slug editing! From a 3rd…
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Ooooh, Columns!
I couldn’t agree more with Justin Tadlock’s feelings about the prevalence of [column] shortcodes. They’ve been getting baked into a ton of new WordPress themes and there’s no standard for how they’re implemented. Besides: Users lose this functionality when they switch to a theme that doesn’t support their previous theme’s shortcodes, leaving bracketed words in…
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Developers
Say, man, do you use the Developer plugin for WordPress? No? Well, it’d be a lot cooler if you did…
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Socialite
I normally have a pretty strong dislike for social sharing buttons — mainly because of the overall load time they add to a site — however, Socialite.js (and its WordPress-ready counterpart) may have softened my opinion on them. By loading the social sharing buttons asynchronously, it can cut the amount of initial page requests down considerably. So…
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The Auditor
Interconnect IT’s The Auditor looks like a really nice audit log plugin for WordPress. But it retails for $249. That means that I’m not going to get to play with it any time soon. I wonder if I can get away with expensing it…
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Cache Rules Everything Around Me
When it comes to speed, one of the easiest things someone hosting their own WordPress install can do is enable expires headers. Expires headers basically tell the browsers visiting your site to cache the static stuff — like images and scripts — so they don’t have to be downloaded every time one of your pages needs…
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Liveblog
I’m looking for an excuse to use the new Liveblog plugin for WordPress after finding out about it. But it’s kind of “out of scope” for me to start doing that sort of thing here. Or is it?
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Feature Request: Tracking Plugin Updates
You know what I’d kill for? A plugin that takes this info from a WordPress plugin page: And drops it into place here: Because keeping track of that sort of thing is becoming increasingly important for anyone who gives half a shit about keeping their site and its plugins up to date. So, uhm, does…
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WP201: The Video
The folks over at WordPress.tv have posted my section of the day long class I helped teach on WordPress performance & security during WordCamp Phoenix 2012. The audio is a little muffled and the video is 10 minutes longer than the theatrical release of The Avengers — and nowhere near as entertaining — but I tried to pack it…
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Go Duck Yourself
Following Ben Brooks’ lead, I’ve decided to replace my site’s search engine with DuckDuckGo. But all of the solutions he’s linked up have been a little fiddly and require editing your theme files. And while I’m okay with doing that, I realize a lot of folks probably aren’t. So I pulled together this little bit…
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Y’all Reddle For This?
Like the new theme? Want to play with it on your site? Well, it’s not in the WordPress theme directory just yet. But it is in Automattic’s SVN repository… Grab Reddle via SVN and give it a whirl. And if you want to see what it’s capable of (or I’ve managed to change my theme) check out…
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Check Yr Head
I just found out about head.js, but it definitely seems like something I’m going to have to play with really soon. Fortunately, somebody has already made a WordPress plugin that leverages it — so I guess that I don’t really have much of an excuse for not looking into it now, do I? [via]
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Moving Day
If anyone notices a significant speed increase on the site here, it’s because I’ve finally gotten around to moving it from a well meaning but poky VPS over at DreamHost to a shiny new supercharged account at WP Engine.
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Cleaning Up Unicode Cruft in WordPress
While helping someone with WordPress move earlier this week, I noticed a bunch of weird Unicode cruft (like ’ and –) in their posts and comments. Apparently, MySQL databases don’t like it when you switch their default character encoding. But different web hosts have different ways of doing things — so default character encodings can (and…
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Why I Prefer WP Super Cache
Even though W3 Total Cache seems to have become the more popular and robust option for WordPress caching, I’ve stuck by and continue to recommend WP Super Cache. Why? In a word: simplicity. Now I could write a big long entry on why simplicity trumps a crapton of options and flexibility, but I’d rather have a…
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“State of the Word” Slides
Michael Pick posted his slide design notes for Matt Mullenweg‘s beautiful “State of the Word 2011” presentation and they are totally worth your time. Seriously. Read it now and thank me later.
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Google Page Speed Service and Large Uploads in WordPress
So Google’s Page Speed Service looks pretty great – but if you get into the beta and upload a lot of media to your WordPress site, you’re going to run into a few snags. The cap for their caching proxy is currently set at 2MB. And while that’s fine for most folks, it’s not really going…
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No More TimThumb
With all of the hubbub around TimThumb, it’s probably a good time to point people to this handy guide on replacing it with functionality that’s already baked into WordPress.