Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

Wordpress Static Home Page

November 5th, 2007

Matthew

I’ve been asked about this a few times lately, I know there’s a plugin that does this, but this is the most simple way, by far.

Duplicate the page.php file of your theme and name it home.php

Right before the line that starts with “< ?php if (have_posts())…”,

add this line: “< ?php query_posts(’pagename=home’); ?>“

Create a page in the wordpress admin, and make sure that it’s post-slug is “home“

Done. Now the page called “home” will show as your homepage.

Check your font

October 13th, 2007

Matthew

I came across a few cool tools for working with fonts and css.

Typetester is an alternative to
fiddling around with CSS in order to test out font settings.

I also found Designer Plaything,
which, while a little rough around the edges, provides a useful alternative
to Typetester in that you can try out different headline / body copy combinations.
With some more font options and some further development — more customization
options, user-defined text, the addition of sub-headings — this could
turn into quite a useful tool.
Designer Plaything also provides a brightness and contrast check of your color
settings, which is a nice touch.

Aother is Font Tester
It’s very customizable and, like Typetester, allows you to compare fonts against
each other.
However, it doesn’t include the option to compare headings alongside body copy.
It also seems a little bug-prone which precludes me from recommending it wholeheartedly.
For example, in Firefox changing the number of columns via the ‘View’ option
causes the example text to disappear.

Social Shopping Engines

October 8th, 2007

Matthew

Microsoft announced the purchase of comparative shopping Web site Jellyfish.com yesterday. No information was provided in the official blog post about how Microsoft would eventually use Jellyfish, but it could augment its existing ecommerce and search offerings nicely, important as a more universal approach to content goes mainstream for the search engine media giants like Google and Yahoo. Jellyfish however is not the only comparison (or comparative) shopping service on the Web. There are in fact many (fifteen below including Jellyfish) that, if you are an online retailer, you should look into as a sales and marketing vehicle. Comparison and social shopping services are excellent ways to generate excellent feedback, build brand by establishing community and of course move product.

Below is a list of fifteen comparison shopping engines that at one point or another have crossed my radar. I’ve also included Web rankings from Quantcast.com, Ranking.com and Alexa.com which should provide at least some modest guidance on how much traffic these sites are receiving on the whole.  If you know of another comparison/social shopping engine that I missed please do comment below.

Quantcast Rank: 71,705
Ranking.com Rank: 54,913
Alexa Rank: 35,780

Jellyfish: Comparative shopping search engine which shares revenue with shoppers. Think of it as "eBay in reverse." Instead of showing advertising to Jellyfish end users, the company allows stores to use their advertising dollars to lower the cost.
 

Quantcast Rank: 221,996
Ranking.com Rank: 1,066,099
Alexa Rank: 97,758

Crowdstorm: (Beta) Crowdstorm is a social shopping engine which will bring in content aggregated from a vast range of professional sites and blogs, allow end-users to "ask the crowd" for personalized answers, receive price comparisons from multiple sites (amazon, ebay, shopping.com). Crowdstorm relies on an algorithm to measure user knowledge and trust between people.
 

Quantcast Rank: 5682
Ranking.com Rank: 3,798
Alexa Rank: 2,223

Etsy.com: A very popular site for the buying and selling of handmade items. What makes Etsy social are the features: handpicked lists by members (dubbed Treasury), geo-locators (find and browse by location), a "time machine" which shows recently added items, suggestions (generated list of product recommendations from a random sampling of users favorites) and of course, let’s not forget "Alchemy" - a feature which allows users to request made-to-order items from Etsy sellers.
 

Quantcast Rank: 16641
Ranking.com Rank: 9,249
Alexa Rank: 12,593

Zebo.com: A little known but (by the looks of it) highly active social shopping engine. Zebo dubs itself as the world’s largest repository of things people own. Create personalized profiles about what you own, want, and love to shop for and see what other people are doing on the site. Very social features such as ZEBuzz (realtime conversation board - very active), ZeboStrip and Graffiti (post and share photos), and Zebo groups to stay in touch with your shopping buddies make the service one to consider adding to your marketing mix.
 

Quantcast Rank: 4,233
Ranking.com Rank: 35,768
Alexa Rank: 11,380

ThisNext.com: Calling itself a "shopcasting" network, ThisNext allows users to discover, recommend and share their favorite products. All items featured on ThisNext are picked by the community. Users can organize their picks into lists called shopcasts. The social nature of ThisNext is strengthened with interactive badges (lists and tags) for your blog, website or social profiles on networks like MySpace.
 

Quantcast Rank: 896
Ranking.com Rank: 29,645
Alexa Rank: 7,085

Kaboodle.com: One of the more popular social shopping engines and social networks in general, Hearst recently acquired social shopping engine Kaboodle back in August of 2007. Kaboodle is an active and engaging community where members create and join groups, share advice, feedback and product suggestions and personalize their profiles with polls and other widgets. Hearst is expected to build pages on Kaboodle featuring products from many of its 19 U.S. magazine titles, such as Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping.
 

Quantcast Rank: 53018
Ranking.com Rank: 57,319
Alexa Rank: 28,166

Wists.com: Short for Wishlists, Wists are shareable image bookmarks for any page on the Web. Users install the Wists browser button and automatically create picture bookmarks for any page without having to actually uploading anything. This could make publishing or sharing lists of recommendations and wishlists easier for time-strapped social shoppers.
 

Quantcast Rank: 44775
Ranking.com Rank: 71,929
Alexa Rank: 66,003

ShopWiki.com: The only shopping search engine that combines advanced Web-crawling technology with consumer-written wikis. This enables more products to be listed than a traditional social shopping engine could ever provide (more than 222 million products).
 

Quantcast Rank: 3849
Ranking.com Rank: 2,548
Alexa Rank: 1,629

Woot.com: One of the more lively social shopping sites available, Woot has made a name for itself by selling just one item per day - starting at midnight. Unconventional to say the least, Woot started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor that has taken on a life of its own. The community is dedicated, active and purchase oriented.
 

Quantcast Rank: n/a
Ranking.com Rank: n/a
Alexa Rank: n/a

Buzzilions.com: A very interesting twist on social shopping. Buzzillions collects reviews from buyers that are verified by the retailers that sold it. The service helps end-users find products by narrowing down via the "Consumers Speak" navigation bar using words from customer reviews, provides SnapShots to help shoppers get the consensus of customer opinions, and then enables consumers to drill down to more detailed customer reviews.
 

Quantcast Rank: 24794
Ranking.com Rank: 38,152
Alexa Rank: 14,887

Stylehive.com: Just like its tagline says, it’s what’s hot, right now. Stylehive focuses on the world of retail, design and fashion and are becoming a significant influencer in the shopping world. The community is active thanks to a good feature set; create tagged collections to share, interact with other hive members, build and share wishlists.
 

Quantcast Rank: 293,790
Ranking.com Rank: 867,181
Alexa Rank: 132,019

Glimpse.com: One of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites for 2007, Glimpse.com is now part of TheFind.com. Another fashion-focused social shopping engine, users can browser, refine searches and see popular trends. TheFind.com will now power the shopping search engine allowing it to cover more online boutiques, brand stores and specialty fashion retailers.

Quantcast Rank: 38650
Ranking.com Rank: 78,348
Alexa Rank: 46,165

Stylefeeder.com: Another interesting social shopping engine which lest users find, share, and keep track of their own personal shopping items online, using visual bookmarks. Users can drill down to find products with well-labeled keyword tags, add products they find, create watch lists, establish groups and more - like add Stylefeed to your own web page.
 

Quantcast Rank: 14875
Ranking.com Rank: 76,823
Alexa Rank: 50,144

Shopstyle.com: A great way for fashionistas to get involved with social shopping, ShopStyle users have the ability to act as editors by assembling outfits into a stylebook, share them with friends to shop from directly. Users can even add pictures and commentary to their own stylebook and even push the content to their own external blogs.
 

Quantcast Rank: n/a
Ranking.com Rank: n/a
Alexa Rank: 279,775

OSOYou.com: (Oh, So You) OSoYou.com is another shopping and sharing website for women with a passion for fashion and beauty. Users create their own Stylefile, a resource that enables shoppers to add what they like to their wardrobe wishlist in a drag and drop fashion from the site or elsewhere on the Web into their own personal page.

h1 Tags

October 5th, 2007

Matthew

So, is there the rule of one when it comes to using H1 in your content or doesn’t it matter how often you use it on a page?

I tend to use H1 for the main heading on the page, which typically equates to the page title. I wouldn’t use it for subsequent headings within the content of that page.

However, although the W3C is rather vague on this issue it does say that

Some people consider skipping heading levels to be bad practice. They accept H1 H2 H1 while they do not accept H1 H3 H1 since the heading level H2 is skipped.

Clearly this implies that you could use H1 more than once in an article. Unfortunately, I don’t really follow how you would implement this in a way that makes sense semantically — perhaps someone can advise me?

Interestingly, in the above quote the W3C seems to be impartial regarding the practice of skipping heading levels. I always thought it was a no-no. I guess it’s up to the individual.

Of Sidebars and H1s

When it comes to sidebars — for example, the lists of links in my right-hand sidebar — does it matter what level heading you start these with?

If you use an lower-level heading — say, an H2 — does it imply from a structural standpoint that this content is related to and subordinate to your main content?

Andy Budd seems to think so and I’m inclined to agree with him from a semantic standpoint. This is despite the fact that I haven’t followed this through in practice as my sidebar link lists start with H2s.

On the other hand, from an SEO perspective, do you want to use H1 for headings that are essentially unimportant.

Taking the SEO view, I should really be using H1 more in my content in order to apply more importance to certain headings (which I could then stuff with keywords optimize for search).

Of course, this raises the question of how many H1s you could have on a page before the Googlebot starts to think “hang on a minute…”?

H1 and Site Names

Many people (myself included for this site) use H1 for their site name. I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that, but I would certainly disagree with the notion that this means you can’t use H1 in your content thereafter.

Using H1 solely for your site name seems like a waste of this important tag, both from a structural standpoint and an SEO one.

CSS Backgrounds

September 30th, 2007

Matthew

For many years, web sites all over the world generously offered free tiled background patterns to budding young web designers as a way of “enhancing” their web pages. Derided by many designers in the field as tacky, these backgrounds were generally used sparingly, if at all, by professional designers, especially where download speed was of major concern—and in those heady days of 14.4kbps modems, download speed was always of major concern.

How times have changed in the past ten or so years! With the advent of CSS and the increased proliferation of broadband, backgrounds have become an integral part of web design and development. Backgrounds are no longer simple repeated patterns or, in more abstract cases, extremely large photographs. Nowadays, they form the basis of many a well-designed site. From CSS rollovers and “Faux Column” layouts, to form styling and fluid layouts, backgrounds have become an integral part of the developer’s toolkit.

In this article, we’ll first of all deal with the theory behind the, um, background, in which we’ll break down the properties of backgrounds. Armed with this theory, we’ll proceed to walk through a case study together, in order to see some of the techniques that are utilized by developers faced with a challenging and daunting site design. Finally, we’ll predict the advent of CSS 3, speculating as to what may be in store for designers in the near future.

Background Basics

Before we begin our case study, we’ll need to be equipped with an understanding of the basics of creating backgrounds. For the sake of keeping this instruction brief and concise, let’s just look at the shorthand notation of the background property to start with. It looks like this:

body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}

That’s your background, right there. But to the uninitiated, this code probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Let’s break it down into its individual properties—backgroundcolor, background-image, background-repeat, background-attachment, and backgroundposition.

Setting background-color
Let’s take a look at the specification of the background-color property:

body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}

This property can take as its value a hexadecimal number, an RGB color name value, for example, rgb(255,0,0) for red, a name value, or a transparent keyword.

Hexadecimal values use the fewest characters, and are the most common method of defining colors in CSS. So, for simplicity, we’ll use hexadecimal values.

Setting background-image
The background-image property is also very straightforward:

body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}

This property gives us most of our design flexibility. The location of the image should be specified relative to your CSS file. For example, if you keep your images in a subdirectory of the folder containing your CSS files, and this subdirectory is called images, you’d need to edit the location of the image like so:

body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}

Simple!

Setting background-repeat
Here’s the background-repeat property:

body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}

The valid values for the background-repeat property are:

  • no-repeat
    As its name suggests, the no-repeat value causes the background-image to be rendered once, at the point determined by the background-position property.
  • repeat-x
    repeat-x forces the background image to repeat horizontally, left-to-right.
  • repeat-y
    Setting background-repeat to repeat-y results in the image being repeated along the Y axis, starting at the top of the element.
  • repeat
    The default value for background-repeat, repeat causes the background-image to be tiled across the entire area of the element, starting from the top left.

Setting background-attachment
Let’s investigate the background-attachment property:

body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}

The only valid values for this property are:

  • fixed
  • scroll, the default value

The background-attachment property defines whether the background-position is calculated relative to the page content (scroll), or relative to the browser viewport (fixed). The most notable difference between these values is that background-attachment: fixed; will cause the background-image to remain stationary if the user scrolls the page.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll ignore the background-attachment property, and it’ll therefore assume the default value. We’ll gloss over the background-attachment property, due to the lack of support for the fixed value in Internet Explorer 6, which still holds a large share of the browser market despite the release of IE 7. IE 6 only supports backgroundattachment: fixed; on the body element.

Setting background-position
Here’s the background-position property:

body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}

The background-position property defines the starting X and Y coordinates of the background image. Keywords (left/right/center/top/bottom), relative (percentage) values, or absolute values (px/em/pt/mm) are valid options for setting the background-position.

The horizontal keywords that determine the X position of the background image are:

  • left, the default
  • center
  • right

The vertical keywords which determine the Y position are:

  • top, the default
  • center
  • bottom

web design galleries

September 25th, 2007

Matthew

Web Design Galleries

  1. webdigity
  2. alvit
  3. anjo.dekiteharu
  4. beautifully-webdesign
  5. bestwebgallery
  6. brdcast
  7. ceeses
  8. coolsitecollection
  9. creative-pakistan
  10. css-demo
  11. css-design-yorkshire
  12. css-galleries
  13. css-gallery
  14. css-website
  15. css11
  16. cssbased
  17. cssbeauty
  18. cssblast
  19. cssbrain
  20. cssclip
  21. csscollection
  22. csscontainer
  23. csscool
  24. cssdesign
  25. cssdrive
  26. csselite
  27. cssexchange
  28. cssfill
  29. cssflavor
  30. cssgalaxy
  31. cssgalerie.net
  32. cssgalerie.com
  33. cssgallery
  34. cssglobe
  35. cssgreen
  36. csshardcore
  37. csshazard
  38. cssheaven
  39. cssimport
  40. cssimpress
  41. cssinsert
  42. cssliquid
  43. csslove
  44. cssmania
  45. cssmess
  46. csspinoy
  47. cssprincess
  48. cssreboot
  49. cssremix
  50. cssshowcase
  51. csssmoothoperator
  52. csstux
  53. cssvault
  54. csszengarden
  55. dailyslurp
  56. designbeauty.wordpress
  57. designlinkdatabase
  58. designmeltdown
  59. designscreme
  60. designshack
  61. designsnack
  62. devhome
  63. e-motionaldesign
  64. edustyle
  65. galerie.crooco
  66. inspirace.dobrestranky
  67. inspirationking
  68. lightondark
  69. moderniweb
  70. mostinspired
  71. najdizajn
  72. netzfruehling
  73. onepixelarmy
  74. per.fectio
  75. piepmatzel
  76. plasticpilots
  77. refreshlinks
  78. screenalicious
  79. screenfluent
  80. showcase
  81. standardsreboot
  82. stylecrunch
  83. stylegala
  84. stylegrind
  85. styletheweb
  86. submitcss
  87. tagacloud
  88. thebestdesigns
  89. thehorizontalway
  90. thesis.veracon
  91. unmatchedstyle
  92. w3csites
  93. wakeupgallery
  94. webcreme
  95. webdesign-inspiration
  96. webgallery.dimix
  97. webtest
  98. welldonesites
  99. withstyle

2012 Olympic Games Logo

September 25th, 2007

Matthew

The controversial new logo for the 2012 London Olympic Games has been released costing a massive £450,000.

olympic-logo-crap1.png

This logo proves what my wife has been saying for the past few months ” the 80’s” are back. But in 2012??

New Trick

September 25th, 2007

Matthew

Magazine style drop caps available in css. I am not sure of any clients I currently have that would benefit from this right now. But I am very excited about this.

Wordpress Plugins

September 18th, 2007

Matthew

One thing that I look for in any WordPress plugin is the ability to simply put the plugin in the plugins directory and enable it — without needing to fiddle with inserting code into my themes or any of the other WordPress files. I like the fact that I can switch themes easily whenever I feel like it, without mucking with any files on the server at all.

For the most part, the plugins I recommend don’t require much more than downloading the plugin, uncompressing it into wp-content/plugins in your WordPress directory, and enabling it in the Plugin Management console. I’ve already touched on the database backup and Akismet plugins in the WordPress 2.0 review, so I won’t go over those again.

Admin Drop Down Menu

The WordPress admin menu is a two-tiered affair that requires you to select the top-level menu, wait for the main page to load, and then select the desired function and wait for that page to load. For instance, say you want to manage users. If you start at the WordPress Dashboard, you need to navigate to the Users page and then to the Authors & Users page, instead of being able to go to the Authors & Users page directly from the Dashboard.

The Admin Drop Down Menu plugin makes the header menu much easier to use by providing a two-level drop-down menu bar. Instead of having to navigate to the top-level menu and then to the sub-menu, you can simply move your mouse over the top-level menu and then to the sub-menu function you wish to use.

I’ve installed this plugin on my blogs and found that it works very well with stock WordPress menus. It also generally works well with menus that are enabled by third-party plugins, although it doesn’t quite work fully with the WP-DBManager plugin. Overall, it’s proved to be pretty useful, and it saves me a few clicks each day when I manage my blogs.

Semiologic CMS

Semiologic CMS is a set of plugins and themes for WordPress that work together to turn a WordPress blog into more of a content management system. I run Semiologic CMS on Dissociated Press because I like the Semiologic three-column theme and several of the plugins that come with Semiologic. Each plugin is activated separately, so if you want to use a couple of the plugins, you can do so without running the plugins you don’t want.

Semiologic comes with more than 10 plugins, but I’m only going to highlight the ones that I’ve found most useful. I recommend grabbing the Semiologic bundle and taking it for a spin to see what it offers.

The opt-in, front-page plugin that comes with Semiologic allows you to restrict which posts are visible on the front page by category. Once you enable the plugin, you create a category called "Blog" so that only posts with that category are shown on the front page. Note that you can change the name of the category after creating it, so if "Blog" is too generic, you can change it to whatever you like.

Instead of limiting the front page to a specific category, you may want to display a static page instead. The static front page plugin displays a WordPress page with the slug of "home" on your front page, rather than the most recent posts.

Semiologic also comes with several "tile" plugins to display archives, categories, links, and so forth. These are not displayed by default — Semiologic gives a lot of control over what content is displayed on your blog.

One tile plugin that I particularly like is the subscribe me plugin, which displays a list of feed subscription services, such as My Yahoo!, Bloglines, and the Google homepage or Google Reader, and lets readers click on any of the links to read your blog using that RSS service. You can customize the plugin to display only the services you want, so if you want to disable the Yahoo! link, for example, it’s easy to do.

Admin menu for WordPress

The admin menu plugin is part of the Semiologic bundle, but I want to mention it separately because it’s so useful and because you don’t have to use it in conjunction with the rest of the Semiologic CMS stuff. It provides a small menu at the top of each page of your blog. The menu is a small strip, about 20 pixels high, that lets you navigate directly to various admin pages — such as the Dashboard, Options, or Write Post pages.

The admin menu is a simple plugin, but extremely useful. The only downside is that it doesn’t play well with all WordPress themes. It works really well with the themes included in the Semiologic bundle, but not so well with the Green Marinée theme that I use on Zonkerama.

Adhesive

One thing that continually surprises me about WordPress is that it doesn’t include a way to make a post "sticky" by default. Luckily, the Adhesive plugin makes it possible to create sticky posts. Once you put the plugin in your plugins directory and activate it, each post displays a checkbox for "sticky" in the Post Status box.

By default, a post that’s made sticky shows "Important Message!" in the date field, rather than the date of the post. However, you can configure Adhesive to display a different message or the actual date of the post.

This plugin is particularly useful if you’re using WordPress for a professional blog or business and you want to make sure that readers see a specific post. Want to let your readers know that your blog will be down a few hours next week? Just create a regular post and make it sticky.

Though not essential, the only thing missing from this plugin is the ability to change the sticky status on a specific date.

WP-Cron

The WP-Cron plugin allows you to schedule certain functions in the WordPress admin panel. It comes with several helper plugins that depend on the main plugin. For example, the WP-Cron Moderation plugin sends an email every hour about comments that are awaiting moderation.

The function that I’m most interested in, however, is the ability to schedule backups. Once you enable the WP-Cron plugin, you can schedule daily backups of your WordPress database to be sent to an email address. It’s possible to set up a cron job to do a MySQL dump of your WordPress database, but this is far, far easier.

Assuming your database isn’t too large when compressed, this can be a very handy way to ensure that you have daily backups. Simply set it and forget about it — the backups will execute on a daily basis without any effort on your part.

WP-DBManager

Speaking of the WordPress database, the useful WP-DBManager plugin allows you to create backups, restore from a backup, optimize the database, run SQL queries against the WP database, and manage saved backups.

Yes, WordPress comes with a plugin that allows you to make backups, but WP-DBManager also allows you to restore directly from the backup and delete old backups. It basically provides a one-stop shop for fiddling with your database from the WP2 admin menu.

It also provides information on the tables in your WP database, so you can see exactly how many records are in each table and how large each table is. I did a few test restores with the plugin, and it worked just fine. If you’re using the Admin Drop Down Menu, you’ll need to disable it to get to all of WP-DBManager’s menu options. That’s a bit of an inconvenience, but not too bad.

Jerome’s Keywords Plugin

By default, WordPress posts are associated with one or more categories. However, a lot of folks want to be able to associate tags with their posts as well. For example, I have a Linux category on Dissociated Press, but I might want to tag a post with Ubuntu or Debian to further specify what it’s about. If categories alone just don’t do it for you, several WordPress plugins give you the ability to add tags (in one form or another) to your blog.

After testing several of the tag-enabling plugins, I settled on Jerome’s Keywords Plugin because it offers several useful tag-related features. In its simplest usage, it adds a field to the post-editing page for tags that relate to each post. To show the tags related to each post, you need to add some code to your templates to actually display the tags and links, but that’s a relatively simple operation. Once you’ve added them, readers click on a link for any tag that interests them and see all posts that are tagged with a specific keyword.

Another nifty use of Jerome’s Keyword Plugin is that you can create a keyword cosmos, which displays some or all of your tags and visually indicates which ones are used more often. For example, if you have 50 tags, and you’ve used tags like Debian or Ubuntu more often than GPL or FreeBSD, the Debian and Ubuntu tags will be displayed in a larger font to indicate they are associated with more posts than other tags.

Search and replace

The search and replace plugin can come in handy if you need to make changes throughout multiple posts on your blog. This plugin searches through posts, titles, excerpts, and comments to find a text string and replace it with whatever you like. You can limit it as well — for example, say you want to replace a string only in post titles but not in comments. It is case-sensitive, by the way, so searching for foo won’t turn up Foo or FOO.

This plugin is easy to use, but use it with caution — it doesn’t include the ability to undo a change, and it doesn’t give you the opportunity to preview its work before it makes the changes.

Post levels

Maintaining a blog can be a good way of keeping your friends and family apprised of things going on in your life. Unfortunately, it’s also a good way of sharing too much information with other parties who might find your blog.

WordPress allows you to password-protect posts, but this is a bit clunky. The post still shows up on your blog, but just has a message indicating that it’s password-protected. I’ve never liked this system — it’s like taunting readers, waving a password-protected post in their face. Even LiveJournal users have the ability to restrict posts to only their friends — unless you’re logged in and on the friends list, the posts are invisible.

The Post Levels plugin prevents the post from showing up unless a user is already authenticated. The post also doesn’t show up in the default RSS feed, so it’s virtually invisible to any users that aren’t logged in to your blog. The plugin also allows you to define the default level for posts and users, and to modify the title for protected posts.

The plugin is easy to use. Once you place it in the plugins directory and enable it, you can simply set a post’s level from public to 10, with 10 being the highest level of restriction. This way, it’s possible to have some posts that are public, some that are visible to all registered users (say, family), and some that are visible only to a select handful of users — like your best buddies from college who already know all your deepest and darkest secrets and have photos to prove it.

This plugin could also be useful in a work environment, where some posts could be visible to everyone, while other posts could be visible only to staff or management.

This plugin might not be very useful if you’re using WordPress to power a multiauthor blog. However, I strongly recommend it for personal blogs. It’s not unusual these days for employers to go searching Google for information on potential or current employees. It might be a good idea to limit what you share with the world at large.

CG-Samecat

The CG-Samecat plugin is part of the CG-PowerPack set of plugins. This plugin lists posts from similar categories, or the same category, as the post being read. This is useful if you want to let readers check out similar posts.

After enabling this plugin, you need to add a code snippet to your index.php, my-hacks.php, or another file in your WordPress theme. The PowerPack set comes with a readme on customizing the list of posts that are returned. It might take a little fiddling to get exactly the result you want, but it’s pretty easy to use.

AdSense-Deluxe

A lot of bloggers use Google’s AdSense or Yahoo!’s Publisher Network to try to defray the costs of hosting, or even to make a profit. If you’re using WordPress with AdSense, the AdSense-Deluxe plugin might be worth a look.

This plugin lets you embed AdSense or Publisher Network ads in WordPress posts, and it gives you a "sandbox" to preview ads and see what might be displayed for a given post using a test account. You can click on ads to see where they lead without counting as an impression or going against the terms of service. Note that this preview is not always accurate as to what actually appears on your blog, but it does seem to have a pretty good hit/miss ratio.

You can configure everything through the AdSense-Deluxe option menu. Just copy the AdSense code from Google into the AdSense Code box and create an AdSense block. You can display it in any post by adding the code in the text of the post. For example, if you create a block with the name "banner," you’ll add <!–adsense#banner–> into the body of the post.

You’re not limited to a single block, either. You can create as many blocks as you wish and simply paste in the code for the appropriate ad. It’s also possible to use AdSense-Deluxe to place ads on your blog outside your posts, though I haven’t spent any time trying to configure any in that fashion.

Finding more plugins

This is only a small sampling of WordPress plugins that are worth checking out. The WordPress Plugin Directory and WordPress Plugin Database are good places to start searching for useful plugins.

No clicking flash design

September 18th, 2007

Matthew

This is a website that takes the click out of using a mouse. I’m sold on the idea. After using it for a few seconds it’s completely natural not clicking. I think it really adds to the experience of the site–the silence, feeling like the site knows what you want before you tell it. Kudos to the designers.

Dontclick.it


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