I wanted a button in my toolbar to quickly add links to my wordpress blogroll – filling a moderately sized blogroll by hand can at best be described as tedious, so I haven’t gotten around to it.
Jessica Tompson posted a version that works well (in wordpress 2.8.4) , with instructions on how to use it:
“Add Link” Bookmarklet for wordpress.
don’t forget to put the url of your blog inside the javascript, I glanced over it…. One other caveat: if you use NoScript, it seems you have to at least temporarily allow the site you want to bookmark for the bookmarklet to work.
This took a bit of searching, so I hope posting this makes it easier to find for others. Apparently, there used to be a “Link This” bookmarklet as part of wordpress core that did what I wanted but it has been removed, unfortunately the pages that describe this old feature rank higher in search engines than the bookmarklet that works…
Cloud bookmark by Kevin Dooley
The drupal teaser delimiter is <!--break-->
I make this mini-post, because I was struggling for half an hour to get a post to show on the front page of agileopen.net with a longer summary than the two lines drupal defaulted to, and searching for this gave me links to pages with erroneous descriptions of the break syntax…
Read the discussion of why this solution over other teaser delimiters to understand why it works this way.
At times I am becoming a laggard when it comes to upgrading stuff… However, I love upgrades that focus solely on usability. A while back I switched a couple of wordpress blogs over to subversion. Before that, upgrading was a pain (download zip, unzip, move files around, hope that it works etc.), now it is easy – kudos to the wordpress team!
I got curious after reading the sneak peek announcement. I started looking for a 2.5 tag in subversion – turns out there isn’t one yet, so I switched to trunk (‘trunk’ is a subversion naming convention for the latest version of something):
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk
And it seems to work flawlessly so far! If you want to see which tags are available in subversion, they have a subversion browser , and a how to use subversion. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend you switch your existing wordpress over to subversion. It makes (security) updates much, much easier to install. Even if you want to play on the safe side and use only stable versions (in the browser they are located under ‘tags’), I recommend you read up on how to update your wordpress with subversion, and give it a spin.
Something else that’s working well for me is keeping a separate blog (this one) for testing/experimental purposes, and a ‘main’ blog elsewhere.
As you may see, I’m experimenting here with fluid layouts, using Yahoo’s YUI Grids CSS.
At first using a template from guihackrz – but it’s not called pre-1.0-something for nothing – the template has some defects.
I’m thinking of re-creating a fluid wordpress theme based on another theme, and using for instance the The YUI Grids Builder
to create a fitting layout.
Today I got at least a header image in (examples on the Yahoo site I saw so far were text and blocks) – simply adding a style with a link to the image for the #hd element was enough.
The theme from buzzdroid seems promising. It’s missing the tags in the post body, but that can be ‘re-used’ from the out of the box kubrick theme.
I’ve made good use of firebug to measure and improve performance on a number of websites – . A participant in a course recommended yslow when I mentioned firebug. Yslow is an extension for firebug that gives you a list of recommendations for making your web page load faster. Looks good – I’ll give it a try, even though I’m quite satisfied after the first round of firebug-inspired optimizations (making sure the cache settings of various sites actually work – so that a browser requests most rarely changing items like graphics and stylesheets only once).
Like with the firebug measurements, it does not help you with suggestions on how to make the inside of your website faster (e.g. number of database queries). However, with things like caching, you first reduce the number of page loads, so that you can later focus on the most important ‘inside’ things to improve.
firebug is a plugin for firefox that makes configuring out html pages and the stuff in it a lot easier – inspecting and modifying html, css, javascript and, last but not least, showing all the files that are loaded when a page loads. The last thing is great to check which things are cached (that makes a page much faster to load, and decreases the things your server has to serve – thus increasing its’ capacity).
I’m working on a couple of sites, and firebug has been very helpful. I especially like the javascript console, that helped me to get some difficult FireWatir tests to run – the console allows me to see what javascript works in the page, and do little experiments that I can then transfer to the test script once it works.
The only downside is that firebug does not seem to play nicely with some other firefox extensions (most notably web developer toolbar and possibly selenium), so if you try it out you might want to do so in a separate profile. I find the effort worth it though – firebug makes my try-automated integrationtest-code cycle a lot quicker…
Right now I have firebug side by side with jssh (the javascript shell needed by FireWatir), and that works well.
I’m brushing up on basic javascript.
I stumbled across links to kryogenix. Kryogenix has some very unobtrusive ways to do sortable tables, search keyword highlighting and explorer like tree views and more. Each of them requiring only that you include a javascript file, add a few lines of CSS stylesheet code, and (for the tree view and the table), add a “class” to one table or list. They are unobtrusive, in that your site will still work if javascript is disabled, or your browser does not support everything.
A simple explanation for adding and removing elements on a web page (using document object model (DOM) and javascript): javascript tutorial – dom nodes and tree .
The reason I’m brushing up on javascript, is that I want to write integration tests with FireWatir for pages that have a TinyMCE editor in them. I did an experiment and had it working before, I threw it away accidentally and have to re-create it. Throwing something away is a good way to really learn something (although it takes more time…). So the second time, I’m taking the time to understand more about modifying pages with javascript, documenting my trail for the next time, and save the results in subversion…
This list of favourite wordpress plugins is worth checking out. I’ve been only using a few so far, and am very happy with: akismet (anti-spam), Ultimate tag warrior (tagclouds) and some of the links in this post will be created by sh-autolink. I’m also still very happy with wordpress itself 
plugins from the list that look attractive:
this list of related entry plugins contains a snippet for ultimate tag warrior that lists related posts based on their tags. Seems worth checking out.
Some plugins by Alex King that seem worth checking out :
- Articles – make a list of articles that you select outside the chronology
- Link Harvest – This plugin will go through all of your posts and pages and compile a list of all external links.
- Popularity contest – This plugin will help you see which of your posts are most popular
I’m getting slightly tired of spam comments on me.andering, so I’m trying out an automatic way of fighting spam – akismet. It comes with wordpresss – apparently it gets information on spam messages from a central site, for which I needed to create a wordpress.com account – registration was simple and friendly, and you can host free blogs there as well. I had 35 spam comments today (that comes together in less than a week). Let’s see what next week gives.
A friend of mine lost her password and root password for her laptop. My favourite way to recover that is by using a linux livecd. Of course others have found this too, but searching this with google took longer than coming up with the answer… This post on everything2 explains how to do it, and it links back to some other solutions (without using a livecd, but slightly more difficult ).
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