Weblog Tools Collection

Pictorialis II is finally ready for a demo and maybe some beta testers. Some of the features of this version includes:

-Album building from the post interface
-Upload from FTP, point to the album, suggest an album name and description, type of thumbnail and click on publish album
-EXIF support without PHP-EXIF
-GD and NetPBM support with included binaries
-Addition of photos to existing galleries
-XHTML
-Lots of custom fields for versatility
-Picture preview on edit
-Picture Descriptions
-Everything is paged
-Look Ma, no tables!
-Count number of visits per picture
-Comments, trackbacks etc
-All of WP is included, so all the WP features are available!

Check out the demo at http://mindfulmusings.net/testpict/

If you would like to look at the admin, please leave a comment with an email addy or email me at markghosh at gmail dot com

Credits:
-Photomatt for half the name and the original idea for Pictorialis
-Unteins
-Morydd
-Jesuit for goading me to fix the NetPBM problems
-Skippy_
-NuclearMoose for the wonderful graphic and a bunch of other stuff
-Michel_v for his help with paging

I saw a really nice plugin at No Prerequisite blog. This plugin allows people to post in more than one language on their blogs using WordPress. This has been written in the form of a plugin. From No Prerequisite

The Language Picker Plugin is my personal solution for writing posts in more than one language. When activated, the plugin will display posts in either the default language (as configured in lang_picker.php) or in the visitor’s preferred language, if available.

You can download the plugin from here and see the test post.

Post2Mail - This plugin allows you to automatically e-mail selected people when a post is published on your blog. Also useful for alerting an administrator when a post has been published on the blog. Configuration is done in the post2mail.config.inc file which has comments to get you started.

You can go direct to the download here

I have changed my email for all my blogs. If you want to contact me, please email me at markghosh at gmail dot com

Unteins (Jason Goldsmith) has released a set of plugins for WordPress 1.2 that provide compatibility with LiveJournal.

The set includes:

LJ Moods - places moods at the end of WordPress Posts
LJ Music - places current musci at the end of WordPress Posts
LJ Tags - allows the use of LJ user and LJ Cut tags in WordPress Posts
LJ Synch - Synchs posts between WordPress and LiveJournal (turns WP into a very basic LJ client, it supports send mood, music and editing posts)
LJ Extras - A nice GUI interface for setting the Moods, Music and selecting which LJ journal to post to as well as whether or not to synch changes to LJ

The plugins are available now and can be downloaded at http://jason.goldsmith.us/wp-plugins/ljplugins.zip

Donations gladly accepted

Markku Seguerra has come up with a possible alternative for Dave Shea’s comment highlighting which can easily be implemented with WordPress. This has been used successfully in a couple of sites, including Binary Bonsai.

A small description from Markku’s site:

Simply said, it allows you to highlight the significant and noteworthy comments posted on your WP blog. For my layout, I have the plugin configured to add a class="noteworthy” to what I find fit.

You can download the plugin from here:
http://rebelpixel.com/archives/2004/06/03/comment-highlighting/

CowPimp (who is taking donations for a digicam BTW, hint hint) has come up with a sweet way to cache your WordPress pages. I am going to try it out on this blog. From his post

This is a plugin for Wordpress that caches pages. To use it, you simply install the plugin and turn it on. There is no need to edit your templates. Why would you want to do this? This reduces the load on the PHP interpreter and on the mysql database. It also allows the site to be fully functional even if the mysql database is down.

Download the cache plugin here:
http://www.cowpimp.com/archives/2004/06/08/staticize-plugin-for-wordpress/

I have noticed that the amount of support requests I receive (especially for Pictorialis) is something that I am unable to cope with and still be able to produce new code. So I am asking for your help as well as offering you a better way of getting in touch with the people that are able to help (as well as be helped).

I have created a new “forum” on my existing bulletin board (PhpBB, I know) for Pictorialis and another for my other more general WordPress tweaks/plugins.

The new forums can be visited here. I will visit very often and will try to help as much as I can. I sure would appreciate others chipping in as well.

Thank you for all your support!

Hey, back again with more sillyness.

For those of you who are not quite… how you say happy with the current admin layout in WordPress you now have a choice.  I have released the first version of my admin UI redesign over at my site that dramatically streamlines the UI.

One of the exciting things about this is that already there are people running with this creating color variations to widen the choices we will have.  Look for more on this in the future.

I had seen a couple of “Related Posts” implementations for WordPress and other blogs and they did not really make much sense to me. Once I had the code for contextual searches, the related posts plugin was a simple extension of that search code.

This plugin has the following features:
-related posts from your own blog, so more linkage
-extremely customizeable output
-links listed according to relevance
-"fuzzy” matching of posts/titles
-very easy install

You can see an implementation of this on this blog. Just click on the permalink of any entry and look for the titles at the bottom of the post content.

Download the plugin from here:
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/b2-img/related.zip

Please post bugs.

Looks like this has been done already, with much more robustness and versatility. Sorry for the late entry!

Andrew Hall has released his version of the Sticky Post hack for WordPress. He has acheived this by using custom post fields. Here is a short description of the plugin:

This is an alpha release of a sticky post / select custom field plugin for WordPress 1.2. In advanced editing mode, you create a custom field KEY eg ’sticky’ and give it value 1. In whatever categories that post belongs to, it will behave as a sticky. When you want to unsticky it, delete the custom field for that post.

You can download the plugin here.

You can download the script here.

You can see an example on this blog.

Anne van Kesteren gave me some code to make intelligent searches inside WordPress and I wrapped it up in a nice install tutorial. Some of the features of this hack includes
-text based “fuzzy” searches within WordPress
-a nice Google like interface which is very customizeable
-search results with decreasing relevance to search topic
-trap for words which are less than four letters long, the search then gets routed through the default WP search
-"Next results” button which shows the next 10 (or less) results in relevance
-very simple installation with no effect on future upgrades

Test install is on this blog. Simply search for something from the form on the right.

Please post suggestions/bugs.
Download the zip file here: http://weblogtoolscollection.com/b2-img/search.zip

Lester Chan has come up with a detailed Users Online with statistics for WordPress. This is an extension of my “Online Users” idea. Check out the implementation here:
http://www.lesterchan.net/blogs/wp-online.php

Download more information here:
http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/wp-useronline.zip

Import BookMarks will help you import your browser bookmarks into your wordpress weblog’s link manager. Please read that article for details.

When I wrote WPBlacklist 1.2, I was aware of one problem - the fact that if you had URL with a folder path, the blacklist plugin threw up a whole bunch of errors because the URL screwed up the regular experssion matching. I did a temporary fix for that in the initial version because I couldn’t think of a way to fix this for all such instances. The fix involved modifying any known URL in the blacklist which could cause this problem. Unfortunately, a new URL was added to the blacklist a couple of days ago which causes this problem and I realized that I should come up with a permanent fix which would handle all such URLs in the future. After some tinkering and lots of testing, I’ve finally got WPBlacklist 1.21. This release has only one change - the addition of code to create a regex safe URL if the URL contains forward slashes You can get it from here.
Oops, was in a hurry and totally forgot to include instructions for upgrading users - sorry about that If you are upgrading, all you have to do is upload the PHP files to the same locations as before. You do not have to do the installation again though :p

This plugin adds a “Delete comments as spam” button to the mass editing of comments page. When used to delete unwanted comments, the email address, url, and IP address of that comment will be added to your spam words list. Future comments matching any of those items will automatically be moderated.

You can download the .zip file or view the source.

Leave any bug reports as comments to this post.

If you’d like to beta test this plugin, leave a comment on this thread, including your email address (never shown to the public) and I’ll send you the .zip file.

The install is easy, add a line to wp-comments.php upload 4 files, run the installer, and you’re done. The interface is a popup window that asks to add the email address entered in the comment form to the mailing list. It check if the address is already subscribed to the post, and if the address is on a site-wide banned list. If not they’re subscribed and will receive a mail everytime a comment is added to the post.

A word about the banned list. If someone is subscribing email address other than their own, this is a way for them to stop your site from sending any email to that address. I doesn’t stop the abuse, but gives the victim a quick way to stop it.

Also, I chose the popup window format as necessary evil to ward off evil subscribe bots. The orginal interface was just a checkbox for those posting, but found that could be a problem when attacked via comment spammers.

The emails come with a link to the unsubscribe page, which could use some dressing up.

Known bugs:

* The md5 hash sent in the email doesn’t match up with the programatically generated one.
* The unsubscribe page is butt-ugly.
* Probably should combine the subscribe and unsub files

I have created a plugin for the Text fade in effect described here.

The plugin allows you to specify the value for the fade in on each page it is called.  Simply call the function < ?php fade(’value’); ?> where ‘value’ = your custom number for that page, ie 255, 311, whatever in the <head> and you are good.

You can find the plugin in the usual place.

After a spirited and extremely helpful discussion on the #wordpress channel on irc.freenode.net, I decided to write something up about Atom and RSS 2.0 and why the world is coming to an end because IE does not support application/xhtml+xml. I am no-one but a simple blogger and coder trying to understand the nuances of stupid tech wars between entrenched gurus and this is a feeble attempt at helping others like me understand the concepts better. Thanks to Michel and Anne for their help in getting me started. I will directly quote them both.

To begin with, in 10 words or less, why is Atom better than RSS?
Well, because it is the same as semantic HTML (Atom) versus tag-soup (RSS). Now “tag soup” is a term that is used often and without remorse. Basicallty tag soup is markup that will not validate or synctactically incorrect usage of markup.

So how is Atom better than RSS again?
Well, RSS is much less defined than Atom. So, Atom being a semantic language definition, when used correctly, will behave much like XHTML (which is a semantic language definition). In the end, we have code which validates, which is easier to deal with (as a programmer or a script reading your feed) and the world is a better place to live in.

So what are the major issues with RSS? Can they be fixed since RSS is so popular?
RSS’s main problem is with the description and title elements, that they may be encoded HTML, or not. As markp puts it, “I can’t tell you, and you can’t guess". RSS doesn’t have any way to say a link is ‘ via’ ‘related’ or ‘alternate’, although you could put it all into the content stuff, but that sucks since you can’t process that data and keep track of it. In Rss there is also some problem with silent data loss and all versions of RSS are incompatible with each other while they claim they are compatible. In Atom, you provide the data type and everything can be defined (using ‘type=text/html’ etc.) so the aggregator knows what to do.

What is the application/xhtml+xml business and why is everyone so tanked up about it?
“Serving your nice, fresh xhtml pages as application/xhtml+xml has it’s advantages, as a conforming user agent should refuse to render your pages if your markup is invalid. If text/html is used, a browser should revert to tagsoup-mode.” This however, has its own series of advantages and pitfalls. IE does not support application/xhtml+xml. There are ways to get around that as well, but most developers either choose to avoid it (for now) or get pissed off at other developers for not choosing it.

So, if this is such an open and shut case, how come there is so much hoopla about it?
Many of the consumer focussed and yet influential people could not care less.

Chris Pirillo, an RSS enthusiast who tracks the growth of the technology for Lockergnome’s RSS Resource, believes the merger talk is meaningless. “This doesn’t matter because nobody cares outside of a few geeks,” Pirillo told internetnews.com “If your aggregator supports Atom, it doesn’t matter. If it doesn’t support Atom, users will choose a different aggregator.”
According to Pirillo, consumers are more concerned about finding a newsreader/aggregator that will read all the formats instead of a bitter battle over which format is better for syndication.

The proponents of both RSS and Atom have just gotten too entrenched in their beliefs and too caught up in the battle to see the big picture. Google likes Atom and makes no excuses. Microsoft developers are starting to see the benefits of Atom and are starting to sway. Mark P and other Gung Ho Atom fans would love to see further precipitation of these issues.

My blogs, being as inconsequential as they are, are going to continue supporting both RSS and Atom feeds for now. I get a substantial number of hits on my feeds everyday and with the growing issues with encoding support for RSS and the respect and appreciation that I have developed for Atom, I might switch to advertising Atom feeds only.

Thoughts? Comments?

I’ve created a trial script to import b2evo blogs to WP. The script seemed to work fine on my test installation on b2evo but since I don’t have a live installation of b2evo, the test was just that - a test While the script does seem to allow importing a specific blog, don’t be fooled by appearances - that is just in case the feature is needed in the future :p Currently, all entries and all categories are imported to WP since I was too lazy to figure out the logic for importing just one blog since b2evo has a category based individual blog system. Anybody interested in the script can get it from here.

I suppose this may be a known fact, but I didn’t figure it out until I looked at the code and realized something. For the Livejournal autoupdate script, you are given two different functions. One makes all posts public, and the other posts them all friends-only. Well if you just rename the function and change the name into the calls in post.php, you can have three different functions with checkboxes deciding whether you want to post it public, private (when you click save instead of publish and set it as private in wordpress), or friends only. Just copy the two functions given and rename one of them to something similar in my-hacks.php. And for private entries, change the friends script security tag to “private” Sorry if everyone knew this, but I just found it out And for a shameless plug, feel free to checkout my wordpress sites, both syndicated to my livejournal: Scott’s Talk (news/opinion site), and No Regrets (personal blog of a 16 year-old)

This is a little known feature that I believe should be documented well. If you are using IIS or do not have the mod_rewrite ability, it is possible to still have serach engine friendly URIs in WordPress. If someone was dissuaded from using WP because of this, be dissed no more! Here are the instruction from the admin page of WordPress 1.2 Mingus:

In general for this you must use mod_rewrite, however if you put a filename at the beginning WordPress will attempt to use that to pass the arguments, for example:
/index.php/archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
If you use this option you can ignore the mod_rewrite rules.

Here’s a proof of concept that I put together to illustrate my idea of using text+logic+PHP to make a simple but effective non-graphical captcha-style verification mechanism.

Visit the example page, and leave your feedback.

Based on feedback so far, I’m going to persue this idea and build a plugin based on it.

In WP 1.2 there’s a bug in the built-in blacklist function. If you haven’t tried this out as a way of protecting your blog from comment spam, you should look into this.

The default list is empty, and you can enter words, author names, email addresses, IP address, and URI/URLs. If any word in the list matches anything in the comment text, comment author’s name, comment author’s email address, comment author’s URL, or comment author’s IP address, the comment will be held for moderation.

The bug is that if there’s a blank line in or at the end of the list, it’s treated as a wildcard, and it matches anything in the comment body. So all comments will be moderated regardless of comments.

This is fixed in the CVS, but I thought I’d publish the fix for those that don’t want to run a diff against the CVS version. (Also, there have been other changes that may introduce some incompatibilities.. So a direct drop-in replacement in not advised for the faint-of-heart.)

In the file /wp-includes/functions.php replace lines 1346 & 1347:
$word = trim($word);
$pattern = “#$word#i";

with:
$word = trim($word);
// Skip empty lines
if (empty($word)) { continue; }
$pattern = “#$word#i";

Now, if you accidentally leave a blank line in the words list, it will still behave as expected.

This plugin, developed by Colin Devroe, allows the removal of the ability to comment on old posts in WordPress. I wrote something like this back in the 0.72 days. This can be useful for some people.

Here is the link to the post.