WordPress

Search Meter WordPress plugin version 2.6

Version 2.6 of Search Meter, my WordPress search statistics plugin, is out now. This version has been upgraded to work with the latest version of PHP (5.3), and the search widgets now integrate better with WordPress 2.8 themes. The other change is that Search Meter should now work better on international websites — it now creates its database tables using the UTF-8 character encoding, which should work with non-Latin-based languages such as Chinese, Greek, Hebrew and so on.

You can upgrade your existing Search Meter from your WordPress administration interface, or go to the Search Meter page for more information.

MySQL character encodings

I recently noticed that many of the comments and trackbacks on this website were composed entirely of question marks. At first I thought it might be plain old spam, but it turned out to be a character encoding problem. Here’s how I fixed it. Continue reading “MySQL character encodings” →

Seemore is the new Less

Less, my small but perfectly formed WordPress plugin, has changed its name and is now called Seemore. A different plugin called Less has been added to the WordPress Plugin Directory, so I finally decided to change my plugin’s name to something marginally less 🙂 confusing. Continue reading “Seemore is the new Less” →

Separate WordPress core and content files

Recent WordPress versions have supposedly enabled the ability to separate the core WordPress files from the site-specific files, but I found it hard to find clear information on how to do it. Here’s the method I ended up using. Continue reading “Separate WordPress core and content files” →

Search Meter WordPress plugin version 2.3

I have updated Search Meter, my WordPress plugin that lets you find out what your blog visitors have been searching for. The new version includes a couple of widgets to make it easy to display recent and popular searches on your blog, as well as a few other changes. Here are the details. Continue reading “Search Meter WordPress plugin version 2.3” →

Code Markup WordPress plugin version 1.2

Code Markup, my WordPress plugin that makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts, has been updated to version 1.2. Code Markup lets you include HTML markup in the code sample; it magically knows which characters should be displayed as code and which should be rendered as HTML. Version 1.2 has a few tweaks that will make it more useful and usable. Continue reading “Code Markup WordPress plugin version 1.2” →

Share This (jQuery): a WordPress plugin

I have made a useful modification to Alex King’s excellent Share This WordPress plugin. Share This adds a nice popup to your posts allowing readers to easily submit the post to any number of social networking and news sites. The original version relies on the large Prototype JavaScript library, which adds to the download size for the page. Share This only uses a sprinkling of its features, so I wanted to replace it with something smaller. Continue reading “Share This (jQuery): a WordPress plugin” →

WordPress vs. mod_security

WordPress blog posts with certain words in them can sometimes be blocked or fail mysteriously. Sometimes the offending word is silently removed from the post; other times the post fails with an HTTP error. Here’s a description of one possible cause, together with a useful workaround in case this problem happens to you. The problem could actually affect any blog platform or pretty much any other web application, not just WordPress. Continue reading “WordPress vs. mod_security” →

Less WordPress plugin version 1.1

I have updated Less, my WordPress blog plugin that simplifies WordPress’s “read more” function. The old version of Less will not work in the upcoming WordPress version 2.1, so you should upgrade Less before you upgrade WordPress. Continue reading “Less WordPress plugin version 1.1” →

Top Cat WordPress plugin version 1.2

I have updated Top Cat to version 1.2. Top Cat is a WordPress plugin that allows you to specify a main category for your posts. It also provides template tags for displaying the main category or using it in themes. The canonical example of Top Cat use is my Bennettarium blog. (I wrote Top Cat to help convert the blog over to WordPress.) Continue reading “Top Cat WordPress plugin version 1.2” →