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” →
Posts Tagged: web development
Optimised jQuery Corners plugin
I’ve created an optimised version of Dave Methvin’s excellent jQuery corner plugin. This allows jQuery users to apply all sorts of fancy effects to the corners of web page elements: the now-standard Web 2.0 rounded corners, bevels, dog-ears and many more. The plugin works by injecting extra elements into the page, and I noticed a way to achieve the same effect with fewer elements. This improves the speed and memory usage of the plugin. Continue reading “Optimised jQuery Corners 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” →
Evermore WordPress plugin version 2.2
I have updated Evermore, my WordPress plugin for automatically displaying just the beginning of each post. Recent updates have focused on making it work better; this update improves configuration and problem diagnosis. If you are happily using version 2.1, you don’t need to upgrade. Continue reading “Evermore WordPress plugin version 2.2” →
Search Meter WordPress plugin version 2.1
Search Meter 2.1 is a new version of my WordPress blog search statistics plugin. This version fixes the dreaded “duplicate search” problem that a few people have reported. It’s interesting that there were two causes of this problem — the first was already fixed in version 2.0, but the fix for the second variant was much trickier. Continue reading “Search Meter WordPress plugin version 2.1” →
Nofollow is not as bad as you think
I wrote recently about why the worst thing about nofollow is its name. My response to Maxpower’s thought-provoking comment grew too long for the comments section, so here’s a slightly longer exposition of what’s wrong and right with nofollow. Continue reading “Nofollow is not as bad as you think” →
Nofollow: good idea, bad name
I have never understood the furore that greeted Google’s introduction of the rel=”nofollow” attribute. It seemed to me to be a perfectly sensible way of specifying the provenance of hyperlinks on a Web page. However, many people took it to be Google’s way of penalising contributors to blogs and other interactive websites. Some even thought that Google was guilty of a blanket attack on all blogs. These accusations aren’t true, but the reasons they came up are interesting: Google gave a spurious justification for nofollow; and the name “nofollow” itself is misleading. Actually there are good reasons to use nofollow, and if it had a better name it would be more widely used and less controversial. Continue reading “Nofollow: good idea, bad name” →
Google Web Toolkit
Google have released the Google Web Toolkit — “Build AJAX apps in the Java language”. At first I thought this might just be their version of the Yahoo UI Library, but it turns out to be a completely different approach to the same problem. The YUI Library (and most other Ajax libraries) allow you to build a Web UI directly, using HTML and JavaScript. With GWT, you write a GUI application in Java, and GWT translates it into JavaScript and HTML for web deployment. It’s a less flexible approach, but could make it easier for Java developers to develop web applications with desktop-style GUIs — if this is what they really want. Continue reading “Google Web Toolkit” →
Ajax: How to do it
Ajax and “Web 2.0” have been getting more and more exposure over the last year or so. It may not be quite the revolution it’s cracked up to be, but behind the hype there are useful techniques for building better applications. When people start asking you what you’re doing with Ajax/Web 2.0, you should have a good answer — so here are some thoughts on what you can do about Ajax. Continue reading “Ajax: How to do it” →
Web hosting
It’s not always easy finding the best web hosting provider for your websites, so I thought I would recommend the web host company I use. I set up my first website in 1996, and since then I have used several website hosting companies. Initially, I evaluated them based only on features and price. However, a couple of years ago my old web host had a system crash, and incredibly had no recent backups. I had my own local backups, fortunately, but I did lose some email. I immediately started searching around for a new web host, and settled on Lunarpages because they had everything I needed at a reasonable price. I thought I should write a little Lunarpages review to help you evaluate the many options for web hosting. Continue reading “Web hosting” →