Tech pages
My theme

  • Want a peek at my template tomfoolery? Rifle through my theme and see if there's anything useful to you.

Plugins I've written

  • Auto Tweet - Creates a mechanism to cross-post selected WordPress entries to Twitter.

  • Theme Switcher Widget - Creates a widget for using Ryan Boren's Theme Switcher plugin with dynamic sidebars.

  • Comment Instant Messenger Links - Adds click-to-message images to comments from registered users.

  • Creative Commons Feed - Appends to your site feed a link to a Creative Commons license.

  • Anonymouser - Changes how WordPress identifies anonymous comments.

  • Spam Keyword Sanitizer - Attempts to reduce your "spam profile" by replacing some words with their HTML special character equivalent.

  • WP Grins - A WP 2.x compatible version of Alex King's excellent original plugin. Alex has released an official update, so there's no longer any reason to use my revision. Feel free to read up on it anyway, should you be so inclined.

Plugins I'm using

  • 404 Notifier 1.1 - A handy little tool that generates reports for any 404 errors on your WordPress blog. Notification is available by e-mail or RSS.

  • Ajaxified Expand Post Now 0.7 beta 7 - A fantastic little tweak that replaces WP's shorthand <!--more--> tag with an intelligent ajax solution. Normally the more tag will just point a reader to the permalink. With this plugin, the more tag will dynamically load the rest of the post in question into the current page. It's a simple activate-and-forget plugin that brings dynamite new functionality.

  • Akismet 2.0.2 - The built-in plugin for handling comment and trackback spam. When I started using WP, I was hesitant about this plugin because it required a WordPress.com registration to make it work. Now I'm glad I took the time. Akismet is fantastically effective.

  • Akismet Spam Count 1.1 - This one provides a template tag for displaying how many spam comments Akismet has caught. Recent versions of Akismet have a similar feature, but the Akismet tag uses an image. This plugin is outputs text, which I prefer.

  • Audio player 1.2.3 - A handy little tool that embeds a Flash-based, single track MP3 player in a post. Super simple to use and reasonably customizable.

  • Bad Behavior 2.0.11 - I consider this plugin to be an essential part of my spam fighting plan. Bad Behavior acts to deny access to your blog from all sorts of nefarious robots, including spam bots. In addition to reducing my spam load, I find this plugin also saves me bandwidth.

  • Batch Validator 1.2 - If you're anal and psychotic about your blog using valid XHTML output, this plugin will help you keep up with that.

  • Browser Sniff 1.7 - That sounds so dirty, doesn't it? WordPress 2.x stores user agent information along with every comment. This plugin provides template tags for displaying it in a user-friendly manner.

  • Click Counter 1.02 - A configurable plugin for, uh… counting clicks. The default options will count clicks for every outbound link. I use it only to track downloads for the plugins I've written. Installation requires database manipulation (albeit a very simple one), so this plugin may not be for everyone.

  • Contact Form ][ 2.0.13 - A handy, dandy little tool for creating a form-to-email page. It works well, and has some very nice options.

  • Edit Comments XT 1.0 - This is a plugin so cool, it would almost be worthwhile bundling it with WordPress. As you might have inferred from the name, this plugin allows users to edit their own comments. Whenever a user leaves a comment, that user can edit the comment within a configurable time. The editing functionality works its voodoo by matching IP addresses, so it doesn't matter if a user is registered. Even anonymous users can edit their comments. No cookies or sessions are required, so comments placed in one browser can be edited with another browser. All this gooey goodness is tempered somewhat by the difficulty of the install, which I'd rate as "moderate."

  • Extended Comment Options 1.2 - I consider this plugin to be a key part of my spam fighting plan. This plugin allows you to manage comment and ping status on all of your posts en masse. There's a simple mode (toggle everything) and an advanced mode that allows much finer control. I've started using this plugin to once a month close both comments and pings on any posts older than one month. For example, on December 1st I close comments on all posts older than October 31st. Posts older than one month draw real comments very rarely, but spam comments very frequently. I noticed once I started this practice that my volume of spam dropped by around 75%.

  • FeedBurner Awareness 1.1 - Provides a few simple tools for accessing FeedBurner stats using the Awareness API. I use this only for the template tag that lists my total subscribers.

  • FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3 - Redirects all standard WP feed traffic to a FeedBurner account. This new version works without .htaccess rules.

  • Google (XML) Sitemaps 3.0.1 - A set-and-forget solution for generating and automatically updating a Google-compliant sitemap. This will be most useful when you use Google's webmaster tools to tell Googlebot where to find your sitemap. This version includes an option to automatically notify both Google and Yahoo! of sitemap changes.

  • Gravatars2 2.7.0 - Kip Bond's enhancement of Scott Merrill's Gravatars plugin. Like Merrill's plugin, this version features caching and local gravatars. Kip's version includes automatic cache updating using either WP-Cron or a regular *nix cron command and also allows registered users of all levels to select a local gravatar.

  • Identify External Links 1.3 - This is what I use to apply styles to… well, external links. The plugin uses regular expressions to parse anchor tags and determine which links point to the home domain and which do not. It then applies class="extlink" to the link, which you can then style to your liking. The default settings will process post content and excerpts as well as comment content.

    I was briefly using a similar solution using only CSS, but I could never figure out how to support older browsers. I may not continue using this plugin because, although I think my implementation is tasteful and fairly subtle, I think it feels like a little too much.

  • Impostercide 1.2 - A security plugin that prevents a commenter from using the same name, e-mail address or URL as a registered user. Since gravatars are tied to e-mail addresses, this makes for a reasonably effective method of preventing commenters from impersonating me or each other. The default behavior protects login names, so a bit of modification is required to get it to protect user nicknames (the names actually attached to comments).

  • IP 2 Nation 1.1 - This plugin will attempt to use an IP address to determine from what nation a visitor or commenter is accessing. It comes along with a lovely package of optional flag images. This is a cute, fun plugin. However, it's probably the most difficult to install plugin I've ever seen. Usage requires manual database manipulation with a tool like phpMyAdmin to install the IP2Nation tables on which the plugin relies.

  • Nice Search 0.2 - A simple little tweak, this plugin makes search URLs a little prettier by replacing /?s=query with /search/query/ and replacing spaces and %20 with +.

  • Relocate File Upload 1.0 - A simple tweak to move that ugly inline uploader iframe on your Write Post page into a Docking Box like the rest of the editor's widgets.

  • Share This 1.2 - Not much of a plugin, in so far as this sort of thing goes. Mostly this package is a tool for the easy implementation of an elegant JavaScript-based social bookmarking system. There exist plenty of plugins for adding clickable icons for del.icio.us, digg, et al, but the problem is they're pretty much all fugly and obtrusive. This one is completely different. Using mostly JavaScript and CSS, this plugin gives you a single clickable link to expand a box containing 14 social bookmarking icons and a send-to-a-friend e-mail form. The finished result is both elegant and highly functional, although there's a good chance you'll have to do some heavy customizing to get it the way you want it.

  • Sideblog Wordpress Plugin 4.4 - This is the plugin I use to power my Cuppa Joe mini-blog at the top of the sidebar. Previously, I used some simple template tricks to achieve nearly the same effect, but I ran into issues with the way other plugins manipulate filters like JOIN and WHERE when making the primary database query. It's a lot easier to drop in this plugin instead of sorting out the complex category JOINs. This plugin makes the process very simple. Your sideblog is created with a single template tag or with a widget.

  • Subscribe To Comments 2.1.1 - A very popular plugin, this one allows commenters to click a check box beneath the comment form to receive e-mail updates for follow-up comments. Also includes a subscription manager page for users to manage their existing subscriptions.

  • Tag Managing Thing 1.0 - A WordPress Thing that implements some of the tag managing features formerly found in Ultimate Tag Warrior and makes them available to WordPress 2.3's native tagging system.

  • Themed Login and Register 1.1 - Tweaks the Spartan (and homely) login, register, and reset password pages to use your blog's theme instead of the plain vanilla WordPress defaults. This one needs a minor modification for WP2.1 compatibility.

  • Trackping Separator 1.1.1 - By default, WordPress treats trackbacks as comments, which in my opinion is kind of stupid. This plugin (along with a bunch of template code) will allow you to count and/or list them separately.

  • Unfancy Quote 2.0 - By default, WP will replace the plaintext "straight up and down" quotes with their fancy, slanted cousins. I'm not a big fan of those slanted quotes. This plugin forces WP to use plaintext quotes, which can be invaluable if you're posting code samples.

  • WordCount 0.01 - It, uh, counts words. Includes template tags to display word counts for posts and comments, either all entries or a single entry.

  • WordPress Database Backup 2.1.4 - The (formerly) built-in plugin for backing up the WP database. And it does just that; it backs up the database. As of WordPress 2.1, this plugin is no longer bundled with the WP core. If you want to continue using it (and I strongly recommend you do) you'll need to keep on top of updates yourself. This new version leverages WP 2.1's cron functionality, and so no longer requires the WP-Cron plugin for scheduled backups.

  • WP-Microsummary 0.92 - Firefox 2.0 uses a clever new scheme for automatically updating bookmark titles called microsummaries. This plugin adds that feature to WordPress 2.x.

  • WP-PageNavi 2.11 - This plugin is a stylish solution to a problem I've encountered. I don't know if it's a bug in WordPress or not, but I've found that the traditional next/previous links to navigate archives are not always present. If a certain category contains six pages of archives, perhaps only the first two or three will be paginated. This essentially leaves large portions of my archives inaccessible for browsing. WP-PageNavi replaces the traditional links with a more stylish (and more functional) numbered pagination system.

  • WP-phpMyAdmin 2.8.2 - Allows access to a full featured phpMyAdmin console within the WP admin interface. Several megabytes in size, this is by far the largest plugin I use.

  • WP-ShortStat 1.12b - This is Markus Kaemmerer's version of the superb plugin adaptation of the stand-alone ShortStat package. I'd recommend this plugin for everyone without hesitation. Installation is upload-activate simple and the amount of information it presents is excellent. It's almost enough to make you ditch your hit counter.

  • WP-Stats 2.10 - This plugin will tell you everything you want to know about everything. Want to know how many comments a certain person has made? It does that. Generate a list of those comments? It does that too. This plugin is not concerned with traffic. It's not a replacement for your hit counter or any other traffic analyzer. But it will tell you everything a traffic analyzer won't.

  • WP-UserOnline 2.10 - As the name implies, this plugin counts users. At any given point in time I can see what content is being viewed by whom. Output is sorted by guests, registered users and robots. Includes template tags, a widget, a themed report page and a Dashboard report page.