WordPress plugins

More social, less social

I just wanted to let you all know about the latest changes to this site.

Firstly, I removed the Latest Twits widget from the sidebar. Somehow I am not using Twitter all that much lately. I still love the service, but I have two problems with it. Actually, it’s one, but I feel it in two separate ways. Firstly, I still don’t have a good Twitter client application. Not on my mobile, and not on my desktop. I tried a billion of them, and I am yet to find one that suits me. Without a proper client, I tend to forget to tweet, read other tweets, and respond. Too bad. Second problem is that I am annoyed by all the links that are posted in tweets these days. Sometimes I just want to get the statuses only, to see how my friends are doing and what they are up to. Instead I get a billion links, which I need to click, check, and follow. As I said, I wish I could filter them out in my Twitter client, for those times when I have more time and better Internet connection. The blog will still send the “new blog post” tweets to Twitter though, and I am still trying my best to use the service. It’s just that judging by all the updates I do, the sidebar space can be used better.

Secondly, I added Google Reader shared items to the sidebar. Google Reader is the application I use a lot! And I share quite a bit of stuff. Too bad it often goes unnoticed. Sharing those links and articles via sidebar might give an extra bit of attention to those things that I think deserve it. Just in case you are wondering which plugin I used – it’s Google Reader Widget by James Wilson.

Thirdly, I added some social network buttons in the upper-right corner of the website. These are links to some of my other online profiles and also and easy way to bookmark, share, and promote either the whole website or a specific page that you liked. The plugin that I used for this functionality is Fixed Social Buttons by Ioane.

Compact Archives

Anyone who has been running a blog even for a couple of years, knows how annoying archives can get. Each year brings twelve monthly archives, and the more years you work, the more archives you have. And they just keep multiplying until there is no easy way to use them any more. For anyone who is suffering from this problem while using WordPress platform, I recommend a solution – Compact Archives plugin. If you are not on WordPress, chances are there is a similar plugin for your content management system, but even if there is none, creating one shouldn’t be a huge problem. See how it beautiful it is – in action on my newly re-created Archives page, or on the screenshot below.

Simple, intuitive, and scalable – just the way it should be.

Yet another new look : Carrington theme and more

It’s been a while since I changed the theme of the site. Today I felt like I needed it again. I looked around, checked a few options, and decided to go with the Carrington theme from the excellent folks at Crowd Favorite. It looks simple, yet elegant, fresh and modern. And it is not just your average WordPress theme. It is a whole framework. I didn’t have much to play with it yet, but even from the first few looks it’s very interesting. The theme files and logic are organized in such a way that makes modifying it and building on top of it extremely easy. And unlike some other frameworks, it doesn’t force you to start designing your theme from scratch. It provides already a default look with a few administration options that are handy for people like me, who are just starting up with it.

The second big change that was done today – IntenseDebate plugin was disabled. IntenseDebate is a nice system, and I totally dig the concept, and all, but it turned out to be slightly annoying for me personally. Somehow, the moderation never worked the way I wanted it to work. Comments and the comment form didn’t look the way I wanted them to look (and I couldn’t bother with styling them myself). And it was slowing the site quite a bit by loading all those images, styles, and the JavaScript. Gladly though, IntenseDebate works well with WordPress and I didn’t have to do anything to get my comments back – they are all here exactly how you’d expect them.

As always, after major changes like these, there will be a brief period of tweaking and tuning. If you notice any issues with the site, please let me know. Also, I’d appreciate your opinions and feedback regarding these changes. Thank you for the patience during the bumpy ride. Hopefully you can still enjoy this place.

WordPress goodies of the week

I spent some time playing around with WordPress themes and plugins this week. While most of the stuff I discovered was cool, as usual, a few thins stood out. For the benefit of the general public, here they are.

Automatic thumbnails in Swift theme. One of the problems that I face when choosing a new theme is that often theme author would expect you to do things in a certain way – organize your menus using pages and not categories, or use specific custom keywords, etc. For some time now I was interested in a theme with post thumbnails, but never dared to try. After all, I have more than 4000 posts and the last thing I want to do is go through all of them adding thumbnails. That’s why I was so surprised by how nicely Swift theme handles this problem. It does expect that you add thumbnails using custom fields, but if you don’t, it just grabs the first image from the content of the post and prepares the thumbnail itself. If there are no images in the content, it uses a default one, which can change easily. Awesome! Here is how it looks.
After The Deadline spell-checker. Michael Koenig commented on the post about me trying IntenseDebate comments plugin, and suggested that I enable After The Deadline plugin for comments, which I did. Looking further into it, I noticed that After The Deadline spell-checker is also available for posts. I already have a spell-checker built into my browser, but it doesn’t seem to check the grammar or anything else beyond the syntax mistakes. So, I installed the After The Deadline and I do enjoy it. It doesn’t stand in the way, while at the same time, provides some feedback about my writing style. It has a number of useful features, such as highlighting passive voice, suggesting replacement for complex words and expressions, and more. Recommended, especially for non-native English speakers.
Security tips. A reader of my much outdated, lost, and forgotten WordPress Bits blog asked for some tips to improve WordPress security. I compiled my list of tips and then looked around for a few suggestions from other people. Apparently, there are a number of blog posts (one, two, three) on the subjects and even some plugins (one, two, three) that can help you out.

WordPress plugin idea : relevant tag cloud

Once in a while, especially when trying to explain a widely used technology to a non-technical person, I get this feeling that things could be done better. And that’s exactly what happened recently while I was explaining tag clouds.

I know that there are plenty of variations on displaying and generating tag clouds – most used, most popular, recent, etc, etc, etc. But what I realized is that a relevant tag cloud plugin is missing in WordPress. Or, at least, is hard to find.

Many WordPress blogs these days are serving a particular niche, covering a specific topic. So, for them relevant tag clouds are not a problem. All tags are relevant, since they all share the same topic. However, there are plenty of blogs which cover a wide variety of topics.

Take my blog for example. I write about technology (tools, concepts, trends, etc.), movies, Cyprus, personal life, and lots of random bits about this and that. I tag all my posts. But the tag cloud is totally useless, because it shows all tags from all my posts. And what good are the technology tags for the reader who scrolls through movie posts?

So, I think there is a need for a relevant tag cloud plugin. I don’t know exactly how it should work and if it will work at all, but my ideas are the following:

When on the front page of the blog (is_home()), tag cloud can show anything at all – most used, most recent, most popular, etc.
When in the post or page (is_page() or is_post()), tag cloud should display tags which are used in all posts, that share tags with the current one.
When in the category (is_category()), tag cloud should display all tags which are used in all posts that belong to this category.
When in the archives (is_archive()), tag cloud should display all tags which are used in all posts within the archive time period.
When in search results (is_search()), search term should be checked against existing tags, and if found ,then show all tags used in all posts tagged by the search term. Alternatively, maybe, show a tag cloud for all tags used in the posts matching the search criteria.

I think such a tag cloud would be way more useful, especially for blogs that cover multiple topics. Especially, if the extra database load caused by generating such a tag cloud could be kept under control.

What do you think? Is it going to work? Is there something that I missed here? Is there are a plugin that can do this? Would you jump in and implement it or should I do everything myself?