Tag Archives: WordPress

Updates to my WordPress Plugins

Published Sep 12, 2011 | In WordPress

Over the past week, I have updated nearly half of my Plugins. I thought of consolidating all them in a single post instead of writing separate post for each of them.

If I have fixed a bug or added a new feature, I call them as mandatory updates. If I have just added new translations, the those updates are optional. But it is recommend that you always update irrespective of whether they are mandatory or optional updates.

You can update all these Plugins from your WordPress dashboard or by manually downloading them from their homepage.

Try these updates and let me know if you face any issues.

Mandatory Updates

Easy Retweet

Easy ReTweet is a WordPress Plugin, which lets you add retweet or Tweet this buttons for your WordPress posts, together with the retweet count.

I updated this Plugin to v2.7. I fixed a bug and added new feature, so it is a mandatory update

The following are the major changes

  • Enabled custom bit.ly pro domains (Thanks to Michelle McGinnis for the patches)
  • Added Bulgarian translations
  • Added Lithuanian translations

Github Ribbon

Github Ribbon is a WordPress Plugin, which can be used to add Github ribbons to your website. The github ribbons can be configured either for the entire site or on a post by post basic.

I updated this Plugin to v0.4

The following are the major changes

  • Added CSS style to hide ribbon on printed pages

Posts by tag

Posts by Tag WordPress Plugin, provides sidebar widgets which can be used to display posts from a specific set of tags in the sidebar.

I have updated this Plugin to v1.8.

The following are the major changes

  • Added support for displaying content (Thanks to rjune for the patch)

Twitter Avatar Reloaded

Twitter avatar reloaded Plugin adds a new field to the comment form to get the user’s Twitter username and stores it together with comments and using it replaces gravatar with twitter avatar when the comment is displayed.

I have updated the Plugin to to v1.0

The following are the major changes

  • Using transient api for storing cache
  • Also improve performance

Optional Updates

Geo mark

Geo Mark is a WordPress Plugin which will automatically locate Geo information in your WordPress posts using Yahoo Placemaker and YQL API’s.

I have updated this Plugin to v0.7

The following are the major changes

  • Added Bulgarian translations
  • Added Lithuanian translations

Post to Friendfeed

Post to FriendFeed is a WordPress Plugin which will allow you to post excerpts from your blog posts as a message in FriendFeed with images. By default FriendFeed posts them without images and this Plugin overcomes this issue.

I have updated this Plugin to v1.0.2

The following are the major changes

  • Added Bulgarian translations

Tweetback Helper

Tweetbacks Helper is a helper Plugin for Tweetbacks Plugin to help it detect more tweets.

I have updated this Plugin to v0.4

The following are the major changes

  • Added Bulgarian translations
  • Added Lithuanian translations
  • Added German translations

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Embedding Github files in your WordPress posts

Published Aug 25, 2011 | In WordPress

Recently while debugging the issue with my WordPress feed, I found out that the Plugin which I was using to display files from my Github Gist was highly unoptimized. As promised, I created a Plugin to do it properly.

While working on this new Plugin, I felt that it would be really nice to embed Github files as well in addition to embedding gist.

Gist-it

My search lead to a Google app engine based solution called Gist-it. I really liked it, but one problem with it was that it was not supporting embedding particular regions of the file. So during the Yahoo HackU last week, I hacked on it and added support for specifying line numbers.

I also updated my WordPress Plugin to support gist-it urls as well.

Download & Usage

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page. The Plugin’s home page also has detailed examples of different ways by which you can embed gist or Github files in your WordPress blog posts or pages.

Feedback

If you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below.

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Fixing WordPress Feed timeout issues

Published Jul 12, 2011 | In WordPress

Recently I got an email from my friend Sudheer, saying that the feedburner feed of my blog is not working. I thought it might be some small issue, but it took me more than a couple of hours to fix it. As usual, I thought of documenting it since it was an interesting problem and also someone who has the same problem might also find it useful.

WordPress feed timeout

I started the debug process by logging into Feedburner dashboard. Feedburner reported that it is not able to fetch my blog’s feed url. When I tried to open the feed url directly in browser it was loading, but it took a couple of minutes for WordPress to generate it. But both feedvalidator and feedburner said that the feed times out.

My website was loading properly and my error log was empty. I tried lot of different things but was not able to figure out why the feed was timing out.

Increasing memory used by WordPress

After a couple of web searches, I landed on a old forum thread, which stated that we should try to increase the amount of memory used by WordPress. I tried doing that as well, but it didn’t make difference :(

Reducing post count in feed

Then I tried to reduce the number of recent items that were shown in my feed to 10 from the default value of 25. The feed was getting generated in some decent time and was able to let feedburner pick up my feed. But it still didn’t solve my original issue.

Unoptimized Plugin

After some more debugging, I found the root cause of the issue. An unoptimized Plugin was the real culprit.

I was using github’s gist to store the code samples that I use in my blog posts and used a Plugin to embed the code directly from github. The advantage of this approach is that, there is one centralized repository for my code samples with versioning and also github provides nice syntax highlighting.

The Plugin was making curl request to github to retrieve the code sample and it so happened that most of my last 25 blog posts had code samples and some blog posts even had around three code embeds.

The problem with the Plugin was that, it was not using WordPress’s built-in HTTP request object and also it was not caching any of the response that it got from the curl request. I quickly rewrote the Plugin and WordPress was immediately able to serve the feed in less than a second. (Will be releasing the Plugin pretty soon) Update: You can find the Plugin in its homepage

Solution

So if you are also facing timeout issues with your WordPress feed, then try the following

  • Try increasing the memory used by WordPress
  • Try reducing the number of blog posts that are disabled in your feed.
  • If nothing works, then it’s mostly because of some unoptimized Plugin.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Updated 4 WordPress Plugins

Published May 12, 2011 | In WordPress

Over the past week, I have updated 4 of my WordPress Plugins and thought of consolidating all of them in a single post instead of creating multiple posts.

Posts By Tag

Posts by Tag WordPress Plugin, provides sidebar widgets which can be used to display posts from a specific set of tags in the sidebar.

I updated this Plugin to v1.7. It fixed a bug so it’s a mandatory update.

The following are the main changes

  • Added support for displaying post dates
  • Fixed a bug which was corrupting the loop.

Twitter Avatar Reloaded

Twitter avatar reloaded Plugin adds a new field to the comment form to get the user’s Twitter username and stores it together with comments and using it replaces gravatar with twitter avatar when the comment is displayed.

I updated this Plugin to v0.7. It is a mandatory update.

The following are the main changes

  • Added 4 template functions to display the comment authors Twitter id and profile url.

Bulk Delete

Bulk Delete is a WordPress Plugin which can be used to delete posts in bulk from selected categories or tags. This Plugin can also delete all drafts, post revisions or pages.

I updated this Plugin to v1.3. It is an optional update

The following are the main changes

  • Added German translations

Easy Retweet

Easy ReTweet is a WordPress Plugin, which lets you add retweet or Tweet this buttons for your WordPress posts, together with the retweet count.

I updated this Plugin to v2.4. It is an optional update

The following are the main changes

  • Added German translations

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments

Changed the permalink structure of my blog

Published Feb 20, 2011 | In WordPress

Well, after wanting to do it for many years, I have finally bitten the bullet and have changed the permalink structure of the posts in my blog.

When I moved from blogspot to WordPress, (some 6 years ago) I retained the structure of the blog posts to the usual year/month/date/postname format. But later, I realized that this results in long urls and also these days the date is not adding any additional information to the blog posts.

I have been thinking of changing the permalink structure to the shorter /postname format for quite some time now, but was always worried about setting up the proper 301 redirects.

But at last I did it today, with just one line in my .htaccess file, which looks something like this.

So if you are planning to change your permalink structure then follow these steps.

  • Disable caching. (If you using Plugins like wp-super-cache etc.)
  • Add the above line to your .htaccess file
  • Change the permalink structure
  • Re enable cache

And you are done. :)

If you want you can also create a new sitemap.xml file which could speed up the index update by Google.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged | 1 Comment

WordPress Plugin updates

Published Feb 7, 2011 | In WordPress

Over the past two weeks, I have updated a couple of my WordPress Plugins. Most of them are optional updates, so I thought of consolidating all the changes here instead of creating separate posts for each of them.

Bulk Delete

Bulk Delete is a WordPress Plugin which can be used to delete posts in bulk from selected categories or tags.

I updated this Plugin to v1.2. It is a mandatory update.

The following were the major updates

  • Added support for deleting posts by custom taxonomies
  • Optimized the code which prevents the blank screen that you get when you have huge number of posts to delete on an under-powered server.
  • Added Dutch translations
  • Added Brazilian Portuguese translations

Easy Retweet

Easy ReTweet is a WordPress Plugin, which lets you add retweet or Tweet this buttons for your WordPress posts, together with the retweet count.

I updated this Plugin to v2.3. It is a mandatory update.

The following were the major changes

  • Fixed issue with permalink for official Twitter button
  • Added Brazilian Portuguese translations

Twitter Avatar Reloaded

Twitter avatar reloaded Plugin adds a new field to the comment form to get the user’s Twitter username and stores it together with comments and using it replaces gravatar with twitter avatar when the comment is displayed.

I updated this Plugin to v0.6. It is an optional update.

The following were the major changes

  • Added Dutch translations
  • Added Brazilian Portuguese translations

Google Scribe

Google Scribe is a WordPress Plugin, which allows you to enable Google Scribe to WordPress comment input box.

I updated this Plugin to v0.4. It is an optional update

The following were the major changes

  • Added Dutch translations

Github Ribbon

Github Ribbon is a WordPress Plugin, which can be used to add Github ribbons to your website.

I updated this Plugin to v0.3. It is an optional update

The following were the major changes

  • Added Dutch translations

Bulk Move

Bulk Move is a WordPress Plugin which can be used to move posts from one category to another in bulk. This Plugin can also be used to remove assigned categories from posts.

I updated this Plugin to v0.4. It is an optional update

The following were the major changes

  • Generated translation files
  • Added Brazilian Portuguese translations

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Bulk Delete Plugin now supports deleting posts by Custom taxonomy

Published Jan 24, 2011 | In WordPress

I have updated my Bulk Delete WordPress Plugin, which lets you to delete posts in bulk. The new update adds the support to delete posts by custom taxonomy, in addition to deleting posts by tag and category.

Like the previous updates, this feature was also requested by the users of the Plugin. So if you have any feedback or feature request, don’t hesitate to contact me, I will try to add them to the Plugin.

Screenshot

Delete WordPress posts by custom taxonomy

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page.

Feedback

If you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below.

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Easy Retweet Plugin now supports official Twitter button

Published Dec 1, 2010 | In WordPress

I have added some updates to my Easy retweet WordPress Plugin and have released a new version

Official Twitter Button

In addition to supporting bit.ly retweet counts, Easy Retweet Plugin now supports the Official Twitter Button. You can choose either bit.ly button or the Twitter button.

Screenshot

easy-retweet-option

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s homepage.

Feedback

Please keep the feedback coming and if you want me to add any new features or find a bug, please leave a comment.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Github Ribbon Plugin now supports CSS 3 Ribbons

Published Nov 8, 2010 | In WordPress

After releasing my Github Ribbon WordPress Plugin, I found that Jeff Balogh created a pure CSS3 version of the ribbons without using any images.

I took his code and encapsulated it into my Plugin and added an option to choose between the old image type ribbons and the new CSS3 ribbons.

The new CSS3 ribbons are really cool and you can see them in action in my blog. The only caveat is that, they don’t work in IE (but who cares ;) )

Download

This is an optional update. If you want to use the cool CSS3 ribbons, then you can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s homepage or update it using the Plugin installer.

Feedback

Please keep the feedback coming and if you want me to add any new features or find a bug, please leave a comment.

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

RoloPress 1.5 released

Published Nov 5, 2010 | In RoloPress

We just released an update to RoloPress, a WordPress-based contact manager which is one of my pet projects.

Enhancements

There were lot of enhancements that went into this release. The following are some of the notable ones.

  • Tags are now supported on the front-end, including inline editing
  • Moved over to WordPress settings API.
  • Consolidated settings area for better admin navigation.

You can read the complete list in the announcement blog post.

Fixes

This release also includes couple of bug fixes which were reported in the forums. Notable among them are

  • “Recent Notes” works better.
  • Phone number / IM field deletion on edit has been fixed.

Plugins

This release also has a couple of Plugins added to the core, which can be activated separately.

  1. RoloPress Import: probably our most requested feature.  You can now import any Outlook CSV file into RoloPress.  We choose Outlook CSV because most contact managers allow you to export in this format.
  2. Google Maps for RoloPress: View a google map of any address in RoloPress. You can see an example on demo.rolopress.com.

Third developer

Another important milestone of this release is that, this release includes code from a third developer apart from me and Steve. The third developer is Mike Whitfield, who contributed the front-end tag editing code. Welcome Mike :)

Download

You can download the latest version from the homepage and if you are interested, you can check out the source code at github.

Try it out and if you have any feedback, please post it here or in the forums.

Posted in RoloPress | Tagged , | 2 Comments