The new version features AJAX-based navigation between pages of images, and improved support for insertion within pages and posts as a shortcode.

Flickrpress 1.0 can be downloaded from the Wordpress plugin repository

See it an action over on my personal blog.

It will identify unused files within your uploads folder, and give you the option of archiving then deleting some or all of these files.

Before any action is taken, Upload Janitor will automatically make a ‘tar’ archive of all files to be erased, including their original paths, so you can restore if necessary.

Download

Download Upload Janitor from the WordPress plugins directory.

If you like Upload Janitor, please consider buying one of my products.

Installation

1. Unzip the package, and upload upload-janitor to the wp-content/plugins directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Visit ‘Upload Janitor’ within the ‘Tools’ menu in WordPress to use

How does it work?

This plugin inspects every file within the uploads folder. For each file, it searches pages or posts that reference the file. That is, the plugin searches for the part of each file’s path that comes after the path to the uploads folder, such as 2010/01/my great but forgotten image.jpg.

The path is searched as-is, as well as URL-encoded with ‘%20′ for spaces, and the same with ‘+’ for spaces - 2010/01/my%20great%20but%20forgotten%20image.jpg and 2010/01/my+great+but+forgotten+image.jpg. HTML entity-encoded forms of all of these are also searched.

If no matches are found, then the file is considered unused.

Note that this plugin plays it safe, and does not distinguish between older post/page revisions and the current version of a post/page. If a revision references a file, the file will be considered still in use.

Restoring

If something goes wrong, you can always restore. If you have shell access to your site, this is easy. Simply log in, navigate to your wp-content/plugins directory, and locate the Upload Janitor archive – it will look like upload_janitor_archive_YYYY-mm-dd.tar.gz. Then, type:

  tar zxf <archive name> .

This will restore all files within the archive.

If you do not have shell access to your server, you will have to download the archive, extract it, then upload the contents back to your server. The archive will be accessible at http://your-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/upload_janitor_archive_YYYY-mm-dd.tar.gz

Changes

0.2

• Tweak for compatibility with some apparently buggy PHP installations
• Additional error reporting for ‘tar’ archiver

0.1

• Initial release

Download

Download Hidden Tags from the WordPress plugins directory.

If you like Hidden Tags, please consider buying one of my products.

Installation

1. Unzip the package, and upload hidden-tags to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Visit ‘Hidden Tags’ settings underneath WordPress settings to configure

Changes

• 0.1: Initial release

Twitter doesn’t yet come with its own inline image support, so we tend to be limited to using image hosting services, and linking to them with short URLs. So, services like Twitpic host the image, and we direct traffic to them in return.

Better to take advantage of that traffic, and host images on your own site. This way, viewers come to your site, instead of someone else’s!

Posted images are displayed in your normal Wordpress template, with support for comments and trackbacks, without any setup required. Most themes should work with this, but if not, or if a different layout is required, a custom theme template can also be provided (see ‘Creating a Template’).

Provides an HTML form for posting image content, as well as an API modelled on that of img.ly, compatible with Tweetie (for iPhone) and any other Twitter clients that speak this protocol and offer configuration of custom image hosting services.

Uses Twitter’s authentication and a list of authorised accounts, so you can let others use your image host too. You can even post status updates to Twitter while submitting images.

Provides a widget and shortcode to display uploaded images. This supports filtering by Twitter account, styling with CSS, and Lightbox/Thickbox.

Download

Download the plugin at Wordpress’s plugin directory

If you like Twitter Image Host, please consider buying some awesome Mac/iPhone software. Then tell all your friends.

Installation

1. Unzip the package, and upload twitter-image-host to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Visit the settings page and add your Twitter account to the list of authorised accounts
4. Start submitting images – See the ‘Posting Images’ section for more

FAQ

I get “Couldn’t place uploaded file” messages

You probably need to create the folder in which Twitter Image Host stores uploaded images — it will try to create the folder automatically, but it will fail if it doesn’t have permission.

Create a folder called twitter-image-host-content within the wp-content folder of your Wordpress installation, and make sure it has write permission for the web server user.

I keep getting 404 errors

Make sure your blog is using URL rewriting (i.e. your permalink structure is anything but the boring default ?p=###).

Widget

To use the widget, simply visit the Widgets page and drag the “Twitter Images” widget into a sidebar and configure it.

Shortcode

Shortcodes are snippets of text that can be inserted into pages and posts. These snippets are replaced by various generated content. Twitter Image Host provides a ‘twitter-images’ shortcode to display images you have uploaded within a page/post.

Available parameters:

Example (square brackets replaced by curly brackets):

  {twitter-images columns=4 lightbox="true"}

PHP function

As well as the shortcode, you can also use call twitter_image_host_images() from within a template to produce the same output. Pass the same arguments as the shortcode as associative array values:

<h3>Recently submitted images</h3>
<?php twitter_image_host_images(array('author' => 'ATastyPixel', 'columns' => 6, 'lightbox' => true)); ?>

Tip: Use this in the twitter-image-host.php template (see ‘Creating a Single Template’, below) to display other posted images when viewing an image. Use the_twitter_image_author() to filter the list, to show only other submissions by the same Twitter account as the one of the currently displayed image.

Template Tags

This plugin provides several template tags, for use both in displaying single posts (see ‘Creating a Single Template’), and for custom pages which display many posts in a loop (see ‘Using Template Tags in a Loop’).

The available template tags are:

Single Entry Tags

the_twitter_image_permalink

Returns the URL to the view page

the_twitter_image_url

Returns the full URL to the image, or the image thumbnail if the original image was large

the_twitter_full_image_url

Returns the URL to the full-sized image, if one exists, or false otherwise

the_twitter_image_title

The title of the image

the_twitter_image_date

The date (timestamp) of the image – use date() to configure the display

the_twitter_image_author

The associated Twitter account

the_twitter_image

Returns HTML to display the image and a link to the full-sized image if it exists, with Lightbox rel tags.

Loop Tags

query_twitter_images

Search for Twitter images

Available parameters (passed as associative array):

has_twitter_images

Use with loop: Determine if there are more images

next_twitter_image

Use with loop: Get the next image

Creating a Single Template

By default, this plugin will use the standard post template (’single.php’). However, if you wish, you can create a custom template to display hosted images. The template should be called ‘twitter-image-host.php’, located within your current theme directory.

Creating a template to use this information is fairly straightforward if you have just a little knowledge of HTML or PHP:

• On your server (via an FTP program, etc.), navigate to your current theme. This will live within wp-content/themes.
• Copy an existing template – single.php is usually a good candidate – and call it twitter-image-host.php.
• Open up twitter_image_host.php, and delete everything that looks post-related: This usually includes everything between the have_posts call and the matching endif, and may include some other surrounding content like an ‘Edit this post’ link.
• Replace that which you have just deleted with something that uses the ’single entry’ template tags above, like the following:

<?php echo the_twitter_image() ?>
<h1 class="center"><?php echo the_twitter_image_title() ?></h1>
<p class="center">
	From <a href="http://twitter.com/<?php echo the_twitter_image_author() ?>"><?php echo the_twitter_image_author() ?></a>
	 on <?php echo date('F jS, Y', the_twitter_image_date()) ?>
</p>

• Save the file, add some content (see the ‘Posting Images’ section), and see how it looks.

Using Template Tags in a Loop

Just like the WordPress Loop template tags, the template tags provided by this plugin can be used to display multiple posted entries. This can be used to create a custom page template that lists all submitted entries, with more flexibility than that offered by the shortcode.

Use begins with a call to query_twitter_images(), possibly with an argument to configure the search. If the result is true, then the loop begins, conditional upon has_twitter_images(), and starting with next_twitter_image() to load the next entry. The single template tags can then be used to customise the display of each entry.

Here is an example of use:

<?php if ( query_twitter_images() ) : ?>
    <?php while ( has_twitter_images() ) : next_twitter_image(); ?>
        <div class="item entry">
          <div class="itemhead">
            <h1><a href="<?php echo the_twitter_image_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php echo the_twitter_image_title(); ?></a></h1>
            <div class="date"><?php echo date('F jS, Y', the_twitter_image_date()) ?></div>
          </div>
 
          <?php echo the_twitter_image() ?>
          <p class="center">From <a href="http://twitter.com/<?php echo the_twitter_image_author() ?>"><?php echo the_twitter_image_author() ?></a></p>
          </div>
    <?php endwhile; ?>
<?php else : ?>
    <p>There are no Twitter images.</p>
<?php endif; ?>

Posting Images

To start posting straight away, a simple form is provided at http://your-blog-url/twitter-image-host. Enter a title for your image, your Twitter account details, and select your image. Hit Submit, and you will be given the URL for the image.

To access this facility from an application, use the access point http://your-blog-url/twitter-image-host.

The API is more-or-less the same as that of TweetPic, img.ly, etc.

To post from Tweetie 2 for iPhone, visit Tweetie’s settings, and within Services, Image Service, select ‘Custom’, then enter http://your-blog.com/twitter-image-host/upload

Automate it

For Mac users, an Automator service has been created to upload images by right-clicking on a file in Finder, then selecting a context menu item, if you are using Snow Leopard. This may still work for Leopard users, via the ‘Services’ menu.

Download it here: Send Image to Image Hosting Automator service

To use it:

1. Unzip
2. Double-click on ‘Send Image to Image Hosting’ to open it for editing

3. In the third panel down, change the ‘HOST’ value to the URL to your blog:

4. Save

5. In Finder, navigate to the ‘Library’ directory under your home folder. Create a folder called ‘Services’, if it doesn’t already exist, then drag ‘Send Image to Image Hosting’ into ‘Services’
6. Right-click on an image file, and you should see:

If not, you may need to log out and log back in first.

Making the URL even shorter

If you run Wordpress from a sub-directory (for example, http://your-site.com/blog), then the short URLs generated by this plugin will look like http://your-site/blog/xxxxx. You can remove that ‘blog’ component via a little .htaccess trickery.

Here’s how:

1. Create and open a new file in your site’s webroot called “.htaccess”. If there’s one already there, just open that up and prepare to edit at the bottom.

2. Add the following, replacing ‘blog’ with the real subdirectory under which Wordpress is installed:

   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([^/]+)/?$
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/blog/wp-content/twitter-image-host-content/%1.jpg -f [OR]
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/blog/wp-content/twitter-image-host-content/%1.png -f [OR]
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/blog/wp-content/twitter-image-host-content/%1.jpeg -f
   RewriteRule (.*) /blog/$1 [L]
   </IfModule>
   

   This will take any requests that:

   • Are located in the web-root (start with a slash, followed by anything but a slash until the end)
   • Have a corresponding file within Twitter Image Host’s content directory Then, it’ll rewrite the request silently to the real Twitter Image Host URL, without the viewer seeing.

3. In Twitter Image Host settings, set the ‘Override URL Prefix’ option to ‘http://your-site.com/’

• Ten logo design tips from the field | Logo Design Love
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• Wordpress Theme Development Frameworks If you build and develop Wordpress themes often, you will probably be fed up of all the repetitive code writing, the constantly checking of your mark-up and all you really want to do is focus on the design and the project-specific features. The answer is a Wordpress development framework
• How to Draw Pixel-Perfect iPhone Toolbar Icons Using OmniGraffle

• Flickr RSS feeds
• Photostream
• Filtering by tag
• One or more photosets
• Favorites
• Displaying random items

Other features:

• Choose from three different thumbnail types
• Lightbox/Thickbox are supported
• Data is cached locally to lower server load
• Secure Flickr API used, to eliminate the risk of damage to your server, unlike some other Flickr widgets
• Flickrpress is a multi-widget, so you can use more than one instance (e.g., one in your sidebar, one in your footer)
• Use as a shortcode to insert into posts and pages — multiple instances supported in the one entry

Flickrpress uses the excellent phpFlickr library.

Download

Download Flickrpress at the Wordpress site.

If you like Flickrpress, please consider buying one of my products.

Installation

1. Unzip the package, and upload flickrpress to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Add the ‘Flickr Widget’ to your sidebar and configure, or see the ‘Shortcodes’ section for information on use in pages and posts

If you wish to use content from anything but an RSS feed, you will need a Flickr API key. This can be obtained from Flickr

If you wish to use Lightbox, you must first install the Lightbox plugin.

Shortcode

Shortcodes are snippets of text that can be inserted into pages and posts. These snippets are replaced by various generated content. Flickrpress provides a ‘flickrpress’ shortcode to display images from Flickr within a page/post.

Available parameters:

Example:

  [flickrpress type="photostream" api_key="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" account="michaeltyson" count="30" paging="true" lightbox="true"]

Styling

Flickrpress comes with CSS styling, but if you wish to modify its appearance, such as adding frame borders, simply style the “flickrpress-container” class. See style.css for more.

Changelog

1.0.2

• Added Thickbox support
• Compatibility fix for PHP 4

1.0.1

• Bugfix in navigation javascript encountered when Lightbox isn’t installed

1.0

• Implemented AJAX-based navigation through pages of images
• Added shortcode documentation
• Caching for shortcode and php calls
• Removed ‘css’ option in favour of always including CSS
• Fixed conflict between shortcode and widget versions
• Fixed bug in loading all photostream items

0.3.2

• Fixed a warning when using shortcode

0.3.1

• Fixed a packaging snafu

0.3

• Support for use outside of sidebar

0.2.1

• Bugfix for displaying random favourites

0.2

• Now able to be styled as described in http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/css-decorative-gallery/. See style.css for more info.

0.1.1

• Bugfix for when only 1 random image shown

0.1

• Initial release

I recently had a bit of a security breach – some lowlife broke into my account and injected some phishing stuff into my personal webmail software. Consequently, I went on a bit of a security binge and deleted some apps I wasn’t using much, changed all of my passwords to ridiculously long strings, and set up layers of HTTP authentication on my Wordpress login/admin pages, the latter of which is described here.

The general idea is to make it hard to get to the login/admin pages in the first place, which should block some attacks.

The AskApache password protect Wordpress plugin will do all of this for you, unless it thinks your webserver doesn’t have the supporting software. It failed for me on Site5, saying I lacked HTTP digest authentication support, which is actually not true, as it’s enabled. I couldn’t be bothered debugging it though, so I proceeded with the manual route.

Create the password file

First, I created an htpasswd file, containing a login and password. There’re many sites describing how to do this, but on the terminal, it’s fairly easy:

htpasswd -c /path/to/.htpasswd myusername

Note that it’s a good idea to put the .htpasswd file somewhere outside the web root – your account’s home directory is one option.

Protect the login page

I opened up the .htaccess in the Wordpress root folder, and added the following:

ErrorDocument 401 default
 
AuthUserFile /path/to/.htpasswd
AuthName "Blog"
AuthType Basic
 
<Files "wp-login.php">
    require valid-user
</Files>

Note that ‘ErrorDocument 401 default’ line – this is in place to avoid getting a ‘404′ error whenever you load up the login page. I’m not entirely sure of the details, but it seems that if the rewrite module is used (the thing that allows Wordpress to define an arbitrary website structure, without needing physical files), then this causes problems with HTTP authentication.

Also, if you wish to protect access to the XMLRPC access point as well, you can add the following:

<Files "xmlrpc.php">
    require valid-user
</Files>

However, if you do this, I’m pretty sure pingbacks (the Wordpress-specific version of trackbacks) will no longer work. I think trackbacks will still be functional – as far as I know, they use a different access point. If you use a desktop blogging app, you’ll want to make sure it can handle HTTP authentication. I know ecto can.

Protect the admin area

Finally, I created a new .htaccess file in the wp-admin directory, which looks like this:

ErrorDocument 401 default
 
AuthUserFile /path/to/.htpasswd
AuthName "Blog"
AuthType Basic
 
require valid-user

Alternatively, in ‘inclusive’ mode specify a list of tags/categories to make public – all other tags/categories will remain hidden.

Download

Download the Private Tags plugin at the Wordpress plugin page

If you like Private Tags, please consider buying one of my products.

Installation

1. Unzip the package, and upload private-tags to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Visit ‘Private Tags’ settings underneath Wordpress settings to configure

Changes

0.1 – Initial release

I came across this beautiful Elegant Grunge modification today, at Gawariel.com. Fantastic!

Here’s another cool one by Rodrigo Muñoz:

And one from Nistha Tripathi:

A note on contacting me: Please don’t make direct contact asking about customisation, as I don’t have the resources to help you. These kind of questions should be directed to the Wordpress forums. Thanks!

If you like Elegant Grunge, please consider buying one of my products.

• Configurable sidebars! Choose from no sidebar, a sidebar on the right (the standard layout), or a double sidebar on the right!
• Support for WP 2.7 paginated and threaded comments
• Support for a custom header image – just enter a URL to an image, typically a transparent PNG, and it will appear in the header instead of the text (SEO friendly)
• Some bug, compatibility and i18n fixes

<

p>Note: If you have problems with this theme, please post your question at the Wordpress forums. Please don’t contact me directly, as I don’t have the resources to help you.

Custom Permalinks is a Wordpress plugin that gives you ultimate control over your site structure.

Lay out your site the way you want it. Set the URL of any post, tag or category to anything you want. Old permalinks will redirect properly to the new address.

Download

Download Custom Permalinks for Wordpress from the Custom Permalinks Wordpress plugin page.

If you like Custom Permalinks, please consider buying one of my products.

Installation

1. Unzip the package, and upload ‘custom-permalinks’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Edit any post, tag or category to set a custom permalink.

Configuration

• Open or create a post, tag, or category.
• Under ‘Custom Permalink’, type in a URL, not including the http://domain part of the address.
  
• Save

Now, the post/tag/category will be accessible at the custom address.

Incoming visitors from old links will be redirected via a 301 redirect to the new address.

See Custom Permalinks in action right here! (See the address you’re currently at?)

Notes

Interacting with other plugins which modify the URL

If you notice that some plugins, such as Keyvan Minoukadeh’s Paged Comments plugin, are not operating correctly, then ensure that your custom permalinks have a trailing slash (or not, if your standard permalinks do not have trailing slashes).

The Paged Comments plugin, and possibly others, work by adding a path component to the URL to signify state (eg. /comment-page-1), then hiding that path component from Wordpress.

If you have a custom permalink with a different trailing / configuration to your normal permalinks (i.e., your custom permalink has a trailing / when others don’t, or vice versa), you will notice that these plugins no longer work, because Custom Permalinks is correcting the URL, which overwrites the plugin’s changes.

If you notice this happening, make sure you have a trailing / on your permalink, or remove the trailing slash if your standard permalinks do not have a trailing /.

Hiding the custom_permalinks custom field

A user recently asked for this; I’m not going to include it in the plugin (some people, including me, want to see this field, because we set it manually sometimes), but I’m happy to make a plugin-let to make it happen.

Here it is: hide_custom_permalink_field.php.zip

Put it in your wp-content/plugins folder and turn it on in Plugins under WP admin.

History

Version 0.5.2: Bugfix for matching posts when there are multiple posts that match parts of the query

Version 0.5.1: Compatibility fix for WP 2.7’s tag/category pages

Version 0.5: Support for installations in subdirectories (i.e. not located at the webroot). This should make Custom Permalinks start working for many people.

Version 0.4.1: WP 2.7 compatability fixes; fix for bug encountered when publishing a draft, or reverting to draft status, and fix for placeholder permalink value for pages

Version 0.4: Added support for pages, and fixed a bug concerning post drafts.

Version 0.3: Largely rewritten to provide more robust handling of trailing slashes, proper support for trailing URL components (eg. paging)

Version 0.2: Added management page to display all custom permalinks, with an option to revert selected items

Version 0.1.1: Fixed problem with categories

Version 0.1: Initial release

So, here’s the Elegant Grunge theme for the plugin – put this in the ‘themes’ directory under the ‘paged-comments’ plugin directory.

elegant-grunge-for-paged-comments.zip

Google AdSense shortcode

This is the simplest plugin, which provides an ‘adsense’ shortcode to output a Google ad. To use it, use Google’s tools to create the ad, then paste it into the php file where indicated, then put {adsense} (replace the curly braces with square brackets) in posts/pages where you want the ad to appear (remove the spaces around the square brackets).

adsense.php.zip

And now for a demo + shameless attempt at monetization:

Media player

This one is useful if you occasionally post a video file on your blog, and host it locally. If you use video more frequently, there are plugins that probably are more suited, but I personally didn’t want the overhead, and I wanted to store videos in the standard upload locations, instead of having a separate repository, which seems to be what other plugins do.

This one uses the JW FLV player, provided in the plugin. Use something like:

{media source="http://my.site.com/path/to/video.flv" width="400" height="308" preview="http://my.site.com/path/to/preview.jpg"}

(replace the curly braces with square brackets)

mediaplayer.zip

I used this just the other day on a post demonstrating the output of the simulator I’ve written for my PhD.

Music player

This is the plugin that renders the content for my music page, as well as providing mini-players for other posts. Give it a path to a directory, and it will display all mp3 files in that directory with flash players based on the XSPF Web Music Player. Recently-added mp3 files will be marked as ‘New’. Use something like:

{musiclist path="path/to/my/music"}

(replace the curly braces with square brackets; add optional nolink=”true” parameter to avoid linking to the mp3 files from their titles)

For just one track, use:

{audio source="path/to/audio.mp3"}

musicplayer.zip

Recently I released some code to discover and embed Twinkle images linked from Twitter postings, and released a modification to Ricardo González’s Twitter for Wordpress plugin which uses it.

I’ve now implemented support for Twitpic as well.

Grab the modified Wordpress plugin here:

twitter-for-wordpress-plus-images-v0.2.6.zip

After installation, add the widget and make sure ‘Discover images’ is ticked.

For non-Wordpress users, the base code is also available here:

TwitterImageUtil.class.php-v0.2.6.zip

Include it in your twitter list source code, and use it as a filter for the message content. Something like:

$message = TwitterImageUtil::processContent($message, $mysql_database_handle);

Some configuration is possible – see the header comments for more details.

The code will create a thumbnail of the image, and store it locally. It’ll also cache the results in a MySQL database for speed. It supports Lightbox, too – just supply the relevant flag to turn it on.

Updates

• Version 0.2.6: Bugfix for posts with both images and @mentions
• Version 0.2.5: Bugfix from prior version, plus compatibility fix for Twitpic changes
• Version 0.2.4: Updated to match Twitter for Wordpress v1.9.2: Compatibility fix for WP 2.7
• Version 0.2.3: Another update, chasing the moving target that is Twitpic
• Version 0.2.2: Updated to match Twitpic’s new image storage using Amazon S3.