A Tasty Pixel » Blog » WordPress

Personalising AddThis’s Tweet Button

Michael Tyson — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 19:08:55 +0000

AddThis is a quite useful WordPress plugin for adding a host of sharing options to your blog posts.

By default, the “Tweet” button that AddThis provides will append “via @AddThis” to the end of tweets, which seems to me a little uncool, given that it’s your content.

So, here’s a little plugin that lets you specify your own Twitter account name instead of @AddThis.

The principle is simple: AddThis were kind enough to define their own filter for the plugin’s output. The plugin plugs itself into this filter, and makes an adjustment to the Tweet button.

To use it, put addthis-modifier.php into your wp-content/plugins folder, open it up and set your twitter name where indicated. Activate it, and you should be good to go.

Download the plugin: AddThis Modifier Plugin

For extra marks: Here’s some code you can use to replace line 14 (the $twittername = … line) to provide a different Twitter account for each post author. Is that not awesome?:

    $accounts = array('Michael'   => 'MichaelTyson',
                      'Katherine' => 'NellieWindmill');
    $twittername = $accounts[get_the_author()];

Supporting WordPress shortcodes and captions in MarsEdit preview

Michael Tyson — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:50:49 +0000

I noticed that WordPress these days uses a shortcode to define image captions, of the form:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="630" caption="Image title goes here"][/caption]

I’ve recently redone our blog template at Technomadics, and while setting up the new preview template in MarsEdit, thought I’d take a stab at implementing support for captions, too, via some javascript in the template.

I was successful! Here’s how I did it:

Added the following to the “head” section:

<script type="text/javascript">
var prior_content;
function watch_for_changes() {
  var check = function() {
    var elt = document.getElementById('content');
    if ( elt.innerHTML != prior_content ) {
       elt.innerHTML = apply_filters(elt.innerHTML);
	   prior_content = elt.innerHTML;
    }
    setTimeout(check, 100);
  };
  setTimeout(check, 100);
}
 
function apply_shortcode(source, name, callback) {
   return source.replace(new RegExp('\\[' + name + '\\s*([^\\]]*)\\]((.|[\s\n])*?)\\[/' + name + '\\]', 'g'),
                         function(match, paramString, content) {
                           params = new Object();
                           reg = /([a-z]+)="((:?="[^"]+"|[^"])*)"/gi;
                           while ( (match = reg.exec(paramString)) != null ) {
                             params[match[1]] = match[2];
                           }
                           return callback(params, content);
                         });
}
 
function apply_filters(html) {
  html = apply_shortcode(html, "caption", function(args, content) {
     return '+
               'class="wp-caption ' + (typeof(args.align) != 'undefined' ? args.align : '') + '" '+
               'style="width: ' + args.width + 'px;">' + content +
             '' + args.caption + '
';
  });
 
  return html;
}
script>

…changed to ‘body’ tag to…

…And wrapped a div around the main “#body#, #extended#” content with an id of content:


#body#
#extended#

Basically, it polls the content area for changes, and when triggered, runs it though a filter. The above is extensible, and by adding additional “apply_shortcode” calls from “apply_filters“, more shortcodes can be simulated.

Keeping content active with popular posts widget and regular rotation

Michael Tyson — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:30:54 +0000

Vlad Bailescu’s WordPress Stats Helper plugin is useful for showing a list of top blog posts in one’s sidebar, but it can have the tendency to artificially elevate posts in a feedback cycle of awesomeness.

What you want is to rotate the posts around to give other popular posts some exposure. I’ve made some minor adjustments to Vlad’s plugin to add the option for random rotation.

Grab the modified version here: wordpresscom-stats-helper-random.zip

You’ll want to unzip this in your wp-plugins folder, disable the old plugin, then activate this one. See the new settings in the widgets section of your WordPress admin — I recommend a random pool size that’s twice the number of posts to display, but you can tweak the settings to your liking.

Galleria for WordPress

Michael Tyson — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:09:47 +0000

This plugin is based upon the Galleria javascript gallery, and displays your Flickr photos in a slideshow-like gallery.

It also displays your groups and photosets in a clickable list, to display photosets in the gallery.

This is a plugin I wrote for my own use (see it in action here), but I have received several requests to make it available.

Download and installation

Download Galleria for WordPress here: galleria.zip

To install, unzip within your wp-content/plugins folder, then activate the plugin under Plugin settings in WordPress.

Usage

After installing the plugin, use the following shortcodes in pages and posts:

galleria

Displays the Galleria javascript gallery with your photostream, or, if the user accesses the URL with an anchor tag containing a photoset ID, the contents of that photoset.

Parameters:

`api_key`	Your flickr API key (get one here)
`account`	Your flickr username

Sample:

[galleria api_key="YOUR-API-KEY" account="your-user-name"]

galleria_photosets

Displays a nested list of your groups and photosets, with links to click to open the photoset in the current page. Should be used on the same page as the galleria shortcode, above. This list is generated client-side using Javascript. Note that this means the list will not be picked up by search engine crawlers.

Parameters

`api_key`	Your flickr API key (get one here)
`user_id`	Your flickr user ID

Sample:

[galleria_photosets api_key="YOUR-API-KEY" user_id="1234567@N00"]

Keeping blog visitors by showing meaningful search results in WordPress

Michael Tyson — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 14:43:45 +0000

I recently became disgruntled with the way my blogs displayed search results. By default, WordPress blogs will show searched posts exactly as they might appear on an index or archives page: Typically as an extract, or perhaps even as the full entry.

This doesn’t help at all if you’re looking for something in particular – It’s a much better idea to show the post within the context of the search query, as real search engines do.

See it in practice here.

This is a fairly easy thing to actually get working in WordPress. It’ll take just a couple of minutes, and will make a big difference to blog visitors. Here’s how I did it.

Creating a search result page

If your theme doesn’t already have one, you’ll need to construct a template within your theme that WordPress will use for search results. By default, WordPress will use your index.php template, so that’s usually a good place to start with, for normal themes.

Duplicate index.php, and call it search.php.

If you already have a search.php, you’re all set.

A note about theme engines

A special case here is for theme engines like Thematic (which I use for this blog). For Thematic, it’s a matter of un-hooking the provided search ‘loop’ from within your child theme, and replacing it with your own.

In my case, with a Thematic child theme, this takes place within functions.php. First, one needs an ‘init’ action, to remove the existing hooks.

function mytheme_init() {
   remove_action('thematic_searchloop', 'thematic_search_loop');
}
...
add_action('init', 'mytheme_init', 10);

Then, it needs a replacement function to perform the search result loop:

function mytheme_search_loop() {
  while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
 
     the_ID() ?>" class=" thematic_post_class() ?>">
       thematic_postheader(); ?>
      
         thematic_content(); /* We will replace this next */ ?>
 
      
       thematic_postfooter(); ?>
  

 
   endwhile;
}
...
add_action('thematic_searchloop', 'mytheme_search_loop');

Some smarts to show context

What I did was replace the content of each post displayed with some code that constructs and displays some context around the search terms found in the post.

In your search.php (or your search loop function, if you’re using a theme engine), look for the line that inserts the post content. Chances are, it’ll look something like . In the case of the Thematic child theme above, it’s .

Delete that line, and replace it with the following (here’s a plain-text version, if that’s easier):


// Configuration
$max_length = 400; // Max length in characters
$min_padding = 30; // Min length in characters of the context to place around found search terms
 
// Load content as plain text
global $wp_query, $post;
$content = (!post_password_required($post) ? strip_tags(preg_replace(array("/\r?\n/", '@<\s*(p|br\s*/?)\s*>@'), array(' ', "\n"), apply_filters('the_content', $post->post_content))) : '');
 
// Search content for terms
$terms = $wp_query->query_vars['search_terms'];
if ( preg_match_all('/'.str_replace('/', '\/', join('|', $terms)).'/i', $content, $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE) ) {
    $padding = max($min_padding, $max_length / (2*count($matches[0])));
 
  // Construct extract containing context for each term
  $output = '';
  $last_offset = 0;
  foreach ( $matches[0] as $match ) {
    list($string, $offset) = $match;
    $start  = $offset-$padding;
    $end = $offset+strlen($string)+$padding;
    // Preserve whole words
    while ( $start > 1 && preg_match('/[A-Za-z0-9\'"-]/', $content{$start-1}) ) $start--;
    while ( $end < strlen($content)-1 && preg_match('/[A-Za-z0-9\'"-]/', $content{$end}) ) $end++;
    $start = max($start, $last_offset);
    $context = substr($content, $start, $end-$start);
    if ( $start > $last_offset ) $context = '...'.$context;
    $output .= $context;
    $last_offset = $end;
  }
 
  if ( $last_offset != strlen($content)-1 ) $output .= '...';
} else {
  $output = $content;
}
 
if ( strlen($output) > $max_length ) {
  $end = $max_length-3;
  while ( $end > 1 && preg_match('/[A-Za-z0-9\'"-]/', $output{$end-1}) ) $end--;
  $output = substr($output, 0, $end) . '...';
}
 
// Highlight matches
$context = nl2br(preg_replace('/'.str_replace('/', '\/', join('|', $terms)).'/i', '$0', $output));
?>
 

   echo $context ?>


   the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark">Read this entry

Save, and search for something on your blog — you should see contextual search results, now.

One final tweak: Results per page

WordPress has a setting for the number of posts to show per page. You may want to use a different number of search results per page, given that each result is now shorter than a full post.

To override this ‘posts per page’ setting, you’ll want to find the line just before the search loop. It’ll probably look like , or, if your theme doesn’t bother with that part, .

Before that line, insert the following:

 global $wp_query; $v = $wp_query->query_vars; $v['posts_per_page'] = 10; query_posts($v); ?>

This will take the current query (including the search phrase, page number, etc.), add a ‘posts per page’ parameter, then pass it back to WordPress’s query engine.

Flickrpress 1.0

Michael Tyson — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:07:28 +0000

I’ve just finished a new release of my Flickr plugin for WordPress, Flickrpress.

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.

Upload Janitor WordPress Plugin

Michael Tyson — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 22:29:04 +0000

This plugin allows you to reclaim disk space and clean up your uploads folder by deleting old uploads you are no longer linking to.

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.Please note: This plugin is currently not under active development, and has not been extensively tested for recent WordPress versions. Use with caution, and always manually back up your WordPress installation before use.

Download

Download Upload Janitor from the WordPress plugins directory.

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

Installation

Unzip the package, and upload upload-janitor to the wp-content/plugins directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
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  .

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

Hidden Tags WordPress Plugin

Michael Tyson — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:23:45 +0000

This plugin allows you to specify a list of tags or categories to keep hidden: These will no longer appear anywhere on the site, such as in the tag cloud or on the list of post tags. This is useful when using tags to control behaviour of your blog with other software, or when you wish to maintain groupings of posts out of the public eye.

Download

Download Hidden Tags from the WordPress plugins directory.

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

Installation

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

Changes

0.1: Initial release

Twitter Image Host for WordPress

Michael Tyson — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:44:58 +0000

Keep your traffic in the family! Host Twitter images on your own site, with support for comments and trackbacks, image resizing and thumbnailing with Lightbox.

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

Unzip the package, and upload twitter-image-host to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Visit the settings page and add your Twitter account to the list of authorised accounts
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:

`count`	Number of items to display
`id`	Single ID (eg ‘abcde’) of one image to display, or multiple IDs separated by commas (abcde,fghij)
`view`	Image thumbnail view: squares, proportional, large or custom
`custom_thumbnail_width`	Custom width for thumbnails, when ‘view’ is ‘custom’
`custom_thumbnail_height`	Custom width for thumbnails, when ‘view’ is ‘custom’
`custom_thumbnail_crop`	Whether to crop custom thumbnails
`author`	Comma-separated list of Twitter account names to limit results to
`columns`	Number of columns of images to display
`lightbox`	‘true’ to use Lightbox/Thickbox

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:

Recently submitted images
 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):

`count`	Number of items to display
`id`	Single ID (eg ‘abcde’) of one image to display, or multiple IDs separated by commas (abcde,fghij)
`author`	Comma-separated list of Twitter account names to limit results to

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:

 echo the_twitter_image() ?>
 echo the_twitter_image_title() ?>

	From  echo the_twitter_image_author() ?>"> echo the_twitter_image_author() ?>
	 on  echo date('F jS, Y', the_twitter_image_date()) ?>

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:

 if ( query_twitter_images() ) : ?>
     while ( has_twitter_images() ) : next_twitter_image(); ?>
        
          
             echo the_twitter_image_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"> echo the_twitter_image_title(); ?>
             echo date('F jS, Y', the_twitter_image_date()) ?>
          
 
           echo the_twitter_image() ?>
          From  echo the_twitter_image_author() ?>"> echo the_twitter_image_author() ?>
          
     endwhile; ?>
 else : ?>
    There are no Twitter images.
 endif; ?>

Posting Images

To start posting from your WordPress blog, select the “Twitter Image Host” menu item from the “Posts” administration section. Enter a title for your image, select your image file, hit Submit, and you will be given the URL for the image. If you wish to tweet straight from this facility, you will need to follow the instructions from that page to set up the plugin.

To access this facility from an application, use the access point displayed on the Twitter Image Host options page under “Settings”.

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

To post from Twitter (Tweetie 2) for iPhone, visit Twitter/Tweetie’s settings, and within Services, Image Service, select ‘Custom’, then enter the API URL as listed on the options page.

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:

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.
Add the following, replacing ‘blog’ with the real subdirectory under which WordPress is installed:
```
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]
```
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.
In Twitter Image Host settings, set the ‘Override URL Prefix’ option to ‘http://your-site.com/’

Links for June 3rd through June 18th

Michael Tyson — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:26 +0000

Links for June 3rd through June 18th:

Ten logo design tips from the field | Logo Design Love
10 astonishing CSS hacks and techniques
Adaptive CSS-Layouts: New Era In Fluid Layouts? effective techniques to create 100%-functional adaptive CSS-layouts
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

Flickrpress: WordPress Flickr widget

Michael Tyson — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 06:32:26 +0000

Flickrpress is a widget/shortcode function to display items from Flickr in the sidebar or within pages and posts. This widget supports:

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.

My latest project:

Download

Download Flickrpress at the WordPress site.

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

Installation

Unzip the package, and upload flickrpress to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
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:

`type`	One of: ‘rss’, ‘photostream’, ‘sets’, ‘favorites’
`url`	URL for RSS feed
`api_key`	API Key for types other than RSS
`account`	Account name, email or ID
`sets`	Comma-separated list of photoset titles
`tags`	Comma-separated list of tags to filter by (for photostream view)
`view`	One of: ‘squares’ (view as squares), ‘proportional’ (proportional thumbnails) , ‘large’ (large thumbnails)
`count`	Number of thumbnails to display
`paging`	‘true’ to show page navigation, to move back and forward through pages of images (implemented using AJAX)
`random`	‘true’ to display randomly
`lightbox`	‘true’ to use Lightbox
`columns`	Number of columns of images to display

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.

FAQ

I’m seeing “Flickr is currently unavailable” messages

You may have an incorrect setting: To see the actual error message, open your server’s error log and look for Flickrpress messages. How you do that depends on your host – on mine, Site5, the error log appears in the WordPress folder; on others, you access it through a web interface). If you can’t get to it, open up the file includes/interface.php in the plugin’s folder, and change error_log on line 22 to echo – then any messages will be printed to the screen. You’ll want to change it back afterwards so your visitors don’t see those messages.

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

Firming up WordPress’s security

Michael Tyson — Sun, 10 May 2009 02:22:17 +0000

There’re thousands of articles out there describing how to secure WordPress better against attacks, but I still had a little difficulty with the nuts and bolts, so I thought I’d detail the process I underwent here.

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
 
 "wp-login.php">
    require valid-user
>

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:

 "xmlrpc.php">
    require valid-user
>

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

Private Tags WordPress Plugin

Michael Tyson — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:23:17 +0000

The “Private Tags” WordPress plugin allows users to specify a list of tags or categories to keep hidden from the public – all posts within the specified tags/categories, and the tags/categories themselves, will not be visible to anyone but the original author.

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

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

Changes

0.1 – Initial release

Great Elegant Grunge mods

Michael Tyson — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:27:12 +0000

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:

Elegant Grunge PSD

Michael Tyson — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:18:31 +0000

Due to popular demand, I’m making available the Elegant Grunge PSD, so that users can make modifications more easily. It can be downloaded here (5.5 Mb):

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.