Personalising AddThis’s Tweet Button

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()];
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Keeping content active with popular posts widget and regular rotation

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.

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Upload Janitor WordPress Plugin

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.

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Hidden Tags WordPress Plugin

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.

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Twitter Image Host for WordPress

See the new version, Twitter Image Host 2, which stores images as actual WordPress posts, for more easy customisation and management. It can be run at the same time as Twitter Image Host, for easy migration.

Twitter image hostKeep 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.

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