PiXELWiT » PlugIn

Lemons to Lemonade – Automatic Upgrade

Pixelwit — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 02:31:21 +0000

photo credit: ms.Tea

After the fiasco with The Ignoramus, I briefly considered refunding his money since he was so disappointed about the Improved PageFlip not documenting the super-secret (i.e. known to everyone but him) process of resizing the stage. Fortunately I quickly came to my senses and decided to do something much more satisfying and give the money to a worthy cause.

WordPress is known for it’s rapid rate of upgrade releases and keeping up with all of the changes used to be a real pain in the butt until WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin came along. The WPAU plugin presents a series of links to painlessly guide you through the upgrade process and handles all of the backing-up, downloading, deactivating and reactivating for you. Download the plugin, install it like any other WordPress plugin, read the FAQ and you’ll be upgrading in no time. Sweet clean and neat.

Thanks guys, I know $12.50 isn’t a lot but maybe it’ll help get that “rollback” feature into future versions.

CPAUG July 30th Meeting

Pixelwit — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:17:13 +0000

I must preface this post by stating, “I suck at remembering names.”

So having said that…

To the guy to my left who uses Photoshop to do HTML layouts but doesn’t have a laptop:
1. I don’t know if you use FireFox and FireBug plugins but you might be interested in the PixelPerfect plugin.
2. People mentioned FireWorks so I thought I’d throw in a link to an Adobe article discussing Photoshop and FireWorks integration.
3. And when talking about FireWorks I always like to mention Senocular’s work.
To the guy to my right with the Treo:
1. I’m looking for some mobile techno devices and checking out everything I can.
2. Thanks for tolerating my questions/grilling.
To the guy who wants to sell PDFs as e-Books:
1. Adobe just happens to have a PDF called “How to Create Adobe PDF eBooks“.
2. You could skip the PDF entirely and just convert Quark to eBook.
3. If you want to go the EXE route, you can have Quark export to HTML and try some eBook Compiler software like Activ E-Book Compiler
To our group leader Megan (1 of the names I actually remember):
- Thanks for mentioning my site.
- And most importantly, thanks for the cookie.

FireFox FireBug Plugins

Pixelwit — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:22:04 +0000

I’ve mentioned my fondness for FireFox FireBug before so when I read about the 5 Best FireBug Plugins I knew I had to share the news. It seems FireBug is popular enough to warrant its own subset of “plugins” or “extensions”. Nifty.

Out of the 5 available plugins:

YSlow: Creates a report grading the speed of any site.
FireCookie: Lets you inspect and modify the cookies a site is using.
FirePHP: A PHP Debugging tool used to examine PHP header data.
PixelPerfect:Overlays a transparent image guide to help tweak CSS.
Rainbow: Color coding for scripts inside FireBug.

I found YSlow from Yahoo! to be the most interesting. YSlow uses 13 rules to grade your page’s performance and presents the results in a well-formatted series of tabbed views. When combined with the information found in Yahoo!’s Best Practices for High Performance Web Sites this FireBug plugin will definitely help you understand why your page is loading slowly.

Better Feeds Plugin for WordPress

Pixelwit — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:44:08 +0000

When I talked about customizing the length of your WordPress feed I mentioned that I was using the More Feed Excerpt plugin in an effort to force WordPress to split RSS feeds at the “more” tag. After talking to the developer of the More Feed Excerpt plugin, George Notaras, I decided to take his advice and give version 1.99 of Ozh’ Better Feed plugin a try.

At that time it would be fair to say the Better Feed plugin was quite rough or “unpolished” at the very least. All of the features worked but the lack of an administrative interface forced you to dig deep into the PHP code to edit variables and template text. The plugin included a function to put related Categories in the RSS feed’s footer but I had to cobble together my own function to display a list of related Tags.

BUT… fortunately for you version 2.0 of the Better Feed plugin has just been released and it provides a great new admin interface and a Related Tags feature...

Continue reading "Better Feeds Plugin for WordPress".

© Pixelwit for PiXELWiT, 2008. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Comment, PlugIn, Review, WordPress

Ajax Edit Comments, New Features Added

Pixelwit — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:02:16 +0000

A few days ago I reviewed Ajax Edit Comments for WordPress and I really liked what I saw. Since that time the plugin developer Ronald Huereca has stopped by, listened to what people had to say, left a comment explaining his choices, and then promptly released his next version for evaluation. The new Ajax Edit Comments 2.1 Pre-Release Candidate is out and ready to be tested.

If you’re a WordPress blogger, I highly recommend installing this plugin to ease and simplify comment editing for both site administrators and site visitors. Plus if you try AEC RC 2.1 right now, there’s a pretty good chance that your reasonable feature request will make it into the next version of the plugin.

Give it a try, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.