Tag Archives: plugin

Catching up With Backtype

Posted on 17.10.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

BackType: pour voir les commentaires que je fais dans la blogosphère, l'impact "social" de mon blog, les derniers tweets qui le référencent, et un plugin WordPress (TweetCount) qui va remplacer TechMeme pour moi, simplement parce qu'il liste effectivement les tweets référençant l'article en question, ce que TechMeme ne fait pas.

[en]

Image representing BackType as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

A few weeks ago I read that BackType was going to discontinue the BackType Connect plugin that I had used some time back here on CTTS, which prompted me to (a bit hastily, I’ll admit) make a comment about how you’re really better off not relying on a third party for hosting your comments (which is not what BackType does, my bad).

The BackType Connect plugin took offsite reactions to your blog posts (tweets, for example) and published them as comments. I have to say I was never really really happy with the plugin: installing it made me realize that most mentions of my posts on Twitter were retweets (or spambots) and that I didn’t want to mix that kind of “reaction” with my comments. At one point the plugin really stopped working (or gave me some kind of grief) and I dropped it.

I actually liked BackType a lot when they started out, and I owe them big time for saving hundreds of my blog comments when I dropped my database early 2009. Even though I wasn’t using their plugin, I was unhappy about the announcement — and even more unhappy when I discovered that my user page had disappeared (yes, the one displaying all the comments I’d made on other blogs and this one, which replaced what I’d used coComment for).

BackType, however, did something I liked a lot, and wished TweetMeme had done: allow me to see all the latest tweets linking to Climb to the Stars. This prompted me to take a closer look at what BackType was actually still doing, and report my findings of interest back to you, dear readers.

  1. Good surprise: BackType actually does still allow me to track comments I make all over the blogosphere — but it uses my URL rather than my user account to identify me.
  2. Already mentioned: tweets linking to my blog. Including old ones.
  3. The social impact of any URL: tweets, comments and friendfeed mentions over time, complete with mugshots of “top influencers“.
  4. TweetCount plugin, which is probably going to replace the TweetMeme plugin I was using until now,  because BackType actually lists tweets linking back to a post (compare with the TweetMeme page for the same post). I’ve always found TweetMeme a bit too close to Digg and TechMeme (you know I’m no fan of the race for popularity or breaking news). TweetCount counts a few less tweets than TechMeme, and I suspect its results are cleaner.
  5. If you like displaying tweets mentioning your posts on your blog, you should also check out the BackTweets plugin.

Does BackType do anything else that seems precious to you?

Conversation fragmentation is still an issue in today’s blogosphere, but tools like BackType (and even the Facebook Like button!) are helping is stitch the different pieces together.

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Posted in Tools | Tagged backtweet, backtype, comments, conversation, Digg, friendfeed, metrics, plugin, TechMeme, tracking, tweetcount, TweetMeme, twitter, Wordpress | 1 Comment

Plans for Basic Bilingual

Posted on 09.04.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Projets de développement pour le plugin WordPress Basic Bilingual, qui rend ce blog bilingue.

[en]

Here are the next improvements I want to make to the WordPress plugin Basic Bilingual. Considering my coding skills, they will happen slowly, so feel free to lend a hand if you think you can.

  1. Move the language definition to the admin screen. There’s already a screen and an option there, so it’s a simple case of copying and modifying code around to create options for language 1 and language 2, and create a simple function to retrieve the values at the beginning of the plugin.
  2. Allow WordPress search to access the other-excerpt field. The Keyword Search in Plugin Table example in Codex is close enough to what I’d like, only it would need to search in the postmeta table instead of a custom plugin table.
  3. Here’s the big one. Append a language code to any WordPress URL (except permalinks) to filter out posts from the other language. Ideally, would display posts in the language and also the other-excerpts of posts in the other language, with different formatting (smaller title font to distinguish them from full posts written in the desired language). Am reading up on wp-rewrite, permalinks for custom archives, WordPress queries and custom queries. I feel I’m onto something, but I also feel just a little bit out of my depth.

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Posted in Wordpress | Tagged basic bilingual, coding, idea, php, plugin, Wordpress | 5 Comments

Four Lazy WordPress Plugin Desires

Posted on 04.04.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Quatre idées de plugins WordPress que j'utiliserais s'ils existaient.

[en]

Dear Lazyweb,

Here are a few WordPress plugins I’d love to use, if they existed.

  • hreflang: I’ve come to love the visual editor in WordPress (after years of hating it with a passion). The only thing I regret is that if I want to add hreflang attributes to my links, I have to go over and edit them in HTML. So I don’t do it. The little pop-up to add a URL has fields for title, target (blergh!) and class, so it shouldn’t be too hard to write a plugin that adds an hreflang field, should it?
  • unpaginate: I’ve always had mixed feelings about pagination. On the blog home page, it’s great, as it allows you to simply “read more”. On very long pages, it’s also good, because it allows you to not have to wait a whole year for the page to load. But often, if I’m on a monthly or category archive page, I’d like to be able to load all the posts belonging to that month or category so I can do a quick text search on it for something I’m looking for. What would be lovely would be a plugin that adds an “unpaginate” link at the bottom of the page (near “previous”). Upon clicking that link, the reader would be taken to an “all the posts” page with no pagination. This could be an option of the next plugin I’m going to describe.
  • post lists: I like it when blogs display full posts on their pages, but I know that in some cases it’s more practical to see a list of titles with excerpts, or even just a list of titles. This plugin would make WordPress generate list and excerpt pages for any existing URL in the system: 2009/12/list/ or tags/twitter/excerpt or category/writing/partial. These pages should not be paginated, I think (so the unpaginate plugin described above could be an option for this plugin, as the code to do it should already be included). Maybe a little admin panel to set the URL schemes and activate various options would be cool.
  • Tagul tag cloud: simple one! Give all the tags of the blog to Tagul to eat, and display the pretty tag cloud on the tags/ page. Bonus for tag clouds by month, category, and… tag.

That should keep you busy if you were looking for a little WordPress plugin coding project! Am happy to give more precise information if some kind soul is willing to give one of these a try. Fame and fortune (well, maybe not fortune) await you!

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Posted in Wordpress | Tagged hreflang, idea, partial posts, plugin, post lists, tagul, unpaginate, Wordpress | Leave a comment

WPtouch iPhone Plugin Now on CTTS

Posted on 12.01.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Le plugin WPtouch iPhone permet maintenant aux lecteurs de CTTS munis d'un iPhone de voir une mise en page adaptée à leur petit écran. Profitez!

[en]

Some time back I noticed that sites on WordPress.com were sporting a fancy iPhone-compatible theme, like this one:

Xavier put me on the scent of the WPtouch iPhone plugin, which I have just installed on CTTS — should make getting your daily (hrmm… almost) dose on your favorite phone a more pleasant experience!

WordPress Mobile Edition is another plugin which lets you customize your mobile theme more finely.

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Posted in Wordpress | Tagged iPhone, mobile, plugin, theme, Wordpress, wptouch, wptouch iphone theme | 1 Comment

WPML to Make Your WordPress Site Multilingual

Posted on 20.12.2009 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

A tester absolument si vous devez mettre en place un site multilingue: le plugin WPML pour WordPress.

[en]

I’ve been wanting to play with the WPML WordPress plugin for a while now, and I finally took the plunge today and updated my professional site to the latest version of WordPress, as well as WPML. (Sadly, the content still needs a major overhaul.)

Until now, I had built it using two separate WordPress installations, one in English, one in French, linked together by my quick-and-dirty plugin Bunny’s Language Linker (which, in the light of today’s experiment, I will be retiring from rather inactive development — Basic Bilingual remains, though, and still very much makes sense).

Here’s a summary of what I did:

  • backed up my database
  • upgraded both WordPress blogs to the latest version and exported their content
  • removed the automatic language redirection based on browser language preferences to make sure it wouldn’t interfere (I want to find a way to insert it back in, help appreciated)
  • added and activated the WPML plugin on the English installation
  • went through the settings after activating advanced mode
  • translated widget text and site tagline
  • manually imported content from the French site (import failed due to PHP on my server not being compiled with ctype_digit()), but it was only a dozen pages — it’s easy to specify language and of which English page a new one is a translation of, if any)

Setting up WPML

I did encounter some grief:

  • when selecting the “different languages in directories” I kept getting an error message which didn’t make much sense to me; tip: if that happens, make sure that your site and pages all work fine (in my case, I had to reset permalink structure because it had got lost somewhere on the way — even though the settings didn’t change)
  • I’m using a theme with an existing .mo file for French, so I selected that option (to figure out what the textdomain is, look through a theme file to see what the second argument to the gettext calls is — they look like __("Text here", "text domain here")) but it seems that all the strings for my theme still appear in the “string translation” pane
  • initially the strings for my widgets and site tagline weren’t appearing in the “string translation” pane — you have to click the “Save options and rescan strings” button for that, even if you haven’t changed any settings (that was not exactly obvious to me)

Here’s what I still need to fix:

  • the rewrite rules are set to hide the “language directory” part of the URL when browsing the site in the default language — I want to change this as explained in this forum post
  • reimplement automatic language detection
  • set up a custom language switcher that looks more like “Français | English” somewhere at the top right of the page

And honestly, once that is settle, WPML is as close as it gets to my dream multilingual plugin for WordPress!

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Posted in Language Geekiness, Wordpress | Tagged bilingual, languages, multilingual, plugin, Wordpress, wpml | 1 Comment

Basic Bilingual 0.4

Posted on 14.11.2009 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Mon plugin bilingue vient enfin d'être mis à jour: version 0.4 à disposition, par les bons soins de Luca!

[en]

Another long-overdue update of my Basic Bilingual plugin (which, as you can see by following the link, now has its own page here, in addition to the page in the WordPress plugin repository).

Luca Palli e-mailed me a few months ago saying he had upgraded the admin code to make it compatible with WordPress 2.8. I’m happy to let you know that you can now drag the language and other excerpt fields to more convenient places in your post and page editing screens.

Basic Bilingual with new editing screen, thanks Luca!

Luca also added an options screen, and I have hope that I (or somebody) will at some point manage to write the code to set the languages through the options screen rather than by editing the plugin, as we have to do now (it’s pretty simple editing, though).

So, thanks a lot, Luca.

Thanks too to the “how to use Subversion” page on the WordPress extend site, as it saved my life once again. I update my plugins so infrequently that I completely forget how to use svn in between.

As always, back up your data regularly, and if you bump into any problems, let me know. If you want to contribute code, as you can see, you’re more than welcome!

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Posted in Wordpress | Tagged basic bilingual, bilingual, blogging, languages, plugin, Wordpress | 2 Comments

PJW Blogminder Plugin for WordPress

Posted on 09.04.2009 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

J'en rêvais, on m'a prise au mot: un plugin qui vous envoie une alerte si vous n'avez pas publié quoi que ce soit sur votre blog depuis x jours (entre un et sept jours). Histoire d'éviter que la semaine entière passe sans s'en rendre compte!

[en]

A few days, ago, I was dreaming out loud on Twitter about a plugin which would let me know when I hadn’t published anything on my blog after a certain number of days. I guess that, once again, I’d reached the end of a week and realised that I had not written a single thing on CTTS.

Well, my wish was heard, and Peter Westwood has just released the PJW Blogminder plugin. The plugin adds a simple option to your profile page, where you can request a reminder if you haven’t published anything in the last few days (set the number of days between one and seven).

Blogminder screenshot

Nice!

(Now I just need to get my server to send mail… ahem.)

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Posted in Wordpress | Tagged alert, e-mail, plugin, reminder, Weblog Technology, Wordpress | 1 Comment

Redirections in WordPress

Posted on 18.07.2008 by Stephanie Booth

When I moved the Going Solo site away from WordPress.com (which did its job well, btw) so that I could jiggle it around and make the Lausanne and Leeds events into separate sites, I ended up with a whole bunch of URLs like http://going-solo.net/programme which actually referred to the Lausanne event, and needed to point to http://lausanne08.going-solo.net/programme.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you probably know that I’m not shy to go and fiddle around with my .htaccess file, but I’m also getting increasingly lazy as the years go by. So, here are two WordPress plugins (well, one isn’t strictly a plugin, but let’s not get tangled up in semantics) which can come in handy:

  • Redirection plugin: use this when you just need a 301/302 (prefer the latter) redirect/move — if you head to http://going-solo.net/programme, you’ll see it at work. It has a handy interface to let you manage all your redirects, and also does 404 logging for you. I’ve discovered (and fixed) quite a few broken links since I installed it.
  • “Redirect to” page template (thanks, Mark): this is actually a page template which does nothing but redirect somewhere else. I use it on the main Going Solo site to create navigation tabs to Lausanne and Leeds which redirect to the other sites. Create a page with the right title, select “Redirect” as the page template, and add a custom field named “redirect” with the destination URL as value.

Have fun!

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Posted in Wordpress | Tagged 301, 302, 404, moved, plugin, redirection, template, useful, Weblog Technology, Wordpress | 10 Comments