You need a cron job in your WordPress blog – something run to a schedule, hourly, daily… Instead of fixing up a crontab and using wget or lynx, you can use WordPress’s internal version of the cron job.

This isn’t a true cron job, with a crontab text file sitting on the server – it’s known as a pseudo-cron. Since a script can’t launch itself, it makes use of a visitor, human or maybe robot, launching it by requesting a page. So the job actually runs at the first launch after the scheduled time, not necessarily at the scheduled time to the exact second.

wp_schedule_event()

The most convenient way of using WP-Cron is to wrap it all up in a plugin – so that the scheduling can be done just the once by including it in the plugin activation function.

register_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'my_activation');
add_action('my_hourly_event', 'do_this_hourly');
register_deactivation_hook(__FILE__, 'my_deactivation'); 

function my_activation() {
wp_schedule_event(time(), 'hourly', 'my_hourly_event');
}

function my_deactivation() {
	wp_clear_scheduled_hook('my_hourly_event');
}

function do_this_hourly() {
	// do something here every hour
}

The PHP time() used as an argument indicates “as of now” – so if the plugin is activated at 11:23, an hourly event is going to run at xx:23 from now onwards.

If your code is in for example functions.php and is executed every time the script is executed, you don’t want to keep scheduling the same event. Something like this prevents the problem:-

if (empty(wp_next_scheduled('my_event')))
		wp_schedule_event(time(), 'daily', 'my_event');

WP-Cron Hourly, Recurrence Intervals

Only hourly, daily and twicedaily are available immediately – but there’s a trick to getting more and that’s to tap into the cron_schedules filter and add a key to the schedules array.

add_filter('cron_schedules', 'my_add_weekly');

function my_add_weekly( $schedules ) {
	$schedules['weekly'] = array(
		'interval' => 604800, //that's how many seconds in a week, for the unix timestamp
		'display' => __('Once Weekly')
	);
	return $schedules;
}

We spend enough time on the blog content and then tend to forget about the comments part. Comments are the way to get people involved – build up a blog’s readership etc etc. A few, sensible, comments trickling in will freshen up a page’s content and make it not seem completely dead in the water to passing search engine crawlers…

And the good news, there’s plenty of comment-related plugins available to get the job done.

First up, though, before anything else – make sure your WP theme and wordpress version are capable of handling threaded- (definitely) and paged- (probably) comments.

The Plugins

Added Value for Comments

DoFollow
By default, WordPress slaps a nofollow attribute on any comment author’s web site link displayed – if you’re not sure what nofollow is, more info here. DoFollow removes this attribute from web site links in comments so search engines can follow them – offering an incentive for people to leave a sensible, or otherwise, comment as they pass by. Which is clearly going to attract spammers as well – always use together with comment moderation.

CommentLuv
An elaboration of the first – more incentives to leave a comment by displaying info about the commentator’s site, with links, such as a selection of their latest blog posts, tweets or diggs.

Subscribe to Comments
Enables commentators to sign up for email notification of subsequent comments – so they can keep in the flow of the discussion.
One operating annoyance with this setup – not the fault of the plugin – involves the dicks who comment using an email address they’ve slapped a spam authentication filter on – so that the poor old WP webmaster gets an email demand for authentication for every subsequent comment until they get round to deleting the offender – a little knowledge being a dangerous thing etc.

Displaying Comments

Twittar
Displays, as an alternative to Automattic’s gravatar, the comentator’s Twitter avatar – if existent…

GD Star Rating
Does depend on the context of your blog, as to whether a comments rating system has value – might be overkill for the average blog…

Gravatar Signup
Adds a checkbox to the comment form for users who don’t have a Gravatar, giving the option to then go on and sign up for one. Prevents the march of grey men down blog comments…

Easy Comment Uploads
Allows a commentator to upload images or other files, togehter with adding their comment – with lightbox display for all added images. It’s obviously wise to be conservative about which file-types you let visitors upload – especially for non-image types.

Ajax Comment Preview
Runs the comment text through the WordPress filters to show a preview – can be useful if commentators are likely to be adding code snippets etc.

Not “comments” plugins as such, but… There are lots of ways of displaying and defining “Popular Posts” – simplest is to go for the posts with the most comments, for example:-

Most Commented Widget
Adds a sidebar widget displaying an ordered list of the posts/pages with the most comments – shows where the action is.

Top Commentators Widget
Appeal to their vanity… and gain spammers.

Anti-Spam Comment Plugins

There’s always Akismet, but there’s also:

Bad Behavior
Attempts to filter out bots by analyzing HTTP requests. Does seem to make a significant difference in server load, monthly bandwidth, for well-established blogs.

OpenID
Asks commentators to sign in before commenting, using their OpenID.
(Update: doesn’t seem 100% functional at the time of writing…)

One small warning – quite a lot of the plugins offered in the WordPress plugin repository are broken or obsolete, due to the arrival of threaded and paged comments. They (probably) won’t break the whole install if you run them, but don’t be too surprised if they don’t do what they’re supposed to…

Just at the moment the best font replacement technique around is cufón – so how to get this technique into your WordPress theme design?

You’ll need 3 javascript files – best to put them in the theme directory under /scripts

1. The Cufon javascript
2. The individual font javascript – downloaded from cufon – or use their excellent generator http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/ (not all fonts as .ttf will do the trick, there’s issues of licensing in terms of web embedding)
3. A custom script, very simple, just to activate.

The plan is to get the scripts loading in the WP header, and the best action hook for this is template_redirect – so, in functions.php

add_action('template_redirect', 'them_js_head_load');

function them_js_head_load(){

define(TH_TEMPLATE_URL, get_bloginfo('template_url'));

wp_register_script('cufon', TH_TEMPLATE_URL . '/scripts/cufon-yui.js', array('jquery'), '1.0');
wp_register_script('my_font', TH_TEMPLATE_URL . '/scripts/myfont.font.js', array('jquery'), '1.0');
wp_enqueue_script('fontsactivate', TH_TEMPLATE_URL . '/scripts/fontsactivate.js', array('jquery', 'cufon', 'them_font'), '1.0');
}

fontsactivate.js is as simple as you want to make it – just this, for example, will replace all post h2 headings on the page

Cufon.replace('.post h2');

Don’t imagine it’s a great idea to replace all the text on a page with a custom font, that’ll make the server chug a bit – stick with headings…