A Flickr Badge using WordPress Shortcodes

Flickr provides a neat little snippet of javaScript to supply various image galleries direct to your site – a so-named Flickr badge. Here’s a good way using WordPress shortcodes to grab a gallery…

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PHP Calendar Functions

It’s really easy to get really mixed up when trying to program with date functions – lots to keep track of, calendars, timezones, daylight saving, weird months that have different numbers of days in them…

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WP-Cron – automating and scheduling

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.

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Using JSON with WordPress

With the popularity of jQuery, AJAX, and client-side programming operations in general, there’s more use made of JSON as a format for getting data backwards and forwards.

For example, the Twitter API offers data as JSON – and more manageably than accessing their RSS XML feeds for user timelines.

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Separate Pingbacks from User Comments

People have predicted their death for a long time, but pingbacks/trackbacks (and displaying them) are still firmly with us – there is a certain vanity involved…

They do give an indication of related content, other sites in your niche (and just how many automated spam sites there are out there ) etc. At the same time, they break up the flow of user comments and even with threaded comments can make it difficult for visitors to follow the discussion.

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A jQuery Slideshow for WordPress 2.9

You want a jQuery slideshow for your WordPress blog? – on the front page, or maybe in the sidebar? No real problem, all the javascript is taken of with the help of a jQuery plugin, all we have to do is figure out how to get the post data.

And to keep things really simple, this is going to use the thumbnail functions in WP 2.9 – no need to mess around with custom fields any more.

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WordPress Action Hooks – the simplified version

WordPress action hooks allow you to access the functions of the core WP code, without messing around with that code. It’s the basis for most plugins (the whole business essentially started out as the plugin API), but themes are using them more and more and there’s no reason not to…

do_action/add_action are also the means of getting external scripts, CSS, javascript/jQuery correctly on the page.

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How’s Twitter doing these days?

Some thoughts on Twitter and how it affects the average WordPress blogger presently :- how to get value out of it, what to avoid and how to maintain a decent etiquette – it does seem to have grown slightly in the last year or so.

Success requires 2-way communication. “Broadcasters” – you know the ones… Their profile says 3 following 12,455 followers – they’re not being a success via Twitter, they’re trading off an established reputation.

It would be nice not to have to do the work, but if you’re starting at the bottom… you’ll have to do the work, no one else will. Follow those who follow you.

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WordPress 2.9 – Using Post Thumbnails

With WordPress 2.9 comes a revised image thumbnail system – previously, support for posts with attached thumbnails was a little haphazard (it is a fiddly business in terms of the programming), but this is a significant step forward. The need is for a series of images, of given size, associated with a series of posts [...]

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WordPress SEO – the Post Title

The one thing you have instant control over is the post title – and, usefully, this can make a huge difference, far out of proportion to any time and effort spent in other SEO directions.

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