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Matt the Mac Jedi drew up this image after reading the story about my recent altercation with a disappointed theme downloader. Apparently, having ascertained that said blogger lacked a full understanding of communication on the WWW, not to mention what open-source code is, it was determined that his license to blog needed to be revoked. I still can’t stop laughing.

license to blog, wordpress, blogging, open source, themes, wordpress themes

After a recent post that included a couple of small .zip files for download, I decided I might want to track how many times my files had been downloaded. A Google search for ‘wordpress download monitor plugin’ yielded the aptly named WordPress Download Monitor plugin. At first glance, it seemed as if I would need to re-upload anything I wanted to count downloads on, which seemed like a pain, but I figured if I decided later I had to have a count, it would just be more downloads to re-upload, so I decided to install it and try it out.

The install was typical–upload to your plugins directory and go activate it in the admin section of your site. The first clue that I was in for a treat is right there in the description of the plugin–it tells you where its options page is. Once in the management area, I immediately noticed that you can either add an Existing or a New download to track. Adding an existing download was as simple as pointing the plugin to the URL and giving it a title. Download Monitor then offers 4 simple ways to integrate the plugin into your post using simple bracket tags and the unique ID of the download. You can specify whether to show a link to the download and a count, just a count, or just the download. There’s also some handy PHP functions that you can use to show your top downloads, etc.

All in all, this seems to be a really great plugin. I was worried at first that I might have to lose a bunch of time re-uploading stuff, but obviously that eventuality was accounted for by Mike Jolley, the brains behind Download Monitor. Other than that, it works for keeping a count, and it’s easy to use. The only thing I might think to improve is that some sort of download image could be added as an option, much like the really nice one on the plugin’s homepage. That will bring more attention to the download and separate it from the general flow of the story. Other than that, I’m a happy camper.

wordpress download monitor, wordpress plugin, download, monitor, plugin, wordpress

It wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be to upgrade from 2.0.4, and I’m a big fan of the new autosave feature.

autosave, auto save, wordpress 2.1, ella, wordpress

After careful consideration and a review of my postings, I’ve come to the inevitable conclusion that I need a category related directly to McAfee, purveyors of the fine VirusScan Enterprise product I’ve come to know and love so well. Heavens to Betsy, how will I ever convert all of those posts seamlessly and quickly? With the Armenian Eagle’s Category Converter plugin–one of the best WP plugins out there–of course. First in line, though, is upgrading to WP 2.1 (Ella), which is a real pain with all the hacked javascript going on on this blog.
wordpress, category converter, plugin, wp, virusscan, mcafee, armenian eagle, wordpress 2.1

Designed by the Armenian Eagle (Armenio to his friends), Category Converter is the only plugin you’ll ever need to keep your blog categories perfectly organized. This is pretty much the simplest and downright fastest way to convert categories in the popular Wordpress blogging software. Not only does it allow you to move stories from one category to another, it also helps you easily reduce and combine existing categories that you may no longer need. Plus, it’s fast. Very. Fast.

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wordpress, plugin, wordpress plugin, category converter, convert categories, blog

That’s right, a question about a previous WP hack has finally convinced me to go through the hassle of upgrading. It’s all done now. Woot!
wordpress, wordpress 2.0.4, quicktags, quicktags.js, wordpress hacks, upgrade

Filler Bunny: He takes up space

One of the best ways to add life to your blog posts is to include images with the text–your reader’s eye is naturally drawn to the large visual well before the text itself, and the addition of a picture can bring an element or realism to your post that would normally be missed. Many templates available on the web, however, fail to include a simple way to add captions to your images, limiting what you can do with them. For example, anyone posting a picture of, say, two dogs would be hard-pressed to indicate which was Rover and which Fido without the aid of a caption. The easiest solution is to place the image in a table with a caption, of course, but this adds several ungainly lines of code which you must type in by hand in order to add a single captioned image. Even copying and pasting, this method of posting captioned images is a serious pain at best.

Thanks to WordPress‘ QuickTags (the row of buttons directly above the post content itself on the Write page), however, it’s relatively simple to edit the ‘img’ button to create custom captioned images.

First, replace the function edInsertImage in /wp-includes/js/quicktags.js with the following javascript:

function edInsertImage(myField) {
var myValue = prompt(’Enter the URL of the image’, ‘http://’);
if (myValue) {
myValue = ‘<img src="’
+ myValue
+ ‘" alt="’ + prompt(’Enter a description of the image’, ”)
+ ‘" />’;
myValue = ‘<table class="alignright" width="’
+ prompt(’Enter the image width’, ‘250′)
+ ‘" border="’
+ prompt(’Border size:’, ‘0′)
+ ‘" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">’
+ ‘<caption align="bottom"><b>’
+ prompt(’Caption:’, ”)
+ ‘</b></caption><tr><td>’
+ myValue
+ ‘</tr></td></table>’;
edInsertContent(myField, myValue);
}
}

Now, at this point, once you’ve replaced your current quicktags.js, the ‘img’ button on the write page may or may not do what you want it to do. Chances are that you’ll have to add to your CSS as well before you can reap the benefits of the modified ‘img’ button, though. If so, place the following in your template’s CSS sheet:

table.alignright {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 0 2px 7px;
display: inline;
}

table.alignleft {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

That should do it. Now whenever you go to add an image with the quicktags img button, it will prompt you for all the appropriate parameters to create a nicely captioned image like the one above. Should you wish, you can add other elements to the javascript, such as the ability to choose the color of the photo’s border.

UPDATE: Make sure you refresh the ‘Write Post’ page of WordPress after you modifiy your quicktags.js file. Otherwise, the cached (unmodified) version will continue to be used.

The WordPress development team announced the release of the new Widgets feature today. The idea behind these Widgets is apparently that they allow you to edit your blog’s formatting and design (in this case the sidebar) through a GUI, eliminating the need for coding knowledge. Although I’m a bit afraid that, like the WYSIWYG editor which made its way into WordPress 2.0, the new Widgets might prove more cumbersome than helpful, I also think it’s important to look at the big picture of blogging as it exists today. There are hundreds of thousands of people out there with excellent blog content and the crappiest looking template imaginable, because they lack the knowledge to edit the source code directly. This tool will help them incorporate the little additions and gadgets that make the blogging experience enjoyable for the reader, without forcing them to spend countless hours debugging changes on multiple browsers and multiple OS’s. Additionally, since WordPress claims that writing Widgets should be as easy as writing plugins, the open source world should soon be contributing a plethora of them to match the output of plugins that we currently see. I know that it’s popular to hate things like this within the IT community, where obscure wisdom is prized as a status symbol, and the general attitude is ‘if you can’t do it the hard way, you’re not worthy of doing it at all,’ but if Widgets can help expand the two-way communication that thrives on blogs, more power to ‘em.