Personal welcome WordPress plugin, as used by tripawds.com

A little while ago a guy called Jim contacted me to ask for a small addition to my Personal Welcomes for WordPress MU plugin. It was a good suggestion and easy to do, so I did it. Then I realised I’d seen something on TV about this guy, so I asked him to write something about what they ar doing, and how they are using my plugin. Here’s what he put:

After being featured on PBS for taking our canine cancer survivor Jerry on
the road trip of a lifetime, viewers flocked to tripawds.com to find out
more. As blog and discussion forum traffic grew, we migrated the website to
WordPress MU so we can now offer free Tripawds Blogs for others to share
their own three legged dog stories.

We use Chris Taylor’s Personal Welcomes plugin to send each new member a
personalized message, welcoming them to the Tripawds Community, and
providing them with helpful links to make the most of their blog.

This handy plugin allows us to create different templates with specific
messages for those who signed up without creating a blog, or those who
created a blog but haven’t yet posted anything. The admin panel for Personal
Welcomes now provides convenient links to new blogs so we can easily edit
each welcome message we send with relative comments, thus creating a truly
personal welcome for each new user.

Many thanks to Chris for his helpful plugin, and quick attention to our blog
links feature request!

http://tripawds.com

It’s great to hear of someone using one of my plugins, especially for a site making a difference to people … or in this case, dogs! Good luck for the future Jim.

Wow! Caching is the cure for what ails yer!

I run a site which has been performing very badly recently – lots of crashes, memory exceptions and the like. It’s hosted by the wonderful Dreamhost and I contacted them to see what the problem was. Basically the site was using too much memory. Ho hum.

So I took a quick look around and found this article on improving BuddyPress performance written by my friend Andy Peatling. Basically I just turned on wp_cache in my wp-config.php file and enabled XCache and look:

Caching makes the world faster

If that’s not a fantastic result I don’t know what is.

So if you’re a DJ and you’re looking for free mix hosting, BeatsBase.com is now working again!

I’m also rewriting the site to have some more Web 2.0 Social Networking features (using, you guessed it, BuddyPress) such as cool member profiles, groups and friends, on-site messaging and more. I also aim to get some kind of integration with Facebook and Twitter going, but of quite what nature I’m not sure yet. This is all dependent on time, of course.

Collection of web dev links

I send myself interesting web development links I find, with the intention to do some further research and enhance my uber-skills. It never works out. So instead here’s a list of links I’ve sent myself over the last few months (newest at the top) which I’ve not had chance to look at properly:

  1. BBC releases a JavaScript library: http://www.bbc.co.uk/glow/
  2. Google web code optimizer, not sure what this is: http://code.google.com/p/web-optimizator/
  3. Easily embed video in web pages: http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
  4. PHP security tips: http://www.noupe.com/php/php-security-tips.html
  5. CSS3 cheat sheet: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/13/css-3-cheat-sheet-pdf/
  6. Build apps without any code: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/07/08/10-web-apps-to-build-the-next-big-thing-without-writing-any-code/
  7. Best free WordPress themes: http://www.blogperfume.com/45-best-free-wordpress-themes-of-all-time/
  8. Beautiful free icons: http://webdesignledger.com/freebies/22-extremely-detailed-and-beautiful-icon-sets
  9. Anothernew JavaScript library: http://rightjs.org/
  10. Handle dates in JavaScript: http://www.datejs.com/
  11. Diagnosing technical issues with SEO: http://www.slideshare.net/janeandrobot/diagnosing-technical-issues-with-search-engine-optimization
  12. LiberKey, massive collection of portable apps: http://www.liberkey.com/en/liste-des-logiciels-liberkey-ultimate.html
  13. Great add-ons for FireBug: http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/13-must-have-add-ons-to-strengthen-firebug/
  14. Create charts with JavaScript: http://www.webdesignbooth.com/14-javascript-resources-and-plugins-for-creating-a-stylish-chart/
  15. SEO toolkit for IIS: http://www.iis.net/extensions/SEOToolkit
  16. Gmail/Facebook style chat: http://anantgarg.com/2009/05/13/gmail-facebook-style-jquery-chat/
  17. Get visitor geographic location with Google JavaScript API: http://briancray.com/2009/05/29/find-web-visitors-location-javascript-google-api/
  18. Growing social networks: http://www.scribd.com/doc/15712612/Growing-Social-Networks
  19. jQuery performance rules: http://www.artzstudio.com/2009/04/jquery-performance-rules/
  20. Free screen recording apps: http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/10-free-screen-recording-softwares-for-creating-attractive-screencasts/
  21. WYSIWYG for jQuery: http://code.google.com/p/jwysiwyg/
  22. Find alternatives to commercial apps: http://alternativeto.net/

Geekery roundup, June 2009

It’s been a month since my last blog post, but a lot has been happening. So in Hugh style here’s a randomly ordered list of the things I’ve been up, and things that have run through my head, to over the last few weeks.

  1. Plenty-o-plugins

    I’ve got a large handful of plugins for WordPress MU completed (or at least to a state where I can release them). The plugins are: statistics, sitewide newsletters, personal welcomes, demo data creator and secure invites.

    I’m also happy that they have been accepted for the official WordPress plugin repository, so keep an eye on my developer page to see when these plugins get updated and new ones get added. I have a few more ideas for plugins I’m going to try to do over the next couple of months.

  2. I like quick development

    Writing those plugins has made something about myself quite clear to me. I enjoy quick development tasks much more than long ones. So writing a plugin that takes 8 – 24 hours is MUCH preferable to writing a full system that takes 100 hours or more. With WordPress’ plugin architecture I think I can do more of that quick development, leaving the fiddly slow bits (user management, templating, database manipulation) to the WordPress core.

  3. myJournal updates

    Although most of the changes I’ve made on myJournal aren’t readily apparent to visitors, they have mae a big difference in how easy it is to manage your profile and site in the system. Especially the showrooms (for example this contemporary designer jewellery showroom).

    One very recent thing (completely done last night, in fact) was adding Twitter updates to profiles. You can keep up to date with me here. That was another of those quick development things.

  4. Computers Unlimited

    One of the oldest serious sites I developed is currently entering version 8, so you’ll soon be able to buy printer cartridges, toner and more using a much nicer interface. Development has taken much longer than I hoped, and frankly I’ll be glad when it’s finished.

  5. jQuery

    A lot has been said about this wonderful JavaScript library, so I won’t dwell on its finer points. Suffice to say it’s continuing to astound me with how easy it makes advanced JavaScript.

  6. Performer

    And when you combine jQuery with Performer (JavaScript without the code) you’re on cloud nine. A couple of months ago I launched the new Performer website, which I’m really pleased with. As I tell people, my design skills are more miss than hit, but this time I think I got it right.

  7. BeatsBase.com

    After increasing the upload limit for mixes to 1gb the other month, BeatsBase.com has been really unstable. Error all over the place. Rather than wade through the code to try to fix it, I’m taking the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress MU and add in BuddyPress which will give some great new features. I’m also going to rewrite my own custom plugins so they are much better, and maybe those will even find their way into the public domain.

I’ve done a few other things (see my Twitter updates in the sidebar of my site, for example), and even some that don’t involved geekery. I’m planning on doing a similar round-up post to this about the new things happening in the busy world of web development (new browsers, new tools, new sites). Who knows, maybe I’ll get to do that before next month.