• Its 10 to 2 atlanta in the 6th. The braves may just win this one!! #

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Popularity: unranked [?]

I’ve been looking for a good way to view this site on my blackberry for a while now (the images in the theme play hell with a mobile browser) and I finally came across a kick ass plugin that does just that. Wordpress Mobile (imagine that right??) is a really nice plugin that reformats your site in to a mobile browser lovin site in no time.

Download the file, unzip it in your plugins directory and activate it. You can leave the default settings alone or go to the setting page for it and plugin your adsense and admob codes and make some money yourself. Ad revenue is split between you and the developer (or you can one out 25 pounds to the dev). The site renders fairly quickly (stupid edge network) and shows photos as well.

As more and more phones come out with better browsers on it (iPhone anyone?) plugins like this will become more prevalent in the blogosphere. One of the nice things is that ANYTHING with a mobile browser will be able to view it.

Now if I can find a good wp-admin interface for mobile I’ll be set!!

Popularity: 71% [?]

One of the plugins in use here is the Yahoo Shortcuts plugin which aim to help make your blog supafly! Its an easy way of adding photos, links, maps and other rich media to Your blogposts with little effort.

The cool thing, is that they’re currently mailing out FREE t-shirts to those people who are using their wordpress plugin! I highly recommend you grab the plugin and the shirt before their all gone!

Popularity: 38% [?]

If you’re like me, you’re a bit hesitant to upgrade to the latest release of Wordpress. DoG was running a very good install of the last 2.2.x release and I wasn’t in a rush to upgrade it for several reasons. The largest reason and one you can still see some of the effects of on the site, is that the theme I’m using, Redoable by DJR hasn’t been updated for the 2.3 branch and most likely won’t be any time soon.

If you’re not currently running a theme compatible with the 2.3.x branch of wordpress, I would recommend changing your theme to one that is or wait to upgrade until you’re comfortable with doing the work yourself. I’m in the process of a redesign and I wanted to use some of the native features in the new releases of WP so I went ahead and made the jump. It wasn’t all cake though, there are some hoops to jump through before you dive right in.

1. Download the latest version to your server (if you have ssh, log in and do a wget) via wget or ftp if you can.
2. Log in to your admin area and disable ALL plugins (yes Virginia, even Akismet. No, don’t worry, you’ll have akismet back up with in 15 minutes). They make it nice and easy in wordpress to disable everything at once (there’s a link at the bottom of the plugin management page that disables everything with one click).
3. Set your default theme to the Default wordpress theme. This is recommended practice for several reasons one, the default theme is standard in wordpress releases and WILL work on your site immediately after the upgrade where as your current theme may or may not.
4. Unzip and copy (again really easy in ssh) the new release to your blog directory. Make sure to copy the contents in wordpress to your blog’s directory and not just the wordpress folder.
5. Run http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php - This is a crucial step as the database changed from the 2.2.x versions to the 2.3 branch. You need to update the database or nothing on the site will work correctly.
6. Check your site. Once the upgrade has completed you can check your site. Your posts and everything should display properly using the default theme.
7. Login to your admin area and UPGRADE ANY plugins that say there is a new release. **THIS IS IMPORTANT** as the database changes rendered the way some plugins accessed the information. If you don’t upgrade the plugins you might get errors (like the UTC category error on this site). Its easy and will take hardly any time at all. One of the features I LIKE about 2.3 is that it lets me know when I need to upgrade the plugins.
8. Activate all your plugins - Or at least the ones you still want to use. I went through and cleared out some of the ones not in use here on the site and it helped a bit.
9. Select new theme - You *should* now be able to reset your theme to the one you want. There may be some errors, if that is the case check the wordpress.org site for answers, chances are that someone has already had the same issue.

In all, it should take less than an hour to do the upgrade. If you’re unsure, there are plenty of people who will do it for you (often for a slight fee). I’ve found the best way is to be prepared. Download the new version before you start anything and make sure you read the upgrade notes. If you’re using a custom theme, make sure it will work. I’ve found that most themes will with some minor changes to the way they call some of the WP hooks.

Good Luck young Skywalker.

Popularity: 22% [?]

So in addition to upgrading the code to the site yesterday, I added a plugin. Absolute Comment allows me to reply to your comments from the admin menu, making my job just one step easier. How cool is that??

Popularity: 8% [?]

This time its an RSS plugin I’m lovin on and its good. FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3 by feedburner themselves helps consolidate all the wordpress feeds in to one easy to find feedburner feed. “But Mark, why would I want that??” simple. It allows anyone to go to your RSS feed on your page (delusionsofgrandeur.org/feed/) and get the feed through feedburner allowing for better stats tracking of the feed. This way you can get an accurate count of those people burning your feed baby!

Popularity: 11% [?]

While reading a post about the Super cache plugin for WP and how well it handled the digg effect, I came across another php caching script that I thought I’d give a try. The Xcache Plugin by neosmart seems to have helped a lot to keep the load on my server down. As soon as I had it installed and configured correctly (it took me a minute or two) the load dropped on my server.

The first thing you need to do is download and install XCache itself. On my debian server with apache2 and php5 this was as easy as #apt-get install php5-xcache. The install ran and set everything up. I did have to edit the /etc/php5/conf.d/xcache.ini file.

Look for two things: xcache.size and xcache.var_size. Set the first one to 64M and the second to 10M (you can set it higher or lower, but in order for the wp-plugin to work it has to be set greater than 0). Save and exit and restart apache.

Next download the actual plugin. Once you have it downloaded unzip it and copy it to your wp-content directory. Thats all you have to do. It does the rest. Check your server load and for the fun of it pull up your site and see if it loads any faster. I’d be suprised if it doesn’t.

Popularity: 12% [?]

I’ve added another super cool plugin to the site that will benefit you more than it does me (at least if you post comments anyways). CommentLuv is another fiddyP plugin that I’ve decided to rock on the site. What it does is scour the site you submit as your site when you comment and it pulls the last post from your RSS or feedburner feed. This rocks for two reasons. One, you get links back to your last post, embedded deeper on my site, and two, I get to see what your posting.

If you’d like to see how it works, leave a comment. Yes, this might benefit the spammers out there, but i do a fairly tight job moderating the comments as it is.

Popularity: 8% [?]

w00t. I’ve finally found a plugin to list the top contributors the way they need to be done. The cool thing is that it also resets the count monthly (though that and a number of other options can be changed by editing the config section in the PHP code). Show Top Commentators by Jeffrey Strain works well and it was a simple matter of dropping the script in to the plugin folder and activating it. Once done, I placed the code in my side bar and it was off and running. How sweet it is!

One of the nice things is that he also has a list of modified scripts on the page that are set up for running as a widget (something I stay away from here). If you’re looking for a good way to list your top contributors each month, check his plugin out!

Popularity: 8% [?]

In keeping with last weeks “I’m going to write about a new wordpress plugin every week” statement, here’s another one. One I just came across today and one that has a ton of potential. The guys at younggogetter.com have developed and released the Douche Bag plugin.

Why do you need this plugin? Well, for starters, maybe you want to edit a comment someone left because of what they said, but you feel that would run against your ethics as a blogger (do we have ethics?)? Now you can mark their comment as one made by a douche bag. Of course, you don’t have to use the stock image that comes with the plugin, you could always change it to a pile of sh*t or a thumbs down, or maybe a clown kicking a child. Whatever you use though, you can rest assured that your readers will know you consider that comment/er a douche.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Hell yea baby! I wanted to change my permalinks in wordpress from index.php/archive/postid to /date/posttitle. The problem was that if I just changed it flat out, I’d loose any backlinks (linked to on other sites, forums and wherever) but then I came across Permalink-Redirect. A kick ass wordpress plugin that allows you to input your old permalink structure and it will automagically (since rewrite have always boggled my mind) redirect your visitors to the correct location.

Its a life saver for me. w00t!

Oh, yea, at least once a week I’m going to be featuring a different plugin (some I use here, some I don’t) for wordpress, so stop in and check them out, because there sure are a ton of them!

Popularity: 9% [?]