h4x3d.com » design

Alexa rating system has changed

jez — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:50:07 +0000

Just today I saw that Alexa has changed their rating system - their official news announcement says that NOW more sources will be used to come to a rating, also they claim to be using NEW algorithms that will determine the rating even better. Also the traffic from different countries is now taken into account. Hooray - I moved up to Alexa 25,000 (before change: 38,000), which is quite nice for a private blog with some 10,000 visitors daily.

A quick comparison of the famous wpdesigner.com site and my h4x3d.com:

Wordpress 2.5 and chibby 404

jez — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:20:57 +0000

I have just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and run a plugin update check. Most of the plugins work, which is amazing! Some plugins (two out of 31) were outdated and the automatic update procedure (either through the plugin central “plugin” or built-in wordpress, I dont know) worked out of the box, too. I just had to input my ftp credentials. Upgrading wordpress to 2.5 went without any major troubles as I used subversion. Again I had to use the sw command instead of the up command.
(see when-svn-up-does-not-work-wordpress-subversion for more and replace 2.3.3 by 2.5, else you downgrade by chance). Weird. Akismet was kind of “crapped out”, so was was form-advanced.php. I deleted them through putty and run an svn update again which fixed it.

Also I did the monthly sql optimization and junked out 9mb of crap. phpMyAdmin’s “optimize” sql works a charm!

What I need to do-
- contact alinks author-
- http://www.alinks.org/ as it is broken in version 1.0rc1
- fix the ela archive: Could not open cache file ‘2008-4.dat’
-restore my fancy 404 page which I seem to have lost. anyone got it?
404 chibby page where are you!
- fix search (looks crap)
- update some of my themes?

There are a bunch of new plugins I want to test, but that has to wait till I have my term paper done (sigh)

Technorati love (apparently)

Wordpress Plugin Developers get little credit

jez — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 10:52:27 +0000

Scott Reilly of coffee2code set out to try a 14 days of Plugins Challenge. In the past he has released various (great) wordpress plugins for free which he now tries to update to Wordpress 2.5. as part of the set goal to come up with 14 wordpress plugins in the next 14 days.

Wordpress Plugin Designers such as Scott Reilly or Lester Chan get less media coverage than theme designers for the reason (I assume) that their work is not that visible. Their work is amazing and really improves Wordpress by a lot.

As a Wordpress Theme Designer I think it is time to say thanks and return some favours, show some karma and link-love. Keep it up Plugin People!

Lester “Gamerz” Chan’s Wordpress Plugins
Scott Reilly’s Wordpress Plugins

The ones I love from Lester Chan are: Postviews (does not work here though due to complex loops), Post ratings, Print (allows you to print, right?).

The ones I love from Scott Reilly are: Author images (allows you to show an picture of you below a post or in your template - well you could hard and hand code this, but still this is a neat plugin!), Auto-Hyperlink URLs (autolinks links, as the name suggests), custom comment listing (will incorporate this once again soon, because the current comment section annoys me), Top recent commenters (similar to the one mentioned before) and wpuntexturize (changes annoying curly quote marks (quotation marks) into simple lovely ones). Lorrele’s article on “how to use the post-listings plugin” might be a good place to look at when you have trouble with Scott Reilly’s plugin