Aytemir.com » wordpress

Or how I stopped worrying and started being creative again

Fan-tas-tic — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 22:54:08 +0000

Worrying? Yes, that is blogging. Kind of. How do I get the next traffic peak? What should I do to the make the peak last longer? Is my content/title SEO-ish enough? Is there any blog post at all that hasn’t been blogged, saved, shared and bookmarked already thousands times before?
Well, you get the point: it’s hard to be creative with blogging (in your lill’ free time) and make it stand out and promote it enough to get enough traffic back, which should make the time and energy spend worth while.

Very frustrating indeed. So? So, I’ve made the bold decision to blog (a lot) less and to start being creative (again) and to get things done: meaning among others that I should read less about designing and developing and actually start designing and develeoping.
I’m already occupied with two humble projects at the same time and I should get those finished first.

This article kind of gave me the last push to make the decision: Stop Launching Blogs, Start Contributing. If I should need to promote one of my projects, I think it would be more productive if I do that via another blog, which has a decent amount of audience and gets promoted already by the community.
See how I already got rid of all these ‘social’ save and bookmark buttons?

So? So, I heavily customized the Portfolio theme you’re looking at now and made the projects the homepage: The focus is clearly on the projects and I’m not looking for traffic spikes (any more), but trying to get things done.
Expect less blogs (unless project related) and expect more humble projects, which do get finished on the homepage.

I’m actually quite relieved, that I can spent all this time and energy on actually delivering ‘new stuff’ instead of ‘just another blog’.

Gallery Image Sharing with Google Buzz

Tschai — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:14:17 +0000

Google Buzz seems the next hot thing in the tech savy blog world…and I kinda like it. There are already a lot of tutorials for getting started as a developer/designer with it, but as always the one feature I need for my gallery site is missing: sharing gallery images with Google Buzz.

For some live demo and examples check out the sub categories, sub stats, tags or any single posts at the Fan-tas-tic! Inspiration Galleries: click on the Google Buzz button and see what the buzz is about!

As you may have noticed from de demo above I’ve got my social sharing and bookmark stuff also outside the loop, which makes this a bit trickier than it should.

That’s why my code is centrally in the functions.php of my WordPress theme. And here’s how full code behind the Google Buzz button looks like:

Let’s dissect the code for a quick analysis.

The URL

Line 1 contains the URL you want to buzz; the variable $share_link is the URL you want to pass through. You can replace this with the_permalink() if you are on a single post page.
I use the Buzz button also on other pages than the single post page. Therefore I need to use the following function in the functions.php:

function ftt_get_currenturl(){ return 'http://'.$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]; }

The title

Line 2 contains the title we want to buzz: although you can use the_title() when on a single post page, I use wp_title(), because I use the Buzz button also on other pages.

The thumbnail

Line 3 contains the actual image we want to buzz, along with some optional text.
Already somewhere above this you should have the following statement to get the proper thumbnail for the current post (when on a single page) or the last thumbnail/post on the page, which should be satisfactory too:

$thumbnail = wp_get_attachment_image_src(get_post_thumbnail_id(), 'thumbnail');

The Result

That should do the trick! Now, when you click on the Google Buzz, you should get something like this:

You can play around and adjust stuff to your liking. Let me know in the comments, whether this works for your (gallery) site.

UPDATE

Note that something is messing the code displayed in this post! Maybe because I’ve just upgraded to WP 2.9.2!?
So I had to resort to screenshots…

AZIndex: sort groupheader URL

Tschai — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:28:46 +0000

Like the TDO mini form plugin the AZIndex is an incredible powerful plugin…but also lacks a certain feature, which would make it just perfect: URL’s for the header, the subheaders are grouped by.

AZIndex is just great, but the following mini-hack will make it simply perfect. By adding a simple yet necessary feature: generating an URL for the groupheaders: see http://fan-tas-tic.com/artists/ for a live demo and imagine you can’t click the author names for an example of the original plugin without this lill’ hack.

The general assumption is that the plugin is abandoned by its original author, since there hasn’t been any reaction on the official AZIndex plugin feedback page by the author. So I had to it myself. Again.

The following instructions makes sure a groupheader (tags, author or categy) has an accompanying link (when a subheader is selected).
The most recent version (0.8.1) has been used for this hack, but you should be able to implement it also in older or newer versions following the next steps:
0. Make your backups or try this on a local installation as always with hacks (although I’ve got a nasty habit myself of hacking directly on my live sites but do as I say, not as I do)
1. Get the original plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.
2a. Either unzip the plugin and edit az-index-content.php
2b. Or upload the unzipped plugin directly and open az-index-content.php via the plugin-editor
3. Apply the following changes:
a. Find around rownumber 172 the following statement:

$link = get_permalink($item['id']);

b. Add the next statements beneath this line:

//aytemir.com: start mini-hack
$groupheader='';
$groupheader=$index->head;
if ($groupheader=='author') {
  $groupheader_id=get_userdatabylogin($item['head']);
  $groupheader_url=get_bloginfo('url').'/?author='.$groupheader_id->ID;
} elseif ($groupheader=='cats') {
  $groupheader_id=get_cat_id($item['head']);
  $groupheader_url=get_bloginfo('url').'/?cat='.$groupheader_id;
} elseif ($groupheader=='tags') {
  $groupheader_id=$item['head'];
  $groupheader_url=get_bloginfo('url').'/?tag='.$groupheader_id;
}
//aytemir.com: end mini-hack

c. The code is self-explanatory, I think: just get the header you want to sort/order by, retieve the accompanying ID and generate an URL and apply URL in case of tag, category or author.
d. Find (around rownumber 203) the following statement:

$output .= ''.$item['head'].$cont.''.$cr;

e. And replace it with the following statement:

//aytemir.com: start mini-hack
if ($groupheader=='author' || $groupheader=='cats' || $groupheader=='tags') {
  $output .= ''.$item['head'].$cont.''.$cr;
} else {
  $output .= ''.$item['head'].$cont.''.$cr;
}
//aytemir.com: end mini-hack

5. Save and test it (locally) and let me know if it works for you.

Don’t want to bother ‘hacking’ yourself? You could also download the fully zipped version with the hack already implemented:
1. Download this hacked version, which I doped 0.8.2
2. Upload, activate and test the plugin.

For usage and configuration instructions please refer to the original plugin site.

If you should run into issues regarding this specific hack, please let me know in the comments.

Don’t believe the hype of Gridservice

Tschai — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:21:18 +0000

The MediaTemple Grid-service “is a cluster-based, modern hosting service powered by hundreds of servers working in tandem to power your websites, applications and email with unrivaled power, burstability and reliability”.
Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Background story

I’ve just recently moved to MediaTemple and at this moment my following sites are hosted with (mt): aytemir.com (that would be this blog), fan-tas-tic.com and VoetbalPortaal.com.
All three sites have very humble amount of traffic to handle and are WordPress or vBulletin powered, with some standard popular plugins or mods.
Nothing fancy. Nothing special.

Because VoetbalPortaal.com grow slowy too big for the shared host I was with, I had to move (all my sites) and I believed the hype and decided to move to the ‘state of the art’ and ‘digg-proof’ grid-service of MediaTemple. You never know when you’re gonna need a ‘digg-proof’ host, I guess . And boy did I regret that! And still do regret it!

I had no reason not the believe what they claim on their site: TechCrunch is hosted with them. And a sub-devision of Sony. Although on a more expensive plan. But also a lot of (big) blogs are also with the unrivaled Grid-Service of MediaTemple.

Here comes trouble

Since I’ve moved to (mt) and settled everything all seemed fine, excepts the servers where slower than I was used to with the cheap host I used to be. Bad luck, I guess.
But from day one I got ‘Lost connection to MySQL server during query’, ‘User *** already has more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections’ and ‘Out of memory’ errors via the vBulletin backend. My site had been down for several minutes several times: Although (mt) thought that this may have been caused by ‘bad neighbours’, I never had this kind of issues with other (normal) shared hosts!

Here comes the $olution

And different employees from (mt)-support all suggested me that I should buy an additional service to make up for the initial service, which should be correctly working in the first place: I should get a MySQL Gridcontainer to make sure I wouldn’t bother by other customers on the same cluster.

Although I thought that was ridiculous and I expected to have 99,9% uptime and database-connection and I shouldn’t have to buy an additional service for a simple and humble site…I had no choice, because (mt) had me ‘by the balls’: I had already lost 50% of my monthly unique visitors during the transition* to (mt) and I could not afford to loose more!

More toruble? More $olution!

So I decide to purchase an additional MySQL Gridcontainer. Now I don’t have the ‘Lost connection to MySQL server during query’, ‘User *** already has more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections’ warnings anymore.
But I do have ‘Out of memory’ warnings and even more frequently than before. And guess what (mt) is suggesting as a possible solution? Yes, you’re right!
They suggest I should buy an additional service to make up for the initial service, which should be correctly working in the first place: I should upgrade the memory of my Gridcontainer!

The irony of al this situation is that I had no issues with any of my humble sites at all when I was at the ‘el cheapo’ host for only 30,- euro’s a year!
Now I’m having frequently database-connection error, out of memory errors and I’m not the only one as far as I can tell from the Support Forums. And (most) of us have only simple websites.

The conclusion

Long story short: don’t believe the hype of the Grid-Service (maybe this goes only for MediaTemple) and the ‘digg-proof’ claims they make; at the moment it’s very in-stable and it has problems handling a very average sites like aytemir.com, fan-tas-tic.com and VoetbalPortaal.com.
And when there are no errors, the sites are very slow compared to what I’m used to…before I’ve moved them to MediaTemple.

So just make sure you do more research than I did before moving to another host…or you may end up paying and upgrading to most advanced servers and services, just to host a humble WordPress blog or a vBulletin powered forum!

Disclaimers

PS: the (mt) support is just advising and suggesting and they’re not really ‘forcing’ me buy additional service to make up for their initial service, which does not deliver what they promise.

PS: there are testimonials of (mt) Gris-Service users which are just happy and claim their service does just what it should!

*This is not all (mt)’s fault, because I had to switched from .nl to .com for personal reasons, but constant db-connection errors made things worse.

Fan-tas-tic! User Generated Galleries

Fan-tas-tic — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:23:33 +0000

It took me longer than foreseen, but after a couple of different approaches there is a final alpha version of my fan-tas-tic project. Although still in a alpha stage, I think a soft launch with this post is a logical move prior to a beta version: behold FAN-TAS-TIC! User Generated Galleries.

WTF is FTT!
FTT! is actually designed and developed as a pure personal project: a fantastic image gallery, with ‘fantastic’ covering the genres science-fiction, (heroic) fantasy/sword & sorcery, gothic, horror, anime and the quality of the art self displayed at the gallery.

So…yet another gallery?
Supervisually yes…it’s nothing more than just another gallery.

However some of the features what should make FTT! really unique compared to other galleries are:
Banner blindness prove:

All sponsor/ad banners are blended in the design, so the users are ‘bothered’ as little as possible
The banner spots are randomly generated to minimize the ‘blindness’ effect
Also the single post banner is very visible, yet blended

Quality of the content:

Advanced user submission form (to be moderated by admin for ‘quality control’)
Only fan-tas-tic images are approved; no doodles here!
All images are categorized, tagged and archived and are available via the statistics
All uploads have (if available) a link to the original author and gallery and/or the source of the image

User friendly UI:

Any image can be rated (and is automatically ranked)
Also the less rated and low rated images are highlighted (randomly or via related posts)
Different kind of archives are present: monthly, yearly, per category or per uploader/submitter
Most and least rated post are relative to the current tag, category of the single post
Simple navigation (sub)menu’s showing all submenu
Statistics: Overview of the last rated images and the highest, lowest, most and least rated images

I’ve also left some additional features out, which were time consuming to implement…maybe they’ll make it in the next version

Still to do…
Although I need to work some details out and have to do a lot of code cleaning and optimization and the GUI is somewhat Spartan, the site is live and is ready to be (alpha-)tested.

Feedback?
Any constructive feedback for this alpha-version is welcome in the comments below…

TDO Mini Forms: upload path/URL mini hack

Tschai — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:26:34 +0000

The TDO Mini Forms WordPress Plugin is simply one of these plugins you’ll end up using, when you’ll be using WordPress for more than ‘just another blog’.

For my upcoming project I was looking for a fully customizable end user form and after having tried a bunch, TDO mini forms was simply the best.
I still don’t understand why it is called ‘mini’ because it has a ton of options and almost all of them very useful.

The only issue I got with it was with the file/image upload widget: It was putting the uploaded files in wp-content/uploads/subfolder where I wanted them in wp-content/uploads/year/month.

Although there are usefull hints in the support forum, they wont get you there exactly. So here is the hack to solve this issue:
In the plugins folder replace line 552 (up until the line “// store info about files on post”) in file tdomf-upload-functions.php from this

$postdir = $options['path'].DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$post_ID;

to this

$yearID=date("Y");
$monthID=date("m");

$postdir = $options['path'].$yearID.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$monthID;
$postdir2 = $options['url'].$yearID."/".$monthID;

tdomf_recursive_mkdir($postdir,TDOMF_UPLOAD_PERMS);
tdomf_recursive_mkdir($postdir2,TDOMF_UPLOAD_PERMS);
$newpath = $postdir.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$theirfiles[$i]['name'];
$newpath2 = $postdir2.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$theirfiles[$i]['name'];

if(rename($theirfiles[$i]['path'], $newpath)) {

        $newpath = realpath($newpath);
        $newpath2 = realpath($newpath2);

Note that a variable 2 is added, just after the original.
Also note, that I’ve replaced the variable DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR in $postdir2 into “/”, cause it was giving me headaches.

In line 564 in the same file add just beneath this line

add_post_meta($post_ID,TDOMF_KEY_DOWNLOAD_PATH.$i, $wpdb->escape($newpath),true);

the following

add_post_meta($post_ID,ftt_path,$postdir2,true);

Make sure you do use $postdir2 here again. Will be using ftt_path to retrieve the stored URL, so remember what name you give it here.

And now we’ll be calling the uploaded files via the URL like this

get_post_meta($post->ID, "ftt_path",true);

instead of this, which will give you only the absolute path

get_post_meta($post->ID, "_tdomf_download_name_0",true);

This way it’s not even necessary to check ‘Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders’ at your Miscellaneous Settings.

Hope this helps others out also. If you have any other issues with TDO Mini forms, please refer to the original support form.

UPGRADE warnings

Remember that automatically upgrading the plugin to the newest version will overwrite the hacks above…so make sure to actually backup before you upgrade!

Replacing your comments with Intense Debate

Tschai — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:28:32 +0000

There are some very great and creative ways to design the comment section of your blog: check out these examples for some inspiration (37 Ways to Design the Comments Form, 30 and 30 More Must See Comment Designs for Web Designers).
And while I was thinking about how to design my own comment parts of my upcoming WP powered sites, I decided I should go for the easier way…which by the way kinda is the philosophy of this blog.

So just recently I’ve installed the Intense Debate commenting system on this blog. As you may notice however, the older posts with no comments are still using the built in commenting system. The reason for this is that somehow I’ve not been able to synchronize my WP account with my ID account.
The new plugin crashed and I was forced to use the older version of the plugin. Also with this version however I’m still not able to import my older comments. In general, you should not have any trouble, so don’t be alarmed.

So why did I bother then? Well I’ve got three reasons for that:

1. I want for all my WordPress powered projects one common commenting system. Although not many of my visitors may register, some of them will be automatically registered when they’ve got an Intense Debate account already. This should encourage them to participate more interactively.

2. I’m expecting Automatticto fully integrate Intense Debate into WordPress in the near future. It is a logical next step and I would not be surprised if they do this well before version 2.8. The acquisition by Automattic is also the reason that for example Disqus is no more an option for me.

3. It saves me a lot of development and design time when I decide to use a free WP template, which does not support gravatars and threaded comment. The Unstandard theme is a good example of this. Although you can’t design it fully to your own taste, it still is flexible enough.

So if you should also run into troubles with the newest version of Intense Debate and the support team is not able to help you out, like in my case, you should consider using the old plugin/version. And take the lack of some features for granted, I’m afraid.

UPDATE

Ironically on 23th January 2009 the Intense Debate site is down. And another con for using a third party commenting system is beeing illustrated very typical with this: it slows down my site significantly and when a post has been loaded, you can not comment!
I’ll give them yet another chance…for now.

A fan-tas-tic start of 2009!

Fan-tas-tic — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:50:28 +0000

As stated in my post Setting goals for 2009 I’ll try to post only about the projects I’m working on…from now on. And I have to admit it’s hard not to blog, rant or rave about anything else.
Because there is actually a lot to blog, rant and rave about. For example this blog now has reached a Pagerank of 2 in 3 months, but so did my sleeping site Uppedd.com, which never had any content at all…and this is a big mystery to me.

The first post of 2009 year is a ‘fan-tas-tic’ one. Well, actually it’s about one of my projects called ‘Fan-tas-tic’ and a although the name may suggest otherwise it’s actually a quite humble project: a ‘fan-tas-tic gallery’ powered by WordPress.

Yes, I am aware that there are already hundreds of (CSS) galleries (like these lists of examples: 36 + 74 + 115) and a lot of free WordPress themes to make your own. However they all lack some essential features for the visitors and for the administrator.
I’ll come back to these features in another post, when I’ve got the full feature list of my own gallery complete.

In the mean time you should also check out some of the galleries above for inspiration and figure out which features you think they lack and leave a comment. If I can, I might just implement it in my ‘Fan-tas-tic Gallery’ theme.

Unstandard theme now WordPress 2.7 compatible

Tschai — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 12:43:12 +0000

Like many great themes the Unstandard theme did initially lack some basic features like widgets and gravatars. I made a widgetized and gravatar-ized version and this version has been donwloaded almost 600 times from October 2008 till now. Which proves that it’s still a popular theme and a decent upgrade was necessary.

Unfortunately I am thinking of changing my blog theme, while the current one will probably no longer serve my goals set for 2009.
The good news however is that the original author of the Unstandard theme has made his theme now WordPress 2.7 compatible: I suggest you check out the demo and get this new and approved version instead!

Should you not want to upgrade WordPress, than my ”pimped’ version will still be available for reference and download.

Have fun with this great theme.

Related post(s):

The Unstandard theme: widgetized and gravatar-ized

Best of 2008 for developers: 2008+ tips, tricks, scripts and sources!

Tschai — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:50:07 +0000

The second in series of best posts of 2008 for designers, developers and bloggers. This second post contains a collection of more than 2008 tips, tricks, scripts, examples and tools for developers.
Whether you’re a beginner or pro, you could use some of these posts for a reference someday.

Aytemir.com » wordpress

Or how I stopped worrying and started being creative again

Gallery Image Sharing with Google Buzz

The URL

The title

The thumbnail

The Result

UPDATE

AZIndex: sort groupheader URL

Don’t believe the hype of Gridservice

Background story

Here comes trouble

Here comes the $olution

More toruble? More $olution!

The conclusion

Disclaimers

Fan-tas-tic! User Generated Galleries

TDO Mini Forms: upload path/URL mini hack

UPGRADE warnings

Replacing your comments with Intense Debate

UPDATE

A fan-tas-tic start of 2009!

Unstandard theme now WordPress 2.7 compatible

Best of 2008 for developers: 2008+ tips, tricks, scripts and sources!

Tools & Web Apps (463)

Scripts, Tweaks and Hacks (605)

Tips (208)

Sources (441)

Generators (63)

Plugins and Themes (235)