On Wednesday, while I was cleaning up some WordPress 282 details I took a little bit of time and also upgraded the Random posts plugin and Scheduled posts plugin for WordPress.
These new upgrades allow me to make the most of a common admin interface for all my plugins as well as checking for news related to the plugins straight from the admin panel of the WordPress plugin.
Last week I started reviewing a whole host of tools to get ideas for the new series of cookbooks that I’m programing and I have to be honest and tell you that I went and got hooked on some really cool, free games for the iPhone:
World War™ – 40 Honor Points FREE!
It’s the year 2010. A nuclear war has broken out. Most countries in the world have fought and many have been vanquished. 5 countries have emerged as the major superpowers in the devastating war. Which one will you be?
Start as a general defending your base from the enemy and fight to become the dominant military presence in the world as you march your way to victory in World War.
Feel the speed as you negotiate your way down the serious twists and turns of a massive waterslide in this unique racing game brought to you by Barclaycard. Nine stages await you, as you race against the clock picking up as many points as you can.
Glide through cool modern cityscapes and ride the skies as day moves into night. Twist and tilt your way round tight corners and huge loops, following the natural velocity of the slide. The faster you go the more points you win.
But watch out, the edges are steep and there are some little surprises along the way.
Facebook for iPhone makes it easy to stay connected and share information with friends. Use your iPhone to start a conversation with Facebook Chat, check your friends’ latest photos and status updates, look up a phone number, or upload your own mobile photos to Facebook while on the go.
Almost all of us saw this unusual and fascinating application about the “Red Button”
ons of options allow you to play Mega Man II Lite your way! Take on Dr. Wily and his robot army in both portrait mode and landscape mode. Test your mettle in Classic mode with all the enemies and action you remember, or toggle it off and enjoy a rebalanced gameplay experience with more forgiving controls, scaled-down enemies and an auto-fire option. 
I’ve just updated a minor update to the Popular Posts plugin for WordPress, the changes are mostly cosmetic to help work with WP 282 but there’s a few new features are well, most dramatic I’ve begun the process of converting all my plugins to a new shared administration file structure which should allow me to rapidly release updates
When Montreal design studio house9 design needed to have a website built for a great photopher, Dallas Curow (also of Montreal) they asked me to put together an easy to manage tool using WordPress which would allow Dallas to easy add new photos, update her text and ensure prospective clients can easily contact her.
WordPress allowed me to use a super easy content management tool without needed to program a complex tool from scratch, it allow allows this talented young artist to focus on what she knows best, photography. To make the most of the site, it’s also integrated into Google applications for Analytics and Webmaster Tools.
Thanks to house9 design for the awesome design but do you know what really makes this website great? Amazing content in the form of brilliant photographs from Dallas Curow.
HTML is an acronym for HyperText Markup Language, the basic publishing language of the Internet.
Every computer document needs a way to be read and understood by a computer program, for example Excel spreadsheets are stored in a special file with the extension XLS which stores all the rows, columns, headers, footers, special cells, math equations etc for Excel to read and understand. Likewise, the HTML file format stores everything an Internet capable device needs to know to read and interpret a web document such as a web page.
There are actually a number of types of HTML, the first was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1980 and composed of 22 tags, these special tags allowed users to define the paragraphs and other structural elements of their document as well as some basic elements for leaving comments and document items such as the title.
Although it’s been almost 30 years since the first standard was published, most of the basic elements of HTML are still used. For example, to give your document a title we still use the <title>My Title</title> tag combination and to form a paragraph, the <p>This is my paragraph</p> tags are used. In a lot of ways, the simplicity of HTML is what has allowed it to be so expandable.
You may have noticed that the examples above use an opening <p> and closing </p> tag to designate objects in the HTML code, this is fairly common and easy to understand principle. Essentially every element on a page should have both an opening and a closing tag to show where it begins and ends.
Common examples of HTML block tags are:
While the above tags allow us to layout a basic HTML document such as a resume, it’s important to note that there are some additional basic formating tags needed as well. For example, if you would like to bold a word, you will need to use the <b>bold</b> tags.
Speaking of which, since HTML has evolved a long way we can sometimes achieve the same effect with different tags. For example, <b>bold</b> and <strong>strong</strong> have the same effect in most web browsers. Why the difference? The word bold refers to a method of formating, which implies the purpose of HTML is to affect appearance, while strong implies that the selected text be more significant than the surrounding text without assuming design elements.
Let’s look at another example, the HTML formating tag <i>italics</i> forces a web browser to display text as italics but <em>emphasis</em> has the same default effect. While they both force the document to appear the same (with italic text) this is not always the desired effect. Perhaps we would like a word to appear darker or lighter than the words around it when it requires emphasis. So a word that we would assume to be italics is in fact displayed as bold, depending on the formating instructions of the designer.
To format HTML text, we have several possibilities:
As time moved forward, many additional tags and functions became supported by HTML as some tags became depreciated, others found themselves being introduced.
I’m so excited to let everybody know, the new Great Chefs Great Salads cookbook is now available on the App Store from Apple for just 99 cents! The cookbook includes over 20 great recipes from the hit television series, all geared towards helping us beat the heat with some wonderful simple recipes we can share with a salad.
You can download it from the Apple App Store.
I’m a huge fan of helping people get wonderful, quality links for their website and that’s great but it often leads to people abusing plugins such as the List Posts with Pingbacks and Tracks plugin that I put up.
The latest version of the plugin was just uploaded a few seconds ago and now allows you to specify the minimum Pagerank to include in your list of results, I also fixed a small glitch in the nofollow code so it’s been repaired and is working properly.
Please keep in mind the PR check is resource consuming, so you’d best make sure you’re using a caching script before you go running it!
The script has a built in caching tool which requires the directory to be set to 777.
Ignore the porn quality ads on this site and give it a good read. The article outlines industry firsts for the video game industry. Don’t play games? I don’t care. The video game industry is bigger than Hollywood, learn from them and apply their firsts to your industry.
9 Ways to Ignite Innovation Inside Your Company…and Light Your Way out of the Recession
Innovation is an amazing concept. Simply take something that’s already being done and do it better … who’d of thought? Well here are nine great, simple things that people can do to make their business more successful. Not into real estate? Who cares, read it anyways and learn from it!
This is a great website that helps us old folks (anybody over 30) keep an eye on the kids marketing trends. Not into kids? OK, now I’m just messing … sort of, it’s a huge market.
Your pink slip may turn you into an ‘unintentional” entrepreneur
I love positive pieces about getting fired, reminds me of this one I wrote about how great it is to lose your job.
The Meteoric Rise of the App Store
OK I’m back on my kick, don’t have an iPhone or know that App Store is? Then you’re in a lot of trouble. The App Store (from Apple) is one of the best ways to market digital products such as games and books ever created, college students are selling millions of units of software and earning an equal amount of money for their custom apps.
Before I give you my real list, let me tell you that there are some basics that don’t even deserve to make this list because if you’re running a blog without them, you’re simply working too hard. Plugins like Askimet, WP Lockdown, Theme Switcher, WordPress.com stats, the WordPress.com stats smiley remover and WordPress Database Backup.
Simply put, this plugin does exactly what it’s name implies. It gives web masters like me the opporunity to quickly scan tens of thousands of postings in databases to ensure there are no duplicates. It’s wonderfully powerful when you have a thousands of feeds to maintain, and only a few hours to do it in. It also happens to be from my close friend, Montreal web designer Christopher Bavota.
Oh man … I can not stress what a dream this plugin is. Tags are like keys to SEO gold, they’re one of the few things that a blog owner can do well and immediately see amazing results in the search engines but they’re such a pain in the ass to write. Basically a tag is what your article is about, but in popular single words and catch phrases. What WP Auto Tagger does is great, it breaks down your article and suggests the best tags, automatically. That’s a huge time saver.
This bad bay is the Jonas brothers of WordPress plugins. Sure it’s fairly pointless and a text editor could do the same job but when it comes to saving time (and money) it’s brilliant. What it does is takes a bunch of rough gobbly gook code like this:
$rss = fetch_rss( $url );
$pcount = 0;
$storycount = 0;
$textdate = date(“F jS”, mktime(0, 0, 0, str_pad($month, 2, “0″, STR_PAD_LEFT), str_pad($day, 2, “0″, STR_PAD_LEFT), $year));
echo $textdate;
foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
if (!$first) {$title = $item['title'];$first=1;
$content .= “<h3><a href=’”.$item['link'].”‘ title=’”.$item['title'].”‘>”.$item['title'].”</a></h3>”;
$content .= “<p>”;
if ($item['link_enclosure']) {
$content .= “<a href=’”.$item['link'].”‘ title=’”.$item['title'].”‘><img alt=’”.$item['title'].”‘ src=’”.$item['link_enclosure'].”‘ class=’alignleft’></a>”;
}
and turns it into …
[source lang="php"]$rss = fetch_rss( $url );
$pcount = 0;
$storycount = 0;
$textdate = date("F jS", mktime(0, 0, 0, str_pad($month, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT), str_pad($day, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT), $year));
echo $textdate;
foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
if (!$first) {$title = $item['title'];$first=1;
$content .= "<h3><a href=’".$item['link']."’ title=’".$item['title']."’>".$item['title']."</a></h3>";
$content .= "<p>";
if ($item['link_enclosure']) {
$content .= "<a href=’".$item['link']."’ title=’".$item['title']."’><img alt=’".$item['title']."’ src=’".$item['link_enclosure']."’ class=’alignleft’></a>";
}
[/source]
When it comes to saving time, that’s a huge helper.
It simply terrifies me how many people are not running this plugin or a similar flavor of it. It makes your site safer, easier to manage and much faster for the end user. I’ll also mention that by running it you can use a host like BlueHost for $7.95 a month to run dozens of websites instead of spending hundreds a month to run just one site on complex, over priced servers.
Actually, I’m going to cheat here and tell you that this and Canonical URL’s are plugins you should have for massive SEO curb appeal. Basically Enforce www. Prefix forces your website to always use the correct SEO address and Canonical URL’s tell’s Google that your article is the source, so even if people repost it you get credit.
We all want Google to come to our site right? Well, let’s make it easy for them! Sitemap will provide Google with a free pass to all your content, no matter how deep your links are.
People love pictures and with this simple plugin your website will be able to post pictures as part of your excerpt. Speaking of excerpts, Get Better Excerpts will allow you to pull complete sentences or words from your excerpts.
Between this and SEO Smart Links, I’ll be honest most websites are on auto pilot. The SEO Friendly Images ensures your images have the proper tags to make the most of search engines, while Smart Links adds valuable data to your hyperlinks.
I might be a little bias but this is truly my favorite plugin. It allows you to add your own menu items to the WordPress Admin client, basically creating shortcuts between your website and important things like AdSense and Analytics. It’s completely customizable and saves endless frustrations between myself and clients but providing them immediate access to critical links.
Just like Analytics lets you know who’s visiting and where they’re going, you’ll want to track what people are downloading from your website and how often. This saves a fortune in report generation time, by simply allowing me to tell my clients weekly how often software has been downloaded.
Look, let’s face it … not everything is sellable. If you’re attracting a thousand people a day your website and nobody buys? Maybe your product simply isn’t something people want. One way to check if this is the case, use Google Analytics to see where people abandon your process.
Remember you’re competing against thousands of stores selling similar products, are you competitive? Did you remember to account for shipping costs? Apple’s made a fortune selling stuff online for just 99 cents. Take a look at great applications like The Moron Test which just keeps selling.
Take an honest look at your website, how many clicks does it take to get from the first page to the final sales confirmation page? Is it easy or do people have to think about the process? When I built the new Great Chefs website, we added a lot of great free recipes and daily cooking videos but the real power of the site is a fast, easy to understand sales process using Google Checkout.
OK, saying that you have a great product that people can easily buy and it’s priced right then there’s only one reason left why people don’t buy from you (assuming you have people coming to your website) … that don’t trust you.
Just a quick note to anybody who might have missed it this morning, WordPress 2.8.1 was released with a lot of fairly important updates, not the least of which was a fix for Dashboard memory and fixes to the rich text editor, both problems had been causing me some problems.
The latest updates include minor formating changes to the administration section as well as the addition of a notification script to check for latest updates.
