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Lee Turner
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Posts
- Jan 17, 12
http://www.rottingdeanvillage.org.uk/
Welcome to Rottingdean, our beautiful Sussex village by the sea.
Rottingdean is a unique place and a lively community for both residents and visitors alike. There is plenty to do and see with its beach and seafront, picturesque village green, gardens and pond as well as the famous windmill. It’s thriving high street with many new shops and businesses, cafes, restaurants and pubs provide for everyone’s needs.
- Jan 02, 12
http://www.spreeder.com/app.php
Welcome to spreeder! To begin, you can paste the contents of what you'd like to read here, or just click the spreed! button to try it out on this. Click on the "home" link to learn how to use spreeder to increase your reading speed.
- Nov 02, 11
Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow?
Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen?
During the day, computer screens look good—they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun.
- Oct 11, 11
http://projects.mikewest.org/vimroom/
I do most of my writing in Vim, because I'm a big nerd. It does most of what I want a writing environment to do, but I miss some of the %u201Cdistraction free" features of the quite exceptional WriteRoom. Fullscreening Vim means that text ends up flat up against the left side of my monitor, but I%u2019d much prefer it to be centered. I%u2019d also like a little of the visual clutter to fade away.
- Oct 11, 11
http://capablehands.net/menubarcountdown
Menubar Countdown is a simple countdown timer that displays itself on the right side of the Mac OS X menu bar.
- Aug 08, 11
http://hackemist.com/SafariOmnibar/
Unified location bar with search bar
Search directly using location bar
Quickly switch engines using search engine keywords
Define new search engines - Jul 12, 11
Secure Online Storage. Backup. Sync. Share. Access Everywhere. All data encrypted on your computer.
- Jun 21, 11
Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux
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Posts
- Jan 04, 12
This plugin allows you to kill (remove) the Quam Plures toolbar so it is not displayed while allowing the install owner to choose if it can be turned back on on a per blog basis. The toolbar is only removed from the front-end blogs and not the admin.
Settings, Settings, & Settings
Plugin Settings:
- Allow Per Blog Settings: This setting enables the per blog settings. If you want to remove the toolbar from all blogs then leave this unchecked.
User Settings:
- This plugin has no user settings.
Blog Settings:
- Display Toolbar: Use this to enable or disable the toolbar on a per blog basis.
Widget Settings:
- This plugin has no widget settings.
More Info, Credits & Links
More Info:
- No additional information provided by the author.
Credits:
- Author: Hacking Quam Plures
Links:
- Plugin Homepage: Toolbar Killer Plugin
- Twitter: Lee Turner on Twitter
- Quam Plures
You can download this file and more from the Hacking Quam Plures plugin repository
- Jul 07, 11
Here Be Dragons
This post is dedicated to one of the founding Quam Plures dragons - Yabba who passed away suddenly yesterday.
You will be greatly missed in many, many ways.
R.I.P my friend
- Jun 07, 11
The Twitter Follow Button is a small widget which allows users to easily follow a Twitter account from any webpage. This plugin allows you to add the Twitter follow button to your site. It is implemented as a widget so you can place it in any container.
Settings, Settings, & Settings
Plugin Settings:
- This plugin has no plugin settings.
User Settings:
- This plugin has no user settings.
Blog Settings:
- This plugin has no blog settings.
Widget Settings:
- Twitter username: This is the username of the Twitter account.
- Show Follower Count: Specifies whether to display the follower count.
- Follow Button Language What language would you like your twitter follow button to be?
More Info, Credits & Links
More Info:
- As this is implemented as a widget you can add multiple instances to your site and each of them can have different settings. For example, if your blog is dedicated to a team of people, each person could have their own twitter follow button.
Credits:
- Author: Hacking Quam Plures
Links:
- Plugin Homepage: Twitter Follow Button Plugin
- Twitter: Lee Turner on Twitter
- Quam Plures
You can download this file and more from the Hacking Quam Plures plugin repository
- May 27, 11
As I have just released the zRSSFeed Plugin I thought I would do a quick post to show you what it looks like with a couple of RSS feeds included in a post. I have taken a couple of feeds from the main Quam Plures website, namely the latest news blog and the codex blog. See what you think:
All in all not too bad
- May 27, 11
This plugin allows you to display RSS feeds in your posts. You can include multiple RSS feeds in the same post. To use the plugin all you need to do is add the following code to your posts:
[zrssfeed:id:feed_url]The id is a unique identifier for the RSS feed. This can be anything you like but must be unique within your blog posts - especially if you are including multiple RSS feeds. The feed_url is the actual url of the feed you are wanting to display. Note that this is not the url of the website the feed is from but the actual url of the feed itself.
Settings, Settings, & Settings
Plugin Settings:
- Limit: This specifies the number of feed items to return.
- Header: If this is checked, the header section containing the feed name and link are included.
- Feed Title Size: This allows you to specify the side of the title using the standard html header tags.
- Show Date: If selected, the feed date section is included.
- Show Content: If selected, the feed description is included.
- Show Snippet: If selected the snippet short description is displayed if available.
User Settings:
- This plugin has no user settings.
Blog Settings:
- This plugin has no blog settings.
Widget Settings:
- This plugin has no widget settings.
More Info, Credits & Links
More Info:
- No additional information provided by the author.
Credits:
- Author: Hacking Quam Plures
Links:
- Plugin Homepage: ZRSSFeed Plugin
- Twitter: Lee Turner on Twitter
- Quam Plures
You can download this file and more from the Hacking Quam Plures plugin repository
- May 27, 11
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers created by John Gruber. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). This plugin allows you to write your Quam Plures blog posts using markdown syntax. When the post is displayed on your site it will be automatically converted to html.
Settings, Settings, & Settings
Plugin Settings:
- This plugin has no plugin settings.
User Settings:
- This plugin has no user settings.
Blog Settings:
- This plugin has no blog settings.
Widget Settings:
- This plugin has no widget settings.
More Info, Credits & Links
More Info:
When your markdown is converted into html to be displayed on your blog, the paragraph tags <p> will be included. Because of this you might want to disable the 'Auto P' plugin that is designed to add the paragraph tags into your posts automatically.
Credits:
- Author: Hacking Quam Plures
- This plugin uses code from the PHP Markdown project by Michel Fortin
Links:
- Plugin Homepage: Markdown Plugin
- Twitter: Lee Turner on Twitter
- Quam Plures
You can download this file and more from the Hacking Quam Plures plugin repository
- May 25, 11
The Hello Bar is a simple web toolbar that engages users and communicates a call to action. This plugin allows you to add the Hello Bar to your blogs.
Settings, Settings, & Settings
Plugin Settings:
- The first hello bar number: The first number in the bit that looks like "new HelloBar(1111,2222);
- The second hello bar number: The second number in the bit that looks like "new HelloBar(1111,2222);
- NoScript text: The Hello Bar is displayed via javascript. This setting controls what do you want displayed if the user has javascript turned off?
- Location of hello bar code: This setting controls where on your blog you want the Hello Bar code to go. You can choose just after the <body> tag or just before the </body> tag. If you are not sure then leave it just before the </body> tag.
User Settings:
- This plugin has no user settings.
Blog Settings:
This plugin provides the same blog settings as the plugin settings to enable you to specify a different hello bar on each of your blogs. There is also an extra setting in the blog settings to allow you to enable or disable hello bar on a per blog basis. For example - if you have 6 blogs on your installation and you want the same hello bar on all but two of them, specify that hello bar in the plugin settings and override it for the other two by using the blog settings.
- Enable Hello Bar: Use this to enable or disable Hello Bar on a per blog basis.
- The first hello bar number: The first number in the bit that looks like "new HelloBar(1111,2222);
- The second hello bar number: The second number in the bit that looks like "new HelloBar(1111,2222);
- NoScript text: The Hello Bar is displayed via javascript. This setting controls what do you want displayed if the user has javascript turned off?
- Location of hello bar code: This setting controls where on your blog you want the Hello Bar code to go. You can choose just after the <body> tag or just before the </body> tag. If you are not sure then leave it just before the </body> tag.
Widget Settings:
- This plugin has no widget settings.
More Info, Credits & Links
More Info:
- No additional information provided by the author.
Credits:
- Author: Hacking Quam Plures
Links:
- Plugin Homepage: HelloBar Plugin
- Twitter: Lee Turner on Twitter
- Quam Plures
You can download this file and more from the Hacking Quam Plures plugin repository
- May 24, 11
Things have been a little hectic in my work life over the past few months so, much to my disappointment, work on QP has been a little non existent. However, on the up side, pretty much all the new sites I put together are now built with QP so I am getting chance to give it a really good road test and figure out what plugins I need. I try where ever possible to use formal releases of QP (other than this blog which normally has the most recent dev version) so they are all running version 0.0.0. It is proving to be a really stable build with a few bugs being found and pretty much already fixed on Launchpad.
So, in this post I thought I would give you a quick update as to the Quam Plures plugins that I am going to be releasing over the next week or two.
Markdown Plugin
If you are not familiar with Markdown by John Gruber then I recommend you stop reading this now and head on over to his site and get reading. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for writers and it allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format then convert it to, amongst other things, structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
Pretty much all of the writing I do now is in the Markdown format (including this blog post) so as you can imagine, the Markdown plugin allows you to write your blog posts in the Markdown format and have them rendered in HTML at display time.
Hello Bar Plugin
The Hello Bar is a simple web toolbar that engages users and communicates a call to action. You can find out more at the Hello Bar website. This plugin allows you to add the hello bar to your QP website and enable or disable on a per blog basis and even display different hello bars on different blogs.
zRSS Feed Plugin
One of my little side projects has been to set up my own URL bookmarking site (more on that in a separate post) and as part of that project I wanted to display feeds from other popular social bookmarking sites. I wanted something nice and simple and found a little JQuery project that did just what I wanted. This plugin will allow you to add rss feeds to your blog posts in a nice, easy, convenient way.
Base URL Plugin
This is a really simple plugin that just replaces a placeholder with the base url of your website. This plugin came about because I wanted a way to use the same content (like privacy policy and terms and conditions) across multiple sites and I didn't want to have to worry about changing the URLs every time.
Well, that's about it for now. Keep an eye on the blog for when these plugins are released.
Photo credit: Samuel M. Livingston - May 18, 11
The Follow Button is a new and innovative way to provide a simple button to allow your readers to follow you on Twitter. The button includes the ability for your readers to see your reach or influence through Twitter Grader, your engagement through Twitalyzer and your growth through Twitter Counter. This plugin allows you to add the Tweetmeme follow button to your site. It is implemented as a widget so you can place it in any container.
Settings, Settings, & Settings
Plugin Settings:
- This plugin has no plugin settings.
User Settings:
- This plugin has no user settings.
Blog Settings:
- This plugin has no blog settings.
Widget Settings:
- Twitter username: This is the username of the Twitter account.
- Style: Normal, Compact or Square. Go here to see what the different styles look like - http://help.tweetmeme.com/2010/02/23/follow-button/
- Square Size If you have selected "Square" as the style, enter how big you would like the square to be. If empty it defaults to 32
More Info, Credits & Links
More Info:
- I’m seeing a ? instead of my Twitter profile picture, what do I do?: This means that you haven’t set the twitter username in the widget settings.
- As this is implemented as a widget you can add multiple instances to your site and each of them can have different settings. For example, if your blog is dedicated to a team of people, each person could have their own tweetmeme follow button.
Credits:
- Author: Hacking Quam Plures
Links:
- Plugin Homepage: Tweetmeme Follow Button Plugin
- Twitter: Lee Turner on Twitter
- Quam Plures
You can download this file and more from the Hacking Quam Plures plugin repository
- May 16, 11
Version 0.2 of the Webmaster Plugin has just been released. This version brings two simple changes to the Google Analytics settings of the plugin, which basically allow you to better position the analytics code and allow you to integrate the new site speed report. The new features are:
- You now have the option to include the analytics code in the <head> section of your site.
- Google have recently released the option for Google Analytics to track the page load speeds of your site. Extra code is needed in your sites pages to do this and this release of the plugin allows you to add that code.
To read more about the new site speed report in Google Analytics, see the post on the analytics blog: Measure Page Load Time with Site Speed Analytics Report
You can download this plugin from the Hacking Quam Plures plugin repository
Enjoy
- Dec 08, 10
Just like many other aspects of Quam Plures, the admin console has changed significantly since we departed from b2evolution 3.3.3. We have moved settings around to allow them to be grouped more logically together and totally removed all the blue from the old admin look and feel. This left us with something that looked like this:
OK, it works, it is functional but after I had been using the admin console for a number of weeks I noticed that my eyes were always drawn immediately to the dark headers and not to the parts of the screen that I actually wanted to work with (writing content or changing settings for example). I therefore set off to tone it down a little bit and make it a little more pleasing to the eye - well, to my eyes anyway
My main goal was for my eyes to be immediately drawn to the parts of the screen I wanted to work with and for the rest of the screen to just blend away into the background and not be distracting. I decided to keep the grey look and feel as it wasn't offensive in any way (admittedly it made the whole admin console look a little, well, grey really but hey, it worked for me) and started to make the colour shifts in a lot more subtle. Anyway, a long story short here is what I ended up with:
Now, the main down side to this new look and feel is that the contrast is a lot less between all the different screen elements and for some people this may be a little hard to work with. However, on the up side, this new look and feel provides a great basis to work from for creating new colour schemes like this one:
Again, it might not be to everyone's taste but it certainly has contrast The problem when we are making look and feel changes instead of functionality changes is that we are never going to meet everyone's tastes but hitting a middle ground would be good. An interesting project would be a total redesign of the admin console...... but that is for a different day.
Photo credit: murtazabravo - Oct 28, 10
The Tweetmeme retweet button is for website and blog publishers that want to encourage their audience to retweet their content on twitter. The Tweetmeme plugin will place the Tweetmeme retweet badge in your blog posts
Settings, Settings, & Settings
Plugin Settings:
- Twitter username: This is the username of the Twitter account. Leave this blank to get a retweet of "RT @tweetmeme <title> <link>". Fill it in and get "RT @yourname <title> <link> (via @tweetmeme)"
- Style: Normal or Compact. Go here to see what the different styles look like - http://tweetmeme.com/static.php?page=button
- Top or Bottom: Do you want the Tweetmeme retweet badge at the top or bottom of your blog posts?
- Left or Right: Do you want the Tweetmeme retweet badge to the left or right hand side of your blog posts?
- URL Shortener: Choose which URL shortener you want to use
- API Key: If your URL shortener has an api key (for your own account) enter it here
- Default Hashtags: A comma separated list of default hashtags to add to the end of the tweet. You don't need the # as these will be added for you.
- Spaces: The amount of empty space to leave at the end of the tweet. A number between 0 - 30.
User Settings:
- This plugin has no user settings.
Blog Settings:
- This plugin has no blog settings.
Widget Settings:
- This plugin has no widget settings.
More Info, Credits & Links
More Info:
- When a post is displayed with the Tweetmeme retweet badge included the whole thing is cached by b2evolution to make displaying the post faster in the future. Therefore if you want to change the location of the retweet badge using the above settings you will need to clear the cache before the changes will be reflected in your posts. You can do this by going to the Tools -> Misc tab and clicking on the link called 'Delete pre-renderered item cache'.
- If your Tweetmeme retweet badge is not looking or working like you expect then please head over to the Tweetmeme FAQ page. This will answer a few of the comon questions like why you are seeing a ? in your retweet badge and why the retweet badge is white and not green. If you can't find an answer there then head over to the plugin homepage and post a question to the blog and I will try to answer it the best I can.
- The position of the Tweetmeme retweet badge is controlled by its own custom css file that ships with the plugin. This css file can be found in the folder /plugins/tweetmeme_plugin/css/tweetmeme.css and can be edited to further tweak the position of the badge in your specific skin. The whole badge is wrapped in a div with a class called tweetmeme_plugin and the left and right possitions are controlled with classes called tweetmeme_left and tweetmeme_right.
Credits:
- Author: Hacking Quam Plures
Links:
- Plugin Homepage: Tweetmeme Plugin
- Twitter: Lee Turner on Twitter
- Quam Plures
You can download this file and more from the Hacking Quam Plures plugin repository
- Oct 24, 10
The Fancybox plugin adds the fancybox media viewer from http://www.fancybox.net to your blog allowing you to use it within your posts. Here is the description from the fancybox website: FancyBox is a tool for displaying images, html content and multi-media in a Mac-style "lightbox" that floats overtop of web page. It was built using the jQuery library. It can display images, HTML elements, SWF movies, Iframes and also Ajax requests
Settings, Settings, & Settings
Plugin Settings:
- Enable "mouse-wheel" navigation: Using fancybox you can make the media (images etc) in your posts into a gallery. Tick this setting if you want to allow your visitors to use their mouse-wheel to scroll through your gallery items.
- Fancybox JQuery Selector: The fancybox JQuery selector determines how fancybox will interact with the media on your site. This plugin comes with two pre-set selectors (see below). If you know a little about fancybox and JQuery you will be able to further configure fancybox using this setting but you can use it as is if you prefer.
User Settings:
- This plugin has no user settings.
Blog Settings:
- This plugin has no blog settings.
Widget Settings:
- This plugin has no widget settings.
More Info, Credits & Links
More Info:
This plugin comes with two pre-set selectors. These are:
$("a.fancybox").fancybox({ 'transitionIn' : 'elastic', 'transitionOut' : 'elastic', }); $("a.fancybox_group").fancybox();This means that to use fancybox for a single image all you need to do is add a class called 'fancybox' to the link to the image. Something like this:
<a class="fancybox" href="http://link-to-larger-image.jpg"> <img src="http://link-to-thumbnail.jpg" /> </a>To make a gallery of images all you need to do is add a class called 'fancybox_group' to the links and a rel="groupname" to define the groups. Something like this:
<a class="fancybox_group" rel="group1" href="http://link-to-larger-image1.jpg"> <img src="http://link-to-thumbnail1.jpg" /> </a> <a class="fancybox_group" rel="group1" href="http://link-to-larger-image2.jpg"> <img src="http://link-to-thumbnail2.jpg" /> </a> <a class="fancybox_group" rel="group2" href="http://link-to-larger-image3.jpg"> <img src="http://link-to-thumbnail3.jpg" /> </a> <a class="fancybox_group" rel="group2" href="http://link-to-larger-image4.jpg"> <img src="http://link-to-thumbnail4.jpg" /> </a> <a class="fancybox_group" rel="group2" href="http://link-to-larger-image5.jpg"> <img src="http://link-to-thumbnail5.jpg" /> </a>The above html code will create two galleries of images, group1 with two images and group2 with three images.
Credits:
- Author: Hacking Quam Plures
- Uses the Fancybox Library
Links:
- Plugin Homepage: Fancybox Plugin
- Twitter: Lee Turner on Twitter
- Quam Plures
You can download this file and more from the Hacking Quam Plures plugin repository
Photo credit: alf sigaro - Oct 22, 10
The Webmaster Plugin allows you to add verify meta tags from the major search engine webmaster tools along with installing and manage analytics code on your site. Currently this plugin supports Google webmaster meta tag and Google Analytics. The meta tags and analytics code will be added to every page on your site and the plugin gives you the ability to control where on your pages the analytics code is places and whether you want to track admin users (that are logged on).
Settings, Settings, & Settings
Plugin Settings:
Meta Tag Options
- Google Webmaster: Enter the content of the meta tag as specified in Google Webmaster. This will look like a string of random letters and numbers. The bit you are looking for is the content="" bit in the meta tag: <meta name="google-site-verification" content="jfnaDFsadADjdklaskj3v23nbksa34SADK76"/>
Analytics Options
- Google Analytics _uacct / pageTracker code: Enter the code you obtained from Google. The code is in the form UA-1234567-1
- Track page load times: If this is selected then the google analytics code to track page load speeds will be included.
- Location of analytics code: Where do you want the analytics code to go? If you are not sure then leave it to in the <head> section. Only applies to your blog, not the admin.
- Add analytics scripts to admin pages: If ticked this will add the analytics code to the admin pages.
- Track admin users: If checked, visits to blog pages by members of admin groups are also tracked.
User Settings:
- This plugin has no user settings.
Blog Settings:
- This plugin has no blog settings.
Widget Settings:
- This plugin has no widget settings.
More Info, Credits & Links
More Info:
- No additional information provided by the author.
Credits:
- Author: Hacking Quam Plures
- This plugin contains code from the original Google Analytics plugin for b2evolution.
Links:
- Plugin Homepage: Webmaster Plugin
- Twitter: Lee Turner on Twitter
- Quam Plures
You can download this file and more from the Hacking Quam Plures plugin repository
Photo credit: sepblog - Oct 20, 10
There are still a few things left over from b2evo in the QP code base and one of those things is the installer. It is still very orange and has the grey gradient images for the background. It also uses images to make up the bulk of the rounded corners on the page. Over the past few days I have been working on simplifying the installer and giving it a cleaner look and feel and a cleaning up the code a little. I think the installer now looks a lot better and definitely easier on the eye. Maybe more work to do but certainly a good starting point.
This is how the installer now looks:
Just small improvements really but I think it looks a lot better than it did.
Photo credit: Malkav - Oct 14, 10
Upgrading your blog software is never an easy job. There are a number of things that can go wrong and a number of things you need to be aware of before starting your upgrade. Obviously the most important one is to back up your database and backup your files before doing anything. Now Quam Plures doesn't have an automated update solution where you click a button and your blog software is updated (not that I think I would use one) so the way we update to a newer version is by overwriting the software on our servers with the newest release. This, of course, leads to the question of which files you should overwrite.
Back in the days of b2evolution this was quite difficult as all the 'system' files and directories were mixed up with all the user directories (media folder and the like) so there was always questions flying around as to what needs to be overwritten and what should stay. QP has tried to make this whole process a little easier by making all of the 'system' folders easily identifiable by prefixing them with 'qp_'. Take a look at the following screen shot to see what I mean (click to get a bigger image):
As you can see from the picture, it is very easy to see which are QP folders and which are your folders. Hopefully this will make the upgrade process a little easier in the future.
Photo credit: quenerapu - Oct 08, 10
I have been developing plugins for b2evolution for a little while now and am in the process of converting those over to QP. Throughout that whole time I have always made sure that my plugins used the right code to make them translatable into other languages. However, I never went as far as to extract out the text strings to make my plugins easy to translate. As it turns out there is a specific format for doing this.
With all the plugins shipped with QP there is a folder called 'po' that contains a file called messages.pot. This file contains all the strings contained in the plugin code that you might want to translate. Here is a good definition from http://www.icanlocalize.com
POT – Portable Object Template. This is the file that you get when you extract texts from the application. Normally, you send this file to your translators.
PO – Portable Object. This is the file that you receive back from the translators. It’s a text file that includes the original texts and the translations.So, while I have been playing around with the quicktags plugin I thought it was about time I learned how to create these files (mainly because my changes wouldn't have been accepted otherwise ).
EdB pointed me in the direction of a piece of software called Poedit which totally simplifies the creation of these files. So here is a brief update on how I went about doing it:
1) Download and install Poedit for your chosen platform (I am on a Mac)
2) Go to File -> New Catalog. The following screen should appear:
3) Enter the project name and version and then click on the Paths tab:
The messages.pot file is located in a sub folder of the main plugin folder so we need to tell Poedit to look in the parent folder for our source files. We therefore need to add a new path to this screen which is the '..' path that denotes the parent directory.
4) Next, click on the Keyword tab:
This screen is asking what functions you are using in your code to perform the translations. In Quam Plures this is the code
T_('Text Goes Here')so in this screen we need to add a new keyword 'T_'. Once you have done this click on the OK button and you will be prompted for a location to save the .po file. You should select the plugin's 'po' folder. This will be the same folder as where the file 'messages.pot. is located. At this stage I don't recommend overwriting the messages.pot file as it contain header comments that we need to keep.Update: One of the things I found out while playing with the QuickTags plugin is that QP has a function that you need to use when when echoing strings for use in JavaScript. This is the
TS_('Text Goes Here')function and there is also one called 'NT_'. This means that in this stage you need to add the 'T_', 'TS_' and the 'NT_' keywords.After clicking OK, Poedit will scan the parent directories for your code and extract out all the translatable strings based on the keywords we provided. Once it has done that, the following screen should appear:
Click on the OK buton and then save. You should now have a .po file in the same directory as the file 'messages.pot'. Once I was at this stage I opened both files and copied the contents of my new .po file over the contents of messages.pot while leaving the header comments and text alone. I then deleted the new .po file. This last part is not optimal so I will have to dig into the Poedit settings to see if I can get it to enter all the header info for me to enable me to just overwrite the messages.pot file.
Photo credit: dibytes - Oct 07, 10
There have been quite a few changes to QP since it was originally forked. The admin console has bee streamlined, made more flexible and had a colour change (although more work is needed there ). Skins are now Templates, the install process is now improved as it asks you for an admin username and password and the upgrade process should now be a lot smoother due to a new directory naming convention. However, a lot of the changes aren't visible from the outside as a lot of code has been refactored and removed (I am thinking spam and calling home code here). Anyway, the thing I am playing with today is the Quick Tags plugin.
This is a plugin that is distributed with the core and adds a number of toolbars to the write/edit post screen to allow you to quickly insert html tags. This plugin is a god send if (like me) you don't like the WYSIWYG editors. Today's job is to add more features to the Link button. At the moment it prompts you for a URL to link to and that is it. I want it to also prompt you for a title attribute and possibly a class and a target attribute also. The title attribute should always be there so the plugin will always prompt for that but the class and the target will be configurable items (ie you can turn them on or off and if they are on you can set a default.) The default for these configurable items will be off. Something like this:
Photo credit: ianlloyd
-
Posts
- Oct 21, 11
Another video in the post editing series where I talk about how to add youtube videos to your b2evolution blog posts.
Best,
- Oct 21, 11
This is the first in a series on editing posts in b2evolution. This is a beginner video that explains how to add links to posts when not using the WYSIWYG editor.
Best,
- Sep 26, 10
This is a really simple plugin that is probably redundant now that most browsers will pick up a favicon if it is in the root of your site but I have had this in my dev folder for quite a while so I thought I better get round to releasing it. Basically all it does is put the correct html code in the header of your skin to point to you favicon. It can be useful if you want to keep your favicon file in a different folder that the root of your site.
Download the Favicon Plugin, upload it to your plugins folder and install it via the Global Settings tab. Read the readme file and update your settings. Post a comment here with any questions.
- May 19, 10
I have to say up front that my skill with languages is very poor. It is something I have struggled with since I was at school when I sat in my French exam blankly staring at the examiner who was expecting me to impress him with some fluent expression of how nice the weather was (or something like that - I have blanked most of it out of my mind). However, one thing that I am pretty good at is testing and tracking different things on my sites.
If you have any kind of analytics package installed on your b2evolution blog, you will probably have more data than you know what to do with about how many visitors come to your site, how long they stay and the pages they visit etc. One of the things that interests me is looking at where the visitors to my site are coming from and Google Analytics has a very nice map overlay allowing you to pinpoint geographically where your visitors access your website from. You can also click on the map and drill down even further to individual cities and towns which is great if you are looking to target specific regions with any of your SEO effort.
Here is the Map Overlay for this site:
As you can see from the map, the visitors to my site come from all over the world (57 countries to be exact). As this site is written totally in English I had to ask myself whether the people visiting were able to consume the content in any kind of meaningful way. Looking into this a little further, I can see that the top two countries hitting this site are the USA and the UK, which are both English speaking countries. So at least I know a high percentage will be able to read the content on this site. However, I want there to be as few barriers as possible to people getting the most out of this blog as possible. The solution to this turns out to be very easy.
Enter Google Translate Tools
Using Google’s Translate Tools you can simply add a little snippet of code to your site to add Google’s website translator to your web pages giving your visitors the ability to instantly translate your content into their chosen language. I added this to the sidebar of my site by simply adding a Free HTML Widget to my sidebar and entered the following code:
Code:
<div id="google_translate_element"></div><script>function googleTranslateElementInit() {new google.translate.TranslateElement({pageLanguage: 'en'}, 'google_translate_element');}</script><script src="http://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>This code specifies that my website content is in English so if your content is in a different language head on over to the Google’s Translate Tools page and generate the code for your language.
- Apr 27, 10
This question was sent to me via email and asked “How do I add unique meta description tags in b2evolution?”. You can either watch the video which shows you step by step how to do this or follow along by reading the post below the video.
Before we go into the specifics of how you manage your meta description tags in b2evolution it is important to say what they are and why you would want them in your HTML pages.
The purpose of the meta description tag is to give a unique description of each of your web pages. Ideally each page on your site would have a totally unique and acurate description of what that page is about. From a HTML perspective all <meta> elements (there are more than one) live in the <head> of your web page and has the following format:
<meta name="description" content="Unique description of your page"/>
So, now you know what they are why would you want to make sure you have them on your html pages? Well, the short answer for this is that the search engines will use them when thay are displaying your pages in the search engine results pages (SERPS). This is not always the case as they may choose to display different snippets of your page content if they feel this is more relevant to the search query but it is often the case that the meta description is used as the dscription for your pages. See the video for an example of this. You will therefore want to make sure that your meta descriptions are unique and relevant to your page content to make the search engines happy and entice users to click through to your pages.
In b2evolution 3.3.3 there are multiple ways to manage your meta description tags. You can set them at the blog level (like the idex page of your blog), the page level (like an individual post or page) and the category level (the page displayed when you click on a category link).
Blog Level Meta Description Tags
Login to the admin panel of your blog and navigate to the Advanced tab in the blog settings section:
Blog Settings -> [your blog] -> Advanced
Down at the bottom of this screen you will see a section called Meta data. In there is a field called ‘Short Description’ which is used as the meta description at the blog level.
Page Level Meta Description Tags
To edit the page level meta description tag you need to head on over to the write/edit screen for each post. Make sure that you are on the Expert tab and scroll down to the bottom of the page to the section called Advanced properties. There you will see a field called <meta> desc. This is where you enter your meta description for this specific post.
Category Page Meta Description Tags
OK, so the next place you can set your meta description is for your category pages. To do this you need to do two things. the first is to enable the feature in your SEO settings for your blog, so head on over to:
Blog Settings -> [your blog] -> SEO
Scroll down to the section called Category pages and in there you will see a tick box called Meta description. Tick this box and save your settings. Now head on over to the Category tab for your blog:
Blog Settings -> [your blog] -> Categories
Click on the edit icon for each of your categories and fill in the Description field with what you want to appear as the meta description for that category page.
Using Excerpt As Meta Description Tags
There is one other setting in b2evolution 3.3.3 that relates to meta description tags and this is on the SEO tab in the section called Single post pages / “Permalink” pages. This setting allows your to set the meta description for each post/page to be the same as the excerpt for that post. I personally recommend taking the time to specify a meta description for each post in the way I have mentioned above to enable you to make sure it is unique and has all the relevant keywords you are optimising for in the description. The excerpt is not going to be as optimised as a description you can set yourself.
Best,
- Mar 04, 10
This is just a short post to let you know that I have made a few updates to the b2evo 3.3.x version of the Frugal Theme. These are not really changes that you will see on the front end but more structural changes:
- Removed a duplicate ID so the theme is now xhtml compliant
- Change a few h1, h2 and h3 tags to make the structure of the pages a little better
None of these changes should effect the way the skin looks as all the css for the changed title tags have been updated to make them the same as before so this should be a drop in replacement for the previous version (unless you have made changes to the skin yourself). Please had on over to the Frugal Theme page and download the new version.
Best,
- Feb 10, 10
The Frugal Theme for b2evolution has gone through a major update in that is now supports the new b2evolution 3.x features like intro posts. You can see them in action at the top of the main page of this blog with my 'Subscribe to RSS or see me on twitter' box. This is basically an intro post. The skin now also uses skin settings to allow you to turn off post metadata and choose whether to display the b2evolution logo (the link back in the footer is always maintained)
If you are using the 2.4.x version of the Frugal theme on a 3.x install of b2evolution then I recommend you head over to the Frugal Theme page and download the new version.
Best,
- Feb 03, 10
I was recently asked on twitter if there was a way to change the "Follow Up" text that appears in your post when create an extended post (see the demo site for an example of an extended post) I had never tried this so I thought I would have a play to see if it could be done.
It is possible but it isn't as easy as it sounds so I thought I would document it here for others to have a go. This was all done on a 3.x install of b2evolution and hasn't been tried or tested on any other version
REMEMBER: backup your skin files before making any changes
First thing you need to do is see if there is a file called _item_content.inc.php in your skin folder and if there isn't, copy the file _item_content.inc.php from the /skins folder to the /skins/yourskinfolderyour
Now open that file in your skin folder and look for the bit of text that looks like this:
PHP:
$Item->more_link( array('force_more' => $params['force_more'],'before' => $params['before_more_link'],'after' => $params['after_more_link'],'link_text' => $params['more_link_text'],) );Now edit that bit of text so it looks like this:
PHP:
$Item->more_link( array('force_more' => $params['force_more'],'before' => $params['before_more_link'],'after' => $params['after_more_link'],'link_text' => $params['more_link_text'],'anchor_text' => $params['anchor_text'],) );I think you should have a file called _item_block.inc.php in your skin folder already so open that up and find the bit of text that looks like this:
PHP:
<?php// ---------------------- POST CONTENT INCLUDED HERE ----------------------skin_include( '_item_content.inc.php', $params );// Note: You can customize the default item feedback by copying the generic// /skins/_item_content.inc.php file into the current skin folder.// -------------------------- END OF POST CONTENT -------------------------?>Replace that with this:
PHP:
<?php// ---------------------- POST CONTENT INCLUDED HERE ----------------------skin_include( '_item_content.inc.php', array('anchor_text' => 'Lee Woz Ere',) );// Note: You can customize the default item feedback by copying the generic// /skins/_item_content.inc.php file into the current skin folder.// -------------------------- END OF POST CONTENT -------------------------?>Obviously replacing 'Lee Woz Ere' with the words of your choosing. This is the text that will appear instead of "Follow up:" in your blog posts.
Save all the files and give it a go.
Best,
-
Tweets
- @crowded_island cool. What did you breed ?
- @crowded_island how did you get the plasma ?
- @TassieSusan you'll have to sell it :-)
- @TassieSusan we are still trying for butterfly and plasma :-)
- @TassieSusan both I think !
- Really, really poor taste RT @DerrenBrown: 'Distasteful self-publicist' sadly 'still alive': http://t.co/FMhlX4n3
- @crowded_island :-)
- Testing out new envelopes based on tips from @DanRaine and the @EdgeNews newsletter. http://t.co/bKZ3qlzh
- @TassieSusan only played the castle level so far. Got a high score of 7479 :-)
- @TassieSusan @crowded_island time for a #dragonvale break. Downloaded #NinJump last night by same people as do dragonvale - very cool
- @nuttynanasue have fun. Xx
- @TassieSusan That could very well be a rainbow dragon :-)
- @ChairmanFrib Yeah, good step forward though !
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