The project involved doing a complete rewrite of the code, which was originally written in PHP, and rewriting it in Ruby on Rails. The functionality of the application is more or less the same as it was before, except for a few added features that are primarily in the back-end to give Darren an easier way of administering the whole thing. We also updated the design from the old look to adapt the new look of the new ProBlogger design.

One of the primary reasons for doing this project is to give the back-end code a lot more extensibility, which is key in projects where you want to one day expand and improve on. Now that the thing’s written in Rails, there are a ton of possibilities which can be followed for the Job Board, some of which will be explored. So stay tuned for cool, new features to come!

I built this because I wanted to see when I made my WordPress posts, in a more graphical interface. I already used Google Calendar, so I would have loved to see my posts right in my calendar.

You can do that with my plugin - no configuration necessary! Just download it from me, upload it to your server, and then activate it in your WordPress plugins page. Then, navigate to http://www.kinggary.com/?ical (basically visit your blog, and then add ?ical at the end of the URL) to see the calendar). Then add this URL as an external iCal calendar to whatever calendar application you are using. In Google Calendar, for example, go to ‘Add’ and then ‘Add by URL’, and then just add the URL to the input box and hit Enter! And it’s done!

If you want to only show posts from a specific category, then add &category= to the end of the URL, with the category’s name at the end. An example would be http://www.kinggary.com/?ical&category=web

Download the plugin

Developing for the Facebook platform is very different from other environments that I have worked with, including vBulletin when I was building forums, and WordPress when I was working at b5media, a blog network.

vBulletin made it easy to create new pages powered by the system by simply including a particular file in the new files that you created. A few more steps were required to keep the whole look-and-feel of your existing design into new pages.

WordPress made it even easier to create new pages by creating them right from the administration interface directly in your browser, without requiring you to ever muck in code.

Facebook actually, in a way, makes development somewhat more difficult because the results that you get in your browser isn’t always what you intended it to be when writing the HTML for it, or in some cases, the FBML offered by Facebook.

Certain tags are banned, whereas functionality is unique in certain areas. For example, you can only have one link in certain places such as the title of every Mini-Feed item that appears in a user’s profile, and Facebook offers its own set of tags, called FBML tags, which do Facebook-specific things such as returning the name of the current user.

Some things that I enjoy about working on the Facebook platform include the fact that I don’t have to build an entire navigational system from scratch. I don’t have to create an application’s look and feel because Facebook already provides that. Any navigation that I introduce that doesn’t use Facebook’s default navigational system provided by FBML will more likely confuse users more than help them, because to them, they are still entirely within Facebook when using Facebook Applications, and nowhere else.

Another great thing with the Facebook Platform is that an authentication system is provided right out of the box, with users who have profiles that are already filled out with tons of useful information that can greatly richen their experience with your application.

It’s been interesting developing applications so far, and hopefully I’ll be able to reveal some of the stuff that I’ve built sometime soon!

After building this, I found a post that was made over at TechCrunch which discusses about how it would be interesting if WordPress could have similar functionality to what Stumble Upon provides, so I hope that this fulfills that need.

What it does

It basically adds functionality to your WordPress blog which allows visitors to view a randomly selected post on your blog, with a higher probability of choosing popular posts, and with the option of only showing recent posts. You also have the option of giving recent posts more chances to be shown to visitors if you think that your most recent posts are more interesting to your visitors.

Example

To see how this works, click on the links in the sidebar on this page which say “random post” and “random recent post”, which are right below the search box. They are self-explanatory.

How to install

The plugin does have a requirement, which is the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin (install it like any other plugin; just upload it to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and then activate it in your admin panel), so go and install that first.

When that’s done, download and install my plugin like a normal plugin, too. And you’re done! No configuration is required.

There are two important links that you need to link to. They are:

• http://www.yourblog.com/?stumble
  • Replace yourblog.com with your own blog’s URL, of course. This URL will show the visitor a random post but it gives a higher weight to popular posts, which increases the chances that visitors will land on a popular post. This is a really cool way of hand-holding your visitors to the great posts on your blog, without linking them to specific posts.
• http://www.yourblog.com/?stumble&date
  • Again, replace yourblog.com with your own blog’s URL. This URL will point your visitor to a random post, again, based on the post’s popularity, but also, based on how recent the post is. More recent posts will have a higher chance of being shown to your visitors. This is especially useful for blogs where posts are more news- and events-based, such as TechCrunch. It is more interesting to read posts that have been written in the past month rather than posts that have been written a few years ago on blogs such as these.

Anyways, please, PLEASE let me know how well this works for you. I have only tested this on a handful of blogs, and so far, it has worked great on them. But, if this plugin brings up posts on YOUR blog that are not popular at all, then do let me know! I’ll try my best to fix them ASAP.

So, I hope you enjoy this plugin!

History

• 07/07/15 - 1.0
  • plugin release

First of all, here’s how it will look like in the end (I’ve hidden some plugins that I’d prefer not to appear in the screenshot):

I can’t call this a WordPress Plugin because it requires that you modify some files instead of having me just give you a file to upload and active. The reason for this is because WordPress doesn’t make it easy for me to implement this functionality any other way. What this means is that you have to modify one file yourself (which is completely harmless!) and whenever you upgrade your installation of WordPress, you’ll have to re-implement this modification again.

I submitted this modification as a patch to WordPress and they may or may not implement it as a built-in feature - who knows? If not, then it’d at least be nice of them to give me a hook to use so I can convert this modification into a plugin.

Anyways, on with the show!

Installing this modification

If you know how to use patch files, then download and use this file on your installation of WordPress.

Otherwise, to install this modification, open up your /wp-admin/plugins.php file and find this line:

echo '<h3>Plugins Table of Contents for ' . (count($plugins) / 2) . ' plugins</h3><table id="plugins-table-of-contents"><tr>';

$k = 1;
$starting_plugin = $plugins_per_table;

for ($i = 1; $i <= $table_columns; $i++)
{
echo '<td valign="top"><ul>';
for ($j = $k; $j <= $starting_plugin; $j++)

{
$plugins[$k]['order'] = $k;
echo '<li>' . $k . '. <a href="plugins.php#plugin-' . $k . '">' . $plugins[$k]['Name'] . ‘</a></li>’;

if ($k == $number_of_plugins)
break;
$k++;
}
$starting_plugin += $plugins_per_table;
echo '</ul></td>';

}

echo '</tr></table>';

for ($i = 1; $i <= $number_of_plugins; $i++)

{
unset($plugins[$i]);
}

• Remove empty “By: ” line for plugins without an author specified
• Don’t link plugin names if no URL is specified
• Link to jump directly to a comment in the “Edit Comments” panel
• Table of Contents for all plugins

Every person there will have equal equity in the company that they build. This is absolutely insane - 70 equal founders of this one company where they just decided on the company’s first product in one meeting? This is going to be one heck of an interesting experiment to keep an eye on!Personally, I don’t think that anything great will come out of this group. No matter how great every one of them are as developers, it is near impossible to co-ordinate well with that many people.

I predict that people in the group will end up befriending only a handful of people - maybe 3-4 - and then code a small module of the final product together. If they do work like this, then they have a chance of building something that’s more useful than what a thousand monkeys could produce if they jammed out on keyboards!

One thing that I can picture, though, is that many of them will build startups of their own with new people that they meet from the experience, which I would imagine will be the most valuable thing to come out of the whole event.

You can see them working, live, at Ustream.

I released 40 official modifications in total, all which can be found on my vBulletin profile page, and all of them are free.

In total, all of my modifications have been marked as being installed nearly 2000 times. If you look at the dates, you’ll see that they were all released within roughly a one-year timespan, and the last modification was released over 3 years ago.

Those were fun and interesting times. It was a time when I contributed a lot of free code to a project just for fun, when I suddenly had the urge to just release a lot of stuff for free to the public, as long as people would use them. I also wrote a simple-but-useful vBulletin tutorial on ‘how to create your own vBulletin powered page‘, which managed to garner nearly 100,000 views and over 500 replies.

I think I really need to find a way to get my groove back

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

I’ve written a few posts in the past on Blog Herald, showing how you can make different changes for your WordPress admin by modifying the CSS file for it.

Being able to modify the CSS file to make quick design changes to your WordPress admin is very useful indeed, but the problem is when you upgrade your version of WordPress, the wp-admin.css file is replaced with the newer version because it’s not considered a file that should be modified by users.

Here’s where a new plugin that I came across comes in. It’s called the WordPress admin themer plugin, and what it does is simple. It allows you to create a separate wp-admin.css file that does not require modifying the default wp-admin.css file.

I’ve posted about the non-technical side of the plugin and the benefits that he gained from the plugin before, so in this post, I will walk through how a plugin like this is created, and the typical workflow and thinking that goes behind creating something like this.

This is a WordPress plugin, but it uses some special WordPress functions that I have never seen used in an existing plugin before. Hopefully this post will inspire WordPress plugin developers to use these functions more in future plugins.

The most important thing about the plugin is the wp_insert_post() function that I use. This is used to create new posts in the blog, just by using code and by passing an array to it, containing the data necessary.

The plugin basically revolves around this one function, because when a new item is submitted with the GWP (Group Writing Project) form on ProBlogger, it actually modifies an existing post. It determines which post to modify based on the post’s title, which is currently Group writing project - LATEST.

The wp_insert_post() WordPress function is not documented at all, so I’ll explain how it’s used. It helps if you already know how to use general functions in PHP.

When using wp_insert_post(), you need to pass an array as the first and only argument to it, like so:

wp_insert_post($post);

$post is an array that must contain at least the following keys:

• post_author: the user ID of the blogger who is the post’s author; I set this to Darren’s ID
• post_title: the title of the post. If this is not set, I believe the post’s title is set to the ID number of the post
• comment_status: set this to either ‘open’ or ‘closed’; it will most likely be ‘open’
• post_content: the body of the post. This can be blank.
• ID: this is optional, but if it is set to an existing post’s ID, then you will be modifying an existing post instead of creating a new one.

That’s all you need to get it working. I hope the above has helped you out with your WordPress plugin endeavors!

Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has posted his thoughts on how he thinks the battle between WordPress and Movable Type will play out, now that both will soon be open sourced. WordPress has really taken a strong foothold and has now become the blogging platform of choice among millions of users worldwide.

When I first started blogging (way back, even way before the oldest post in my current blog’s archives), I jumped between using Blogger, Movable Type, and WordPress. I finally settled on WordPress when it was still in its infancy at version 1.0. The default theme back then was horrendous. I couldn’t stand it, but I still stuck with it because I thought WordPress suited me best, especially since I was a PHP developer back then and WordPress is written in PHP, an extremely popular web programming language, so it would have been easy for me to change things to suit my own needs.

Over time, WordPress has evolved, and it definitely shows in its default theme, its functionality, and a lot of new things that are implemented in the application’s backend.

Whenever I hear ‘open source’, I often imagine something that’s made well, but that looks really bad. When you’ve got a group of developers building an app, it’s not easy to unilaterally decide on a design that looks well, so you usually end up with an application that has a lot of functionality but that lacks in the design department. An excellent example of this is Azureus. For what it lacks in its design, it makes up in features.

WordPress is the first open source application that I’ve encountered that, finally, looks as though it was made by a small company. It is a polished application, it looks great, and it’s not too heavy on the features that it offers. A lot of this can be attributed to Matt Mullenweg, the project’s founder, and so I tip my hat off to him.

In my opinion, there’s going to be no showdown between WordPress and Movable Type. The battle ended when WordPress opened up its hosted blogging platform, WordPress.com, and when it released WordPress 2.0. Other applications such as Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad will still play significant roles in the blogging world, but in the open source blogging platform arena, WordPress is already king.

There’s already been quite a bit of criticism about this, most recently from Mathew Ingram, who’s post is entitled “Kawasaki: How I wasted $12,107 on Truemors“. In my opinion, he’s pretty much gotten it spot on; I agree that Truemors is a pretty pointless endeavor, once you look past the fact that it’s founded by Guy. (The multiple TechCrunch posts increased the site’s exposure to me, more than anything else. Those gave it way more hype than it deserved.)

To most people, this sounds like a glowing success story of a web startup, but to be honest, there are certain levels of web startups. There’s the kind where you need to launch it with several partnerships with major corporations before you can even get off the ground (a la Joost) and then there’s the kind where all you really need is a credit card in order to get something up and going. In the case of Truemors, we’re in the latter category.

The way I see it, someone like Guy could spend $12,000 on a web startup such as this because he can afford it more than most other people who are still in their college dorms and want to birth a startup of their own soon (like me!). Also, he’s gotten more flak for making this post than other people would get obviously because of his popularity.

There are many more posts out there that are just like this, which make claims that seem amazing to the blog author but which are unspectacular to those who are more savvy, which is precisely why we need to continue spreading the word on the wonders of open source software!

Excerpt:

I’ve written at a couple blogs, including my own and Blog Herald (here), and quite often, I see that there are quite a number of post categories to choose from in order to tag my posts appropriately.

Below, you can see a typical listing of available post categories that you can use on a WordPress blog. As you can see, though, there are so many categories that the box requires a scroll bar.

Here’s an excerpt:

In continuation of my last post, Enabling sidebar widgets for your WordPress theme, I am now going to show you how you can use these newfound widgets with more than one sidebar on your WordPress blog.

Most blogs have only one sidebar, but some, such as Blog Herald, have two (or more!) After reading my last post, you learned how you can use widgets on your blog’s theme, so now, I will show you how you can use widgets on two or more sidebars. This post assumes that you’ve either read my last post, or you already know how to widgetize a theme but would like to know how to widgetize more than one sidebar.

I’m also going to show you how you can customize your sidebars by choosing how you want each widget to be formatted on a per-sidebar basis, and I’ll also show you how you can name your sidebars to more easily identify each one.

This tutorial will focus on using widgets on two sidebars, but the steps can be easily reproduced to adapt to more than two sidebars.

If you have this problem, then what I normally do is copy the text, paste it into the address bar of my browser, select all of the text again, and then paste it back into your WordPress Visual editor. Bam! No more formatting.

I’m sure that at least a few people have had this problem before, and I can just imagine people copying and pasting the text to WordPress and reformatting all of it back to what you wanted it to be, to get the text just right. I even know of a few people who would typically copy and paste to Microsoft Word, modify it there, and then copy and paste it back into WordPress! I’m sure that a few people will make good use of this tip. If you have and find this useful, then let me know in the comments below!

So, you’ve got that brand-spanking-new (or kind-of-new) WordPress theme, and you’re strutting your stuff like it’s no one’s business. What next? Well, with WordPress 2.2 being released yesterday, major changes come along with it. One of the most important changes to take place involve sidebar widgets; these were once provided as a plugin, but are now built right into the application.

In this post, I am going to walk you through on what you need to know to ‘widgetize’ your blog’s theme, meaning we first have to allow your blog’s theme to use widgets. If you haven’t yet installed WordPress 2.2, then don’t worry, because you can install sidebar widgets as a separate plugin and still follow along.

Okay, now that you’ve got WordPress widgets installed, we first have to widgetize your theme.

Here’s what he said about my plugin:

Thanks Gary

The reason there was such a long gab between this writing project and the last one is that previously running these projects has been so much work as I’ve had to manually copy and paste every entry from emails into posts. This time however I was lucky enough to have Gary King develop a WP plugin that would do the task for me so that all I had to do at the end of each day was copy and paste the list of submissions into a post with my intro. Seeing the numbers of entries we had confirms the decision to go this route - Gary has literally saved me days worth of work. Thanks Mate.

For this latest Group Writing Project, he asked me to write a script for him which would automate as many of these tasks for him as possible. I did this by creating a WordPress plugin that can be found here; it automates almost all of the tasks that Darren needed to do prior to the creation of this plugin. Namely, the plugin automatically creates an HTML-formatted list of blog post titles, which are automatically linked to their respective blog posts, and appends the blogger’s name to the end of the line. Let us start with the form shown below, which is the form that I created where users interact with:

Once the form is submitted, a link is created and appears like this:

What happens in the WordPress admin is that all of this information is actually placed into a drafted post, meaning all Darren has to do is go to the post entitled ‘Group writing project - LATEST’, copy the links in that post to a NEW post that he plans on publishing that same day, and then submit it! It’s just a simple matter of copying and pasting existing content! So, we’ve changed his workflow from several hours of copying and pasting links individually, to copying and pasting one big chunk of text, which takes only a few seconds.

A side effect that has cropped up from all of this is the fact that MORE people are submitting links because the form makes it MUCH easier to do, rather than being required to use a contact form which does not have separate text fields for each required item (post title, link, and blogger name). This also creates the issue of having unformatted content in the contact form, meaning the blogger can put the required information in whatever order they desire, whereas for the new submission form, the content is standardized so that it TELLS the user to enter the information in a text field specifically for each required data.

A few minor things that I’ve also added are that duplicated submissions are blocked so that we try and make every submission a unique one, and that all names and emails are automatically added to a draft post that is separate from the one that has all the links.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post explaining a bit about how I created this particular WordPress plugin for Darren. I’ve got a few more lined up, so stay tuned!

Screenshot

You can see the plugin in action by simply looking at any of the comments on this blog. Here’s a screenshot, as well, just in case I ever decide to remove it from my blog:

Download the plugin

Click here to download the plugin. Download, extract, and upload the entire folder to your /wp-contents/plugins/ folder (so the final path should be /wp-contents/plugins/comment_rankings/) and activate it.

This plugin is also listed in the official WordPress Plugins database.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

The good thing was that whenever the blogroll was requested by a website, the same data would always be sent (in XML format - what else?). The reason that the blogroll may look different on several websites is because each website parses the XML file differently. This enabled us to cache the blogroll XML data that is returned, since it is not dynamic; it only changes if we add/modify/remove a channel or a blog.

Average load times

Before optimization

Before optimizing the blogroll, these were the average load times that it took to load the blogroll with the old code, when it ran 2500 times:

• 5.9277107715607 seconds
• 5.2258749008179 seconds
• 6.9043378829956 seconds
• 8.450049161911 seconds
• 6.729789018631 seconds
• 6.3227508068085 seconds
• 5.4357509613037 seconds
• 7.2524189949036 seconds
• 7.7171530723572 seconds
• 6.8039338588715 seconds

After optimization

After optimizing the blogroll, here are the average load times that it takes to load the blogroll with the new, optimized code, when it ran 2500 times:

• 1.349152803421 seconds
• 1.3284649848938 seconds
• 1.1611139774323 seconds
• 1.3144729137421 seconds
• 1.2075929641724 seconds
• 1.1899409294128 seconds
• 1.3266270160675 seconds
• 1.297404050827 seconds
• 1.2125298976898 seconds
• 1.1947700977325 seconds

Numbers speak louder than words (but actions come as a close second). Keep in mind that the times shown above represent the times that it takes for the blogroll to execute 2500 times (meaning, it takes roughly 1 second to load the blogroll 2500 times. That’s a lot of b5media-blogroll-lovin’!)

This is just yet another testament that caching and optimization can really do you some good, even if it may be a minor change that you’ve made to your code. I used to just write code without any considerations regarding caching and optimization of the code (this was quite a while ago). Eventually, I learned that by simply spending a few minutes to cache data, it can save all of your website’s visitors some time, and little by little, that time adds up.

Resources

Here are some great resources that you can use to cache some of your own data:

• for caching PHP in general, use Turck MMCache
• for caching on WordPress, download and install the WP-Cache plugin

Tutorials

• Caching Result Sets in PHP: Cost-efficient PHP acceleration
• Output Caching with PHP
• Use a mirror for hits from popular websites

(Oh, and there was no screwdriver involved. Doh!)