by Scott on November 29, 2009
Recently I was given the opportunity to review WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide by Lesley A. Harrison . I just recently received the book, but the publisher was kind enough to allow me to post a sample chapter from the book that details how to create your first WordPress plugin. I expect to work my way through the book in the next few weeks at which time I will provide my own personal thoughts.
In the mean time here is some information from the publisher, followed by a link to download a sample chapter from the book.
“WordPress MU enables you to build a complete, professional blog network. Each user gets their own blog, and can choose their favorite templates and plug-ins, and develop their own content. WordPress MU powers some of the largest blog networks in the world, including the mighty WordPress.com – home to thousands of bloggers.
This book will take you through the setup of a WordPress MU-powered blogging network, using a real, working blog network as an example, so that you can follow the creation process step-by-step. Your blogging network will be complete with professional features such as friends lists, status feeds, groups, forums, photo galleries, and more, to build your own WordPress.com – a place where users can quickly come and create a blog for themselves.
The book starts with a clean install of WordPress MU, and as you work through the book, you will build the blog network, and add on more and more features, all seamlessly integrated to achieve a professional, custom-built look.”
Please download the sample chapter below and let me know what you think:
by Scott on March 14, 2009
Recently I was given the opportunity to review WordPress Plugin Development by Vladimir Prelovac. I just received the book this past week, but the publisher and author were kind enough to allow me to post an excerpt from the book that details how to create your first WordPress plugin. You can expect a full review from me within a couple weeks.
Chapter 2, Social Bookmarking with WordPress Plugin
In this article by Vladimir Prelovac, we will learn to create our first functional WordPress plugin and learn how to interact with the WordPress API (this is the WordPress interface to PHP) on the way. The knowledge you will gain in this article alone will allow you to write a lot of similar plugins. This article is extracted from the “WordPress Plugin Development” book.
Let’s get moving! In this article, you will learn:
- Creating a new plugin and having it displayed in the plugins admin panel
- Checking the WordPress version and control activation of the plugin
- Accessing API features—for example the title and permalink URL of each post
- Using WordPress hooks to execute your plugin code when it’s needed
- Using conditional tags to control the flow of your plugins
You will learn these by creating a Social Bookmarking type of plugin that adds a Digg button to each post on your blog
[click to continue...]
by Scott on February 3, 2009
A few weeks ago I signed up for a free account at Are My Sites Up?. I then promptly forgot about it. Today I opened my gmail account and found the following message:
I promptly emailed support at 1and1.com and it was back up within 15 minutes. What a great service Are My Sites Up? provides and for free! They also provide a premium version as well that adds a private RSS feed, Twitter alerts, and monitoring of up to 60 websites.
The screenshot below shows how easy and intuitive it is to use:
Oh, one other thing, when my site came back online I received the following email:
This service is so easy to use, there is no reason not to use it if you own your own website(s).
by Scott on January 10, 2009
Did you know that you can have your Twitter profile graded? The same people (Hupspot) that brought you the Website Grader also offer a profile grader for Twitter. I’ve really just started seriously using Twitter so my grade is a measly 26 out of 100!
From the Twitter Grader website:
The Twitter Grade measures the reach and authority of a Twitter user.
Help me raise my grade and add me to the list of people you’re following:
http://twitter.com/karstetter
Thankfully, Smart Productivity has a website grade of 89 out of 100, I can sleep tonight :).
If you use Twitter please let me know what your grade is in the comments.
Updated (01/13/2009):
Here is my Twitter Grade Badge, which will constantly update with my current grade:
by Scott on December 11, 2008
Smart Productivity is now listed in the Lifehacks section of Alltop.com (lifehacks.alltop.com). There are quite a few prominent blogs listed before mine, so you’ll have to scroll down, down, down, a little farther, almost there, oh, there it is.
If you haven’t heard of Alltop.com before, you’re missing out on a great resource of information. Alltop aggregates news from the top blogs in specific topics and then displays the 5 most recent headlines for those blogs. The result is a very valuable resource and an excellent alternative to googling for information.
Here are some of my favorites:
