Dayn W Creative

• Facebook Open Graph Search, A Semantic Web Tool That Actually Makes Sense – A real competitor to spider based search indexing? It’s just crazy enough to work.
• In Online Retail, Usability Is Rated No. 1 – eMarketer – At the very end of this article is an important point. If visitors to your e-commerce site are there for research, you can think of your site like any other non-e-commerce site where the goal is efficient access to valuable information. Good to remember.
• Music – AudioJungle – I haven’t bought anything from this music collection yet, but if you’re familiar with the other online options for sound effects or background music for video, you’ll recognize the potential here. Plus, it’s part of Envato, so you can expect quality.
• Bounce – A fun and easy way to share ideas on a website – Simple to make notes on website design layouts and share them. Enter a URL, it loads. You overlay notes and share with others. Perfect and easy. via @vinthomas
• Blog Navigation WordPress Plugins: Related, Recent, Most Popular Posts … – Old post from Feb 2007, but great links in here for customizing #wordpress nav. I’m sure some of these plugins must not work anymore…
• Data Monday: Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Web – Clients are often quick to request we build an app when often a mobile website makes more sense. Then again, Jobs says the future is apps. Here are the user tendency numbers to help you decide.
• Article: Twitter Moms Care for Content over Coupons – Congrats to moms everywhere for bucking the Twitter-Direct Marketing love fest. Promos and coupons, your days are numbered. Let’s all follow our mothers and demand more for our follows.
• ALERT: Facebook Phonebook Is Not A Security Threat – Also tells how to hide your phone number on Facebook.
• Twitter Launches Promoted/Sponsored Tweets Before USA World Cup Game – Save some of that Adsense money for promoted Tweets. Can’t wait to see the auction action for this new medium. Also, has anyone else noticed the number of ESPN3 pre-roll spots has increased as we near the finals? Love the #worldcup.
• Launchlist – Your one stop website checklist! – A nice pre-launch checklist for web development. Some of the list items are pretty vague, but this is a great start for creating your own list with more detail.
• When Social Media Becomes The Message: The Gulf Oil Spill And @BPGlobalPR – I hear BP got in the social media game after the gulf disaster. That spells inauthenticity. If all other tactics to sell the importance of social media participation don’t work, here’s your scare tactic angle.

• Personal Tech: Apple iPad FAQ’s – @pogue answers all of the important questions I had about iPad. Video out, how’s the typing experience (really), USB, they 12hr battery life claim is not a myth.
• Facebook’s New Solution For Unofficial Pages: Community Pages – Facebook makes a distinction between brand pages and pages meant to build community around a topic. Think it will take off?
• BRITE: Influence on Twitter can’t be purchased with Kim Kardashian | Econsultancy – Can you buy influence on Twitter? Maybe this should say “meaningful influence”?
• iPhone and iPad Stock Files – collis – GraphicRiver – iPad UI graphic elements kits from Envato for your application design and wireframing needs.
• Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0 – Custom post types is going to be a game changer for my dev team. We currently use a few plugins to massage WordPress into a CMS, namely Flutter and Secondary HTML Content. Custom post types might eliminate the need for those plugins. RT @danielbachhuber.
• Mirror files across systems with rsync – Backup utilities – Lifehacker – I know this is the right way to backup. Real geeks use rsync. I haven’t had the chance to poke this bear yet, but Gina’s article is where I’ll start.

These are my links for March 12th through March 16th:

• Interactive Online – 10 Features to Look Forward to in WordPress 3.0 – RT @jonmacdonald
• Facebook Upgrades Search Capabilities | Mashable – Suggested results while typing in the search box now show more than just your friends or pages you’ve fanned.
• A Guide To Typography On The Web | Fonts | PelFusion.com – Thx @eyedesignstudio @alvinmartinez
• Microdata support for Rich Snippets – With HTML5, Google helps microformats grow up. Add another to-do to the SEO checklist.
• The Battle of the Men’s Body Washes – WSJ.com – Ms Wells thinks W +K’s Old Spice campaign has the edge for men’s personal grooming because they’re selling to the ladies. For the rest of us, we prefer whatever is already in the shower. I’ll do frilly, especially if it’s convenient.

These are my links for March 9th through March 12th:

• Open Site Explorer: Link Popularity & Backlink Analysis Tool – Powered by SEOmoz’s data, this alternative to Google “site:” search or Yahoo Site Explorer let’s you discover the sites linking to you or your competition, and rates them by authority.
• Wanna Know How Your Neighbors Spend Their Money? It’s All on Bundle.com | Fast Company – Say hi to social financial influence brought to you by Razorfish & access to US spending data.
• Best Tweets from SEMPDX Searchfest 2010 Conference | Burlington Bytes – @PeteJewett’s fantastic tweet roll of the best-of tweets from #SearchFest 2010.
• Google Launches the Google Apps Marketplace -
• Blog Smarter | Zemanta Ltd. – Enhance blog posts automatically with related content and images. Gives you tips and advice as you write. Firefox extension. Promote your posts more efffectively. Must try this.

These are my links for February 13th through February 20th:

• newsmap.jp – Real-time news story visualization by size and color.
• JetBlue uses Twitter to test digital credentials – Related Stories – AAAA SmartBrief –
• 20 Fantastic Usability & Conversion Analysis Tools | Spyre Studios –
• FeedWordPress | simple and flexible Atom/RSS syndication for WordPress – RSS to WordPress posts
• My Top 3 Google Buzz Tips – 3 tips for filtering the noise in Google Buzz

Some people have reported the “Choose files to upload” button being broken when trying to add an image to a WordPress post. The behavior I witnessed was that clicking the button simply did nothing. I have also heard that PC users see a blank white window. The quick fix is to use the Browser Uploader instead.

We’ve noticed the issue since upgrading to Flash 10. It seems the deadly combination to break the WordPress image uploader is WP 2.6 (and maybe lower) and Flash 10. Sites that have been upgraded to WordPress 2.7+ work just fine with Flash 10. See my previous post, What version of Flash Player do I have? to check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Big thanks to web guru @joeyyax for sussing this one out, and for pointing out this this thread at WordPress.org.

show more text formatting buttons in wordpress

As I write this, I’m looking at at single row of buttons at the top of this WordPress ‘Write Post’ text area that allows me some basic text formatting options; bold, italic, strikethrough, bulleted list, numbered list, and so on. A few of my clients have asked for more formatting options like the ability to change the font size and color. Most of the options they’re after are actually just hiding.
If you’re seeing a single row of formatting buttons, try the last one on the right. It shows the ‘Kitchen Sink’ which is a second row of formatting options like style, underline, justify, text color, etc, and is sure to satisfy the perfectionist blogger.

$mce_buttons = apply_filters('mce_buttons', array('bold', 'italic', 'strikethrough', 'separator',

Now, feel free to remove or add any of the attributes listed on lancelhoff.com (thanks Lance!) until you’ve made formatting stew.

In WordPress 2.x under Settings > Reading, you can set a number for “Blog pages show at most”.  This applies globally, however.  I discovered a method to make your home page to show only the latest post, while allowing all other blog pages to respect the “at most” number.

In index.php, just before the loop, I added the following line:

<?php query_posts('showposts=1'); ?>

Basically, that sets up a preemptive query and grabs only the latest post, rather than allowing the loop to query the latest “at most” number of posts.

It’s the day we unofficially celebrate the existence of the WordPress blogging platform.  Big thanks to Automattic for forging what has become one of our weapons of choice.

We hearted WordPress right out of the gate for its easy configuration as a simple content management system.  As open and streamlined as many CMSs are aimed at being, many “simple” CMSs with good intentions tend to be too bloated for some of our clients.  When we started using WP, it was the perfect minimalist shim to wedge in that static XHTML/CSS to simple custom CMS site gap. (more…)

I came across a couple WordPress hacks that helped me get tags to behave.  The first is a little PHP call to get a tag list to appear if you’ve used get_posts() to pull posts from a specific category, and the get_tags() function isn’t working for you.  So, if you’re not using the standard loop, but instead want to have the tags for each post appear in a custom loop, use this function as seen here on the wordpress support forums.

print get_the_term_list( $post->ID, ‘post_tag’, ‘ ‘, ‘ ‘, ‘ ‘ ) ;

with arguments in this order: resource_ID, taxonomy, before, seperator, after.

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If you are restricting your WordPress site to specific users, and want to control the page they are directed to immediately after logging in, use the “redirect_to” argument in the URL string for the link.  Also seen here in the forums.

http://example.com/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http://example.com

Down at the bottom of this page, you’ll see a list of the most popular posts.  It took some doing to get this plugin working on this site.  I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 before installing the Popularity Contest plugin.

Basically, follow the instructions in this article: http://tinyurl.com/2wne9f

You’ll have to edit popularity-contest.php in your plugins directory, as well as add 2 tables to your WP database either by running the included query, or manually with phpMyAdmin.