At the beginning of 2011, I began hosting my websites on Site5. I have been singing their praises and recommending everyone I know to them. Today iThemes publicly announced their endorsement of Site5 hosting (and how terrible Hostgator is too). I’m really excited about the development because iThemes is a major WordPress plugins and themes vendor, so their endorsement confirms my feelings about Site5. Also, the CEOs of both companies have been communicating directly which will hopefully result in even better WordPress compatibility with Site5. Check out the announcement post, Site5 has a 6-month free trial (!) for the iThemes community.
WordPress
Sep 7, 2012
Disable shortcodes for ElegantThemes
Go to ePanel/custom-functions.php and remove:
require_once(TEMPLATEPATH . '/epanel/shortcodes/shortcodes.php');
However I recommend that you don’t use ElegantThemes. Sure they’re cheap, but they don’t offer Automatic Updates which makes their themes pretty insecure and vulnerable to hackers.
If you want high quality themes with rock solid security and top-notch support, go with StudioPress or WooThemes.
Jun 18, 2012
WTOTW: Automatically post selected Instagram photos to your blog with ifttt
My Instagram yesterday got a lot of likes and apparently people are really interested to do this, so here’s a quick tutorial how.
This tutorial will show you how to post *selected* Instagram photos to your WordPress blog, automatically. All you need to do is to tag your Instagram with a hashtag for it to work.
ifttt
The key to doing this is a service called ifttt, which is short for “if this then that”. Basically you tell it to watch for a trigger (if this) and do something in response (then that). See the quick one-page guide on their site. Tip: ifttt is pronounced like ‘lift’ without the ‘l’. Continue Reading
Feb 25, 2012
WordPress Online Business Giveaway
The folks over at WP Pro Business are running an insane giveaway of WordPress-based online business products. Some of the stuff up for grabs include..
Gravity Forms licenses
WPMUDEV Memberships
BackupBuddy licences
Wishlist Member licenses
Standard Theme
Marketeer Theme
and more! The total value of the giveaway is over $9,000! Like I said – insane.
Head on over and enter the giveaway now.
Aug 11, 2011
[Published] Take 5 Minutes to Make WordPress 10 Times More Secure
ProBlogger.net published my guest post today. Guess that officially makes me a professional blogger
Jun 22, 2011
Custom size featured image thumbnail with fallback in WordPress
Occasionally you may need to display featured images in sizes other than WordPress’ default thumbnail, medium and large sizes. That’s quite easily solved with the add_image_size() and the_post_thumbnail() functions. Unfortunately, there are still 2 problems to be solved:
- Some posts may not have images at all, or the author forgets to attach a featured image
- Previous posts don’t have featured images
Here’s a solution that 1) resizes the featured image to the right size, 2) uses the first image in the post if a featured image is not set and 3) falls back to a default image if none of the above are true. Continue Reading
May 14, 2011
How to make WordPress bulletproof for clients
This is my talk at WordCon / WordCamp Asia 2011. Here are the notes from my presentation – for my reference and yours. If you enjoyed my ideas here, please Like or tweet this post. Thanks!
Continue Reading
Apr 26, 2011
More robust footer widget areas for Headway
I recently got an email from a reader who wanted to know how I implemented my footer widget areas, and seen some similar requests in the Headway forums. With Headway, you can flip your widget areas horizontally to make a widgetized footer but it works best when you only have 3-4 widgets in them. I wanted to have more flexibility and so I injected 3 widget areas into my footer.
Screenshot for posterity, if I ever re-design this blog. Click for full-size image.
I didn’t have time for a full tutorial but hopefully you’ll find these code snippets useful:
Mar 15, 2011
Why Jetpack really packs a punch – the future of WordPress and why you may not like it much (if you’re a premium developer or service provider)
Last week, Automattic announced Jetpack, a bundle of plugins that will bring the hosted WordPress.com features into self-hosted WordPress blogs. On the surface it sounds like a great addition to the WordPress platform, but James from WPMU.org points out some far reaching implications.
Jan 29, 2011
How to create your own Twitpic-like site
@xescx explains a useful tip on how to roll your own Twitpic service with WordPress.
