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Social proof is an easy way to bump your traffic figures a little bit and make yourself look more authoritative. Today I’ll show you five simple ways to apply it to your WordPress blog.
Preface
The essence of “social proof” is simple : when people don’t have a lot of information about something, they will usually look [...]

After the Deadline is an advanced spell checker plugin for WordPress that was released on Monday. In addition to the standard spell check and suggestions features, it also includes style and grammar checking. The plugin also lets you define custom dictionary of sorts – you can set it to always ignore certain words. Here’s the [...]

The latest version of Broken Link Checker for WordPress is now available on WordPress.org. If you’re already using the plugin you should get an update notification within 24 hours. Below you’ll find a list of changes and a bit commentary about the update.
Around 20 people downloaded the beta version. I haven’t received any death threats [...]

I love all kinds of tweaks and utilities, be it software-specific addons or standalone tools. WordPress is no exception – if server hardware was infinitely capable, I’d probably have a hundred or so plugins installed.
But since the Moore’s law is being all too tardy, there’s a constant pressure to weed out underperforming and superfluous plugins. [...]

The next major update of the Broken Link Checker plugin is almost done. I’ve added several new, oft-requested features and rewritten most existing functions to make them more secure and faster. However, as anyone who has at least dabbled in programming will know, lots of code changes equals lots of potential for new bugs. So [...]

Having up-to-date backups is an essential safeguard in case something goes wrong with your website. So some time ago I installed WP-DBManager and configured it to send a daily backup of my WordPress database to my GMail account. All was well, until last week the backup process failed five times in a row. Upon checking [...]

Highlight Search Terms is a WordPress plugin that can highlight search terms on your blog’s search page. The plugin is based on a tutorial by Thaya Kareeson, but it also includes several additional features not present in the tutorial and better browser compatibility.
Features

Multiple colors : Each word of the search query is higlighted in a [...]

The recent WeblogToolsCollection post about a new antispam plugin “WP Mollom” got me thinking. What’s the main problem with Akismet? It’s certainly good enough at catching spam – it only misses about 4 spam comments per month on this blog and has nearly 99.9% accuracy overall. However, the situation might not be so rosy when [...]

One of the reasons why WordPress can be slow is that it loads all active plugins on each and every page, even if some of those plugins aren’t actually used on that page. For example, an active anti-spam plugin will still be loaded even if the current page doesn’t contain a comment form (e.g. category [...]

Even after two years of blogging, I’m still not rich and famous. Why is that, and how can you avoid the same moderately unpleasant fate? In this post I’ll discuss some blogging mistakes that (still) interfere with the success of this site.
#1 Lack of focus
Pretty much every blogging-related guide begins with “pick a niche”. Having [...]

Say you stumble upon a WordPress blog that has a gorgeous design. Amazed, you wonder what theme they’re using. Of course, it would be straightforward to just email the blog’s author and ask, but it might take a few hours (or days) until they get back to you. Here are three simple ways to identify [...]

As a plugin developer, I sometimes wonder what makes a plugin popular. How come some plugins garner hundreds of comments and thousands of downloads, while others pass quietly into the archives? What kind of plugin do the users want?
Obviously the plugin’s niche (what kind of stuff it does) would be a huge factor. For example, [...]

There’s been some controversy about the ethics of using Adblock. Webmasters want advertising income, users want a better browsing experience. Yadda yadda yadda. I can certainly sympathize with both sides of the debate – on the one hand, I hate intrusive ads as much as anyone. On the other hand, this site is mainly ad-supported.
But [...]

The Raw HTML plugin has been updated! In case you didn’t know, Raw HTML is my WordPress plugin that lets you use unfiltered HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc in your posts. You can download the update from the plugin’s page, or wait for the automatic update notification that should appear in a few hours.
Version 1.1 is [...]

Take the top 100 blogs from Technorati, scrape some connectedness statistics from Yahoo! Site Explorer, mix in a bit of improvised PHP scripting and Processing magic, and we’ve got ourselves a map of the equatorial blogosphere

About The Map
This graph shows the connectedness level of some (see rant below) of the most popular [...]

[Here's some list-cliche-filler stuff while I fight off a (hopefully) temporary bout of unproductivity and dentists]
WordPress internals are documented pretty well, but sometimes finding the right API/Codex page can take a while. That’s why I’ve decided to put together a comprehensive list of all APIs used by WordPress to serve as a “jump-off point” for [...]

I’ve always cared about WordPress performance. I’ve optimized my database, tweaked the server’s configuration, used plugin profilers and installed WP Super Cache and PHP Speedy WP – the “heavy artillery” of performance-related plugins. However, only recently did I decide to finally track down and fix all the remaining subtle issues that may cause slow loading [...]

When inserting an image into a post, WordPress lets you choose an alignment (left/right/center/none) and even add a caption. This usually works well when viewing the post on the blog itself, but will often look messed-up in the RSS feed. Basically, the image becomes unaligned and breaks the intended post layout. I’ve found an easy [...]

As the year is coming to an end, perhaps it’s time for a different kind of “Top X” post. Instead of a list of new WP plugins to try out, here are the top plugin authors – the brilliant people who create outstanding tools and share them with the WordPress community.
The list is ranked by [...]

Here is my latest and hack-iest plugin yet – Admin Menu Editor. It’s a WordPress plugin that will let you manually edit the Dashboard menu. You can reorder the menus, show/hide specific items, change access rights, and more. The plugin is still a bit rough around the edges, so a good understading of WP internals [...]

We all know that WordPress is a popular publishing platform, but how popular is it really? While I don’t know the number of active WP blogs, here’s a different yet interesting piece of statistics – a chart of the historical Google search volume for the keyword “wordpress”.
(click the image to get a slightly larger [...]

As I write this, WordPress 2.7 is due to arrive in a few days. Now that’s very shiny and all, but there’s one thing that has always made me a bit wary about upgrading to a new version : plugin compatibility. When you have a lot of active plugins there’s always a chance that one [...]

Listing recent posts on a WordPress page is easy – there are various widgets and theme functions available just for that purpose. But what about a non-WP page, or even a different site? That’s not that hard either – simply grab some posts from the blog’s RSS feed and output them on your page. In [...]

I’ve been trying to write a review ever since the first beta, but all I could come up can be summarized as “Meh. It’s okay.” WP 2.7 includes a lot of long-awaited features, which is great, but their implementation sometimes inflicts the aforementioned “meh” feeling.
For example, there’s the dashboard menu – finally, a dynamic dropdown [...]

This plugin lets you specify IP addresses or hosts that users are allowed to login from. You can either use full IPs (e.g. “12.34.56.7″) or partial IPs (e.g. “12.34″), which lets you specify a range of addresses. More advanced configuration is also possible – you can specify allowed subnet(s) via network/netmask and use IPv6 addresses, [...]

The upcoming WordPress 2.7 will include a “favorite actions” feature – a dropdown menu that is supposed to contain quick links for easy access to select dashboard pages. The dropdown starts out with a few preset links, and new links can be added by plugins.
Power To The Users
I think it would make more sense to [...]

WP Super Cache is an excellent caching plugin, but sometimes it seems to have problems with deleting expired files. For example, even though this site typically gets at least 3000 pageviews per day, and I’ve set WP Super Cache to delete expired files every 1000 requests (the lowest setting), the expired files tend to accumulate. [...]

A plugin that will scan the WordPress menu structure and attempt to locate the configuration page for each of the active plugins, and add a “Settings” link to the plugin’s row – right besides the “Deactivate” and “Edit” links. The plugin is also smart enough to skip this for plugins that have already added the configuration link on their own (in most cases).

It’s a plugin that measures the performance of other plugins. Well, at least in theory. After several days of intermittent and furious development the plugin is more of a glorified hack, or rather an amalgam of hacks, that provides a myriad of details and slightly-inaccurate summaries about the inner workings of WordPress and its plugins. [...]

Lets talk about that plugin-related code you have to put in your theme files when you want to add something nifty to your blog, like a “Related posts” feature or AdSense ads. It occurs to me that most plugin authors have been handling this the same way – you get a custom function that you [...]