OMNINOGGIN

I’ve been quiet for the past week for many reasons, but the most important reason is that I’ve been working on WP Greet Box version 3.0.  It turned out that there we so many positive responses (and feature requests) on the WP Greet Box plugin that all I could do is work on it whenever I get the chance (at coffee shops, during lunch breaks, before sleeping, etc).  It sounds tiring, but it was all worth it!

What happened to version 2.0?

I silently released version 2.0 after adding the ability to add your own custom greeting messages per referrer URL.

What’s new in this release?

This release has cookies support so now we do not keep showing the same message to returning visitors.  I also added a configurable default message to show when no referrer match is found.

Where do I download, file bugs, make feature requests, comments, and suggestions?

Please visit the original plugin post.

Social Homes Widget is a small but neat little plugin that lets you add links to your various social homepages in your sidebar. Of course you can do this manually, but it’s a lot nicer to be able to manage this in the widgets section in wp-admin instead of having to dive into your sidebar.php every time you want to modify the list.
The plugin supports 19 different social home links. This is more than enough for most people, but not me. Today I found that I needed to add my Plurk homepage to this list. So I found a quick hack to get this done fast, instead of submitting a request to the author. All I did was: Read on…

I apologize if you have visited earlier today and found the Maintenance-Mode screen. I was moving this blog from a self-hosted dedicated server to a shared-hosting server. In this post, I will discuss the reasons for my decision and the switching experience.
Here are some reasons why I made the switch (Pros):

1. I’ve been getting more readers lately so my bandwidth was almost reaching capacity. Shared-hosting is the cheapest way to get decent burstable bandwidth.
2. I wanted to start focusing more on WordPress and less on FreeBSD. Making this switch will alleviate me from having to maintain/troubleshoot low-level system things, leaving me with more time to focus on WordPress development & discussion.

Read on…

Alex King’s “Articles” is a great plugin that lets you easily mark posts as featured articles. You can also display a list of featured posts on a selected page/post by placing a “###articles###″ tag in it. That said, there are TWO big problems with it:

1. It doesn’t work with WordPress 2.3.x or 2.5.x
2. It displays the same article in each category that the post is listed under. So that means if your featured post is filed under 5 categories, your post will show up 5 times on your featured articles list.

Andy Cowl has already resolved issue #1 on this WordPress support thread (THANK YOU!). Here are the changes Andy Cowl did.

+++ articles.php        (working copy)
@@ -96,13 +96,11 @@
        $cats = $wpdb->get_results("
                SELECT $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id, $wpdb->terms.term_id, $wpdb->terms.name, $wpdb->terms.slug
-               FROM $wpdb->term_relationships
-               LEFT JOIN $wpdb->terms
-               ON $wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->terms.term_id
-               LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy
-               ON $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id = $wpdb->terms.term_id
-               WHERE $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id IN (".implode(',', $post_ids).")
-               AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category'
+               FROM $wpdb->term_relationships, $wpdb->term_taxonomy, $wpdb->terms
+               WHERE $wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id
+               AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id = $wpdb->terms.term_id
+               AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category'
+               AND $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id IN (".implode(',', $post_ids).")
                ORDER BY $wpdb->terms.slug, $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id DESC
        ");

On issue #2, I’m thinking about modifying this plugin to accept another custom field called “article_category” to accept a string value of your category slug. Let’s say you feature a post that has 5 categories and set “article_category” custom field to “blogging” then the post will only show up once under the “blogging” category on your featured articles page. What do you guys think of this mod? If there is some demand for this, I will definitely move this to the top of my stack of projects and crank this out in a few hours. Please let me know via comments.