OMNINOGGIN

Weekend Links for the week ending on 07-25-08

• Enhanced Sidebars with Dynamic Content: Visitors tend to ignore the sidebar because most of sidebar content do not change. I’ve been experimenting with this myself and I was planning to write a similar post but Vandelay Design says it better (for now at least).
• WordPress Tips + Things You Can Do After Installing Wordpress: It is more like “Things You *Should* Do After Installing WordPress” both for security purposes and usability.
• How to write a solid and stable WordPress plugin: Mark Jaquith tells us [WordPress plugin developers] how to develop solid and stable WordPress plugins.
• The Deceptively Simple Steps to Persuasive Writing That Works: This technique requires no actual writing ability, but it does work! It’s so simple I can’t believe I never did it until recently.

Read on…

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…

Today I would like to announce the release of “Nowthen Photo Display” WordPress widget that parses picture RSS feeds from the image service nowthen.com and displays the pictures neatly on the sidebar. This is my first WordPress widget so any comments and suggestions are welcomed. I would be happy to make updates/releases if the demand for this widget is high enough and there are some worthwhile feature requests.

Screenshots

Sidebar Widget

Widget Options

Gallery

Gallery Options

Read on…

This tutorial will augment the technique of automatically enabling WP-Cache during heavy load with the ability to switch to a low-bandwidth WordPress theme at the same time.

Few reasons to do this

1. WP-Cache messes with your site statistics, so you do not want to leave it on when your site is not being hammered.
2. You don’t want to use a bandwidth efficient theme all the time because it’s not pretty-lookin’.
3. During traffic storms (e.g. Digg Effect), every 1/100 second optimization tweak counts.
4. If you host your site on a shared host, you will most likely have a bandwidth quota. Switching to a leaner theme conserves your bandwidth (duh!)
5. If you host your site on a home connection, your upload is not up to par with most hosting services, so you need to use that small pipe efficiently.
6. Each “IMG” tag, even if it’s a 1×1 pixel gif, requires an HTTP request to your web server. If you have 10 images on your page, and 10 users are loading your page, that’s 100 simultaneous calls to your server already. Leaner themes usually means less/no images, giving Apache some break.
7. If you’re server is non-uber, you don’t deserve to administer it.
Read on…