Arne Brachhold

In the last time, I’ve seen many Google searches about WordPress and ImageShack in my referer logs. Too bad there wasn’t something on this page about that.

Since I had some time today and found this an interesting combination, I’ve created a small WordPress plugin which allows you to upload image files to ImageShack directly from your WP posting screen and insert them into your post with a few clicks.

More info about the plugin and the download archive can be found on the plugin page. I hope you enjoy it!

I’m using the Jerome’s Keywords tagging plugin on this site and noticed that all keywords (tags) for a post will go away if I approve its comments. After some search through the code I’ve found that the plugin is using the “edit_post” hook to update the keywords after you’ve changed them on the post screen.

The problem is that this hook is also executed when you approve a comment, but since you are not coming from the post form you’re not sending any post data (like the keywords) and the plugin assumes that the post has no keywords or you’ve deleted them. Mark Jaquith wrote about this behavior earlier this year. (Read on …)

If you are suddenly receiving a lot of request within a short period of time because you’ve been linked by a large site like Digg or Slashdot, your hosting solution might not be able to handle the load.

This article should help your to prepare your WordPress blog for such a case or if you’re just using a slow webhost and want to improve the general performance.

Note that your room for maneuver is limited in most shared-hosting environments, so you won’t be able to implement all possible options with a $2.95 hosting account.

On the whole there are two areas where we can try to save processing time by caching frequently loaded data. The first one is the server system like the web- and database-server software, the second one is the application (WordPress) itself.
(Read on …)

YAHOO and MSN Search have announced that they will support the popular format for XML-Sitemaps which was invented by Google in 2005.

I’ve updated the xml-namespace definitions in the new beta version of my XML-Sitemap Generator for WordPress Plugin to the new sitemaps.org standard.

Yahoo has already updated their Site Explorer so you can submit your sitemap to YAHOO and Google. The guys from MSN are a bit slower and will do some internal tests on their own websites before they open the submission for everyone.

Get it while it’s hot!

This release contains several security fixes and performance issues so all WordPress users are recommended to upgrade.

More details are available at the WordPress Blog and the download page.

If you use Firefox to edit a post, it may happen in some cases, especially on long posts and when switching between tabs, that the text gets truncated to an unspecified length. If you save this post, the cut content is lost forever.
(Read on …)

I’m happy to present you another Plugin for your WordPress Blog: The A9 SiteInfo Generator.

SiteInfo is an open standard which allows you to specify information that will be displayed in a toolbar menu. This allows the A9 toolbar (or other toolbars that want to use SiteInfo) to display a menu about your site, when a user is on your site.

(Read on …)

WordPress 2.0.3 is now available for download. If you are using my Google Sitemap Generator plugin, please update to speed up the generation process.

If you don’t want to update, you can apply this patch by hand. It will reduce the generation time significantly.

This is a little Microsoft .Net class which allows you to use the powerful Akismet comment spam protection in your .Net wiki/blog/website/software.

It’s well documented and available as a precompiled library or C# project. It’s compiled as .Net 1.1, but also works great with 2.0. Note that you need to obtain a WordPress.com API key to use it.

(Read on …)

Hi there,

here is another WordPress Plugin for you! I’m sure you know del.icio.us, an online service where you can manage and share your bookmarks with other people. With this plugin you can add a "Bookmark this page on del.icio.us" link to your posts or sidebar. This will allow your visitors to add your page directly into their del.icio.us profile and makes your blog more popular!

(Read on …)

I had a little bit time this morning so I improved my Google Sitemaps Generator…

Features:

Note: This new version is still beta and I’m still at testing. You can try it out and report any errors/mistakes/suggest to my email. If you can, test it under an other copy/backup of you blog… It’s still beta and may have bugs!!

Installation:
Download the zip Archive and extract the sitemap.php and in your wp-content/plugins directory. Then look in your admin page under Plugins and activate it. Now you can click on Options -> Sitemap and configure your settings. Update or write a post to start the first sitemap generation.

Note: I’m not a WordPress expert and this is my first plugin. I read The Plugin API and Writing a Plugin at the WordPress pages. If you are more familiar with WordPress plugins and see something strange/not recommended please tell me! Also the registered actions (add_action) which start sitemap generation may be redundant.

Update: I included a Manual Rebuild button in the options page so you don’t need to edit a post to start the generation at the first time. Beta Testers are welcome

Google announced yesterday a new tool for webmasters. The Google Sitemaps! You can submit you sitemap to Google and allow them to find all your pages without crawling every link. You can read more about this cool feature at searchenginewatch.com.

I created a small php file which will do the generation of the sitemap in a Google compliant format for you. At the moment, only posts, home page and static pages are supported. If you have better knowledge of WordPress than me, feel free to modify the script and include category pages etc.

Every URL in the sitemap may have a priority which represents the page priority on your website. My script calculates the it on the number of comments. This should be ok for most blogs, maybe i will add the post date to priority generation later.

Installation is easy! Just download the sitemap.php and place it in your blog directory. Then tell Google Sitemaps the URL and all should be fine

If you want you can alter the default configuration for various settings like the change frequenty of posts etc. Just have a look at the top of the php file.

I’ve tested it on this site ( WP1.5.1.1 ) and with a XML Schema validator. If you find an error or if it doesn’t work on your site, please drop me a mail or write a comment and I will have a look at your site.

UPDATE:
I included support for archive pages. Just download the new version 1.1 again.
Archive pages will have a predefined priority which can be customized.

UPDATE 2:
It get’s allmost complete
Added support for categorie pages. They will also habe a predefined priority which can be customized.
Download the current version at the links above.

Suggestions / Todo
- Autogenerate priority of categories (maybe by postcount?)
- Use correct lastMod in categories and archives (find last post)

UPDATE 3:
Check the beta of the new version at Google Sitemap Generator v2 (BETA) which comes as a WordPress Plugin and a grahpical administration page!