Basically, if a “recent post” link in this widget was from the “Tools” category (for instance) then it could be styled with a CSS background image or a color specific to that category.

I ended up modifying this Recent Posts plugin. (In enhanced-recent-posts/includes/plugin-class.php line 161)

Here is what I ended up using:

116

<a class="<?php $category = get_the_category();  echo $category[0]->category_nicename; ?>" href="</pre"></a>

Here is what it then looked like when the code worked it’s magic:

<a class="tool-category" href="...</pre"></a>

This WordPress function for getting the category was very helpful.

Have a better way to style links with CSS by category? Bonus if there is a plugin already doing this.

Thanks for reading. Style Links with CSS by Category – WordPress is a post from Blake Imeson

Here is where you can download Texter.

Here are the scripts that I used:
 

10{Tab}ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM{Enter}
20{Tab}ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM{Enter}
20{Tab}ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM{Enter}
30{Tab}ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM{Enter}
30{Tab}ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM{Enter}
30{Tab}ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM{Enter}
30{Tab}ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM{Enter}

Please let me know if you are using this and if you have found any other cool uses for Texter!

Thanks for reading. Quickly Add MX Records for Google Apps is a post from Blake Imeson

I recently got the idea to have all my external links to Wikipedia have a little “W” icon next to them in order to indicate that the links went to Wikipedia.

The solution I came up with is to use some CSS and Regular Expressions to automatically add the image to any URLs that have http://en.wikipedia.org/ in them.

Here is a link to Wikipedia. (if you are not viewing my blog on a modern browser like Chrome/Firefox this may not work)

Here is an image in case you can’t see.

/* Wikipedia */
a[href^="http://en.wikipedia.org"]
{
padding-right: 15px;
background: url("/images/wikipedia.png") no-repeat scroll right top transparent;
}

You can download my little “W” icon at http://www.blakeimeson.com/images/wikipedia.png

I am sure there may be a more elegant and versatile solution to this, if you know of a way to do this better please comment below!

Thanks for reading. Style Wikipedia Links Automatically – CSS and RegEx is a post from Blake Imeson

A client needed to import her RSS feed into a MailChimp campaign but the image wasn’t showing up. Here is how I finally got it to work.

MediaRSS

You first need to make sure the feed (yoursite.com/feed usually) is correctly bringing in the first image. I used a plugin called wpRichFeeds (view plugin author site) which adds the enclosure information to your feed in WordPress. This is basically plug-n-play.

MailChimp Code

Then with some creative MailChimp RSS merge tags I got it to work. This is what I used:

<a href="*|RSSITEM:URL|*"><img src="*|RSSITEM:ENCLOSURE_URL|*" alt="" width="300" height="200" /></a>

I hope this will save some people the aggravation of trying to get MailChimp to automatically pull in blog post images from an RSS feed.

This post also helped me get to this point, RSS email: include post thumbnail image from WordPress RSS feed

Please comment if this helps you out! Any tweaks?

Thanks for reading. MailChimp – How to Add Images to RSS feeds in WordPress is a post from Blake Imeson

Ever wanted to see how prices for an item on Amazon have changed over time? Eh, maybe not but a new Chrome Extension does just that.

It is called theTracktor and here is a screenshot to show what it does:

I installed it because I am going to be buying my second Canon Powershot (Great camera!) in the next 2 weeks and the price recently dropped and I wanted to see how the price has been changing over time.

Tracktor will also let you sign up to get email alerts of price changes.

Enjoy and watch Amazon prices fall!

Thanks for reading. Track Amazon Price Changes Over Time > theTracktor is a post from Blake Imeson

If you have accidentally changed the WordPress Site address in General Settings and now cannot access your site, this post is for you.

Inspired by this Smashing post, What Is The Worst Design or Programming Mistake You’ve Ever Made?, I decided to share mine and hope that this post can be my “Iceberg, dead ahead!” cry.

Setup: I was working on a new client site. I had a development site going in one tab and their live site in another. Problem is that the WordPress backends looked almost identical.

I thought I was changing the WordPress site address on my dev build but I was on the live one. Eek.

When I changed this address WordPress thought it lived elsewhere. The only way I knew at the time to fix this was to use PHPmyAdmin to muddle through the database and find that field and change it back.

I felt a shock of terror run through me as I just took a live and very public site offline and it was now redirecting to my website and the dev subdirectory I was using. I eventually got PHPmyAdmin access and changed it but I have since learned a trick that only requires your being able to edit wp-config.php

Open up wp-config.php and paste these lines (with your site name) into it after the initial commenting:

define('WP_HOME', 'http://sitename.com');
define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://sitename.com');

(Taken from my beautiful WordPress code snippets list)

When you do this, the fields for this in the WordPress backend will be uneditable and grayed out. This is a good idea if you are passing a site off to a client who will have full admin access. This will prevent them from accidentally changing this very important WordPress option.

Hope that this is helpful! Comment if you have done the same thing so I don’t feel I am the only one. :)

Thanks for reading. Accidentally Changed the WordPress Site Address? is a post from Blake Imeson

I recently had a client who needed to send me a lot of pictures and misc. files for a website build. It would have been cumbersome to email them all and thankfully I came across this marvelous solution from this post:  Allow Anyone To Upload Files To a Folder in Your Dropbox Account. Major props to them for publishing the steps to do this.

I have tried to show my step-by-step process for doing this on a WordPress site. What this allowed me to do is create a page on our WordPress site that allows a client to upload files to us using a simple upload box.

When they upload them they are quickly put into any Dropboxes that we have set up.

Dropbox intro: Dropbox is a tool that allows me to have a folder on my computer and everything in it is synced online and then mirrored on any other computers I have Dropbox on. My business partner and I have a shared Dropbox folder for our company that contains all our client files.

If I add/edit anything it will update it online and on his computer within seconds. Complete with notifications. Did I mention it is free? You get 2gb of storage free but that can go up to 8gb by referring people.

Steps to Make this Happen

1. Sign up for Dropbox

2. Set up the “Intake” folder it can be named anything.

3. Download the files from this site -  download the one under “Update” that says “New script” – it is a file called dupass.rar - this allows you to set a password.

4. Unrar the file and open index.php in a text editor

5. On line 27 change default to a password of your choice

$passw = "default"; //change this to a password of your choice.

6. On line 52 put in your username and password. It is in PHP so it will not be visible.

$uploader = new DropboxUploader('you@youremail.com', 'yourpassword');// enter dropbox credentials

7. On line 75 you can change the folder files go into from “shared” to whatever folder you create. If it is a folder in dropbox put “yourfoldername” but if it is within that folder then put “yourfoldername/otherfolder”

<input style="display:none" type="text" name="dest" value="shared" />

8. Now to integrate it into WordPress – if your theme already has template files like a full-width file then you can just copy that and change the name to template-intakepage.php and then make sure it has something like:

<?php/*Template Name: Client Home*/?>

at the top of the file. This file will likely have the usual WordPress calls to your header, sidebar, footer.  You can also create a template file from index.php. For a good tutorial for creating and using this template file see this post on creating template files.

9. You now need to take the code you had changed in the index.php file – everything between the <body> tags and paste it into the WordPress template somewhere probably after

 <?php the_content(); ?>

10. Upload DropboxUploader.php to the same directory that your template file is. This should be your theme folder. /wp-content/themes/YourTheme/DropboxUploader.php

11. Now you need to have a page created in WordPress that is also using this template. Publish and it should be ready to take files that are uploaded and automatically put them in Dropbox.

Notes:

• You could also make this page private in WordPress so that only logged in users can access it
• You can change the CSS styling of the form, its messages and the button. I am still changing ours. I may move the password field around.
• I would change the title of the form and wording of the message and the form button. No one needs to know it is Dropbox

Thanks again to Ampercent for this awesome script!

Let me know if you implement this or have any ideas for improvement.

Update: A friend of ours may be helping us whip up a WordPress plugin for this. Hang tight!

Update 2: It appears there is already some type of WordPress plugin for this. Anyone tried it?

Thanks for reading. Use Dropbox to Intake Client Files on Your WordPress Site is a post from Blake Imeson

Enjoy!

Thanks for reading. How to install incompatible addons in Firefox 4 Beta is a post from Blake Imeson

I decided to throw them out to you all and see if there are any you like particularly or ones I have missed. Suggestions?

I am leaning towards these first ones particularly.

• WorkingPoint
• FreeAgentCentral
• FreshBooks
• Invoicera

• Quickbooks Online
• Curdbee
• Openair
• InvoiceBubble free
• InvoiceJournal free
• InvoicePlace
• Endeve
• BambooInvoice self-hosted / free
• SimplyInvoices
• FreeAgentCentral
• BlinkSale/
• BillingBoss free
• Zoho Invoice
• WinkBill
• NeoInvoice – in beta
• InvoicingApp – coming in late 2010
• Time59

As you can see this is a crowded space! I may end up doing a review post of all invoicing apps.

Thanks for reading. Invoicing Sites – Best way to invoice clients? is a post from Blake Imeson

What happens is that it creates a redirect automatically in the Modified posts group.

Tools>>Redirection>>Groups>>Modified posts

Just delete the redirect that has been created to “/” and it should be fine.

This solves the Redirection plugin bug, problem, issue, whatever. This only happens with newly published posts / pages. Hopefully they will fix this awesome WordPress plugin soon.

Resources

• Fix For Home Page Redirects To Newly Published Pages Problem After Upgrading To WordPress 3.0

Thanks for reading. WordPress Redirection Plugin – Home Page Redirect Problem / Bug is a post from Blake Imeson