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

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

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

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

After a bit of tinkering I have gotten WordPress multisite to work on a HostGator server setup. I am running WordPress 3.0 RC3.

After some simple editing on the wp-config.php file and the .htaccess file I added a wildcard DNS by adding a subdomain with just an asterix * and that allows WordPress to create the subdomains for multisite. Here is how to get it to work…

Step 1

Login to cPanel (something like .com/cpanel ) Go to subdomains and add one with just an asterix.

Step 2

Add this into wp-config.php to enable multisite.

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

Step 3

Login to your WordPress dashboard and go to Tools>>Network (.com/wp-admin/network.php) You will then see the following type of instructions.

Step 4

Add a directory named blogs.dir to the wp-content directory. It should look like /public_html/wp-content/blogs.dir

The CHMOD write permissions should be something like 755 to allow the server to write to the directory.

Step 5

Add what they tell you to add into the wp-config.php file

Mine looked like this:

define( 'MULTISITE', true );
define( 'SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL', true );
$base = '/';
define( 'DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'limecuda.com' );
define( 'PATH_CURRENT_SITE', '/' );
define( 'SITE_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1 );
define( 'BLOG_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1 );

Make sure that SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL is set at true.

Step 6

Add what they tell you to add into the .htaccess file.

Mine looked like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]

# uploaded files
RewriteRule ^files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

Step 7

I don’t know. Go start adding some sites on to your install. :)

Any questions?

Further Reading

• WordPress 3.0 Walkthrough: Getting Started with Multisite
• What To Do Or Consider After You Enable Multisite In WordPress
• Common WordPress Multisite Problems and Solutions

Thanks for reading. Enable WordPress Multisite with Subdomains (HostGator) is a post from Blake Imeson

Got a sizable amount of awesome links to dump on you today. Crazy, mad, ridiculously busy, that has been my last few weeks. There. That’s my excuse for infrequent posts. :) Onward…

Seth’s Blog: Things to ask before you redo your website – Great philosophical questions to answer for really anything you build on the web.

SEO

8 Ways to Target Keywords for Ranking and Usability | 10e20 – Very good summary of some important SEO concepts.

Web Design

CSS Sprites – Online CSS Sprite Builder / Generator – An easy generator to create CSS sprites to speed up your site. Google uses them like so…

Fresh Free High-Quality Icon Sets « Smashing Magazine – Grab some free high quality icons. I’m addicted to collecting these. Need any icons, just ask…

WordPress

300+ Resources to Help You Become a WordPress Expert | Webdesigner Depot – Good grief! This is an overwhelming, yet VERY helpful post.

How To Integrate Facebook With WordPress « Smashing Magazine – Talk about providing value! Smashing Mag never disappoints. I have been needing this info!

Themes

The Digital Business Card WordPress Theme – Human3rror – I Break Stuff. 

Plugins

WordPress › Socialize « WordPress Plugins – Choose which social media icons to include on each post. Great idea.

WordPress › After the Deadline « WordPress Plugins – High quality spell / grammar checking tool for WordPress. Recently bought by Automattic, owner of WordPress. 

WordPress › RSS Cloud « WordPress Plugins – New tech to make delivery of your RSS feeds quicker. Similar idea to PubSubHubbub. (Whose name always cracks me up)

ShopperPress – WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin – Another WordPress e-commerce plugin that looks promising. I wonder how it compares to WP-e-commerce or Shopp, among others.

Bonus

45 Brilliant Examples of Photo Manipulation Art | Noupe – fun post!

(Heads up: I’m hard at work on a huge post on WordPress plugins I’ve used)

Thanks for reading. Shared Links – More WordPress? Yep. is a post from Blake Imeson

These links are coming to you at the end of my first week of classes. Thus starts my senior year at Grove City College. Eeek!

Still have been reading some great things online and found these awesome links to share.

Study Shows Small Businesses That Blog Get 55% More Website Visitors – further proof that business need to be blogging. SEO value alone is worth the effort.

Five Minute Upgrade – Writing Blog Post Titles That Grab Attention

13 Vital Tips and Hacks to Protect Your WordPress Admin Area

OfficeTab – Adds Tabs to Microsoft Office – make Word, Excel, PowerPoint better.

Free and Commercial Stock Photography Sites

(New) 27 Circular Social Media Icons in 3 Sizes

Themes

Jungleland WordPress Theme

KeKo WordPress Theme

Bonus

Send a letter online :: Snailmailr.com – Cool way to send a “real” letter to someone.

30+ Fantastic HDR Photos by Grey Jones – if you don’t know what an HDR photo is, you must check this out. Gorgeous!

Thanks for reading. Shared Links – from Grove is a post from Blake Imeson

Latest helpful links I have come across since the last batch of shared links. Enjoy!

Twitter Tips for Beginners [VIDEO] from the amazing Darren Rowse (Problogger). This is actually more oriented for business use of Twitter. 

13 Tips For A Better E-Commerce Website

20 Nice Free Handwritten Fonts – it is amazing the fonts you can get for free!

SEOmoz | New Mozbar – I use SEObook’s toolbar but this may someday be a good alternative. Any opinions? (both are Firefox only)

WordPress Resources – 48 Resources, Tips, Tricks & Themes | Think Design – has some great WordPress dev. blogs ( I am subscribed to most of them) and tutorials.

Themes

15+ High Quality Free WordPress Themes Released in June-July 2009

Brownie WordPress Theme 

FreeStyle WordPress Theme 

Plugins

45+ Essential WordPress Plugins for Pro Blogging | Blog Perfume

WordPress › Quick Search « WordPress Plugins – suggests search terms as you type.

WordPress › Dashboard Notepad « WordPress Plugins – leave notes in WP backend.

WordPress › WP Pubsubhubbub « WordPress Plugins – New Google technology.

WordPress Plugin Competition Blog » Section Widget for your section-specific needs

Best Commercial WordPress Plugins: Ultimate Review List – two of the best WordPress E-commerce plugins are in this post.

Bonus Tool

Spam-me-not – e-mail link obfuscator – I use this to build mailto: links that are not easily scrapable by spam bots.

Please send me a message or leave a comment if this type of post is useful to you. Or is this unwanted content?

Thanks for reading. Shared Links – new WP plugins & more is a post from Blake Imeson

From my ramblings through the never-ending fields of internet information…

• 3 Forum Search Engines to Search 40.000+ Message Boards
• The Ultimate List of Basic SEO Resources for a Kick-Ass Start
• WooCamp Blog – WordPress

Themes

• Aubogasta WordPress theme

Plugins

• CMS plugins for WordPress
• CMS plugins for WordPress part 2
• CMS Plugins for WordPress, part 3
• 40 Exceptional “CMS Enabling” WordPress Plugins
• 5 Fresh WordPress Plugins Ready to Enhance Your Blog

Bonus :)

The Word of Mouth KFC challenge

Check out my new partnership.  I build/manage this blog, Scott writes the killer content. Sweet deal. Phone Savant | Tips, Tricks & Reviews. Amplify Your Mobile Life.

Spread the love!

Thanks for reading. Shared Links – Spread the Love is a post from Blake Imeson