Nov 06
2010

You may have cause, at some point, to modify the behavior of the QuickTags in the HTML editor of WordPress (the non-WYSIWYG, non-“Visual” editor). There are a lot of tutorials available for editing the quicktags.js file in the WordPress wp-includes folder, but they all seem to want you to edit the file directly. That’s a Bad Idea™ because the next time you upgrade, your changes…

Nov 05
2010

I know some people have been moving away from WordPress and toward blogging solutions like Tumblr. The number one reason I hear for making this move is that WordPress gets to complicated once you start customizing. Distractingly so. I don’t disagree.

I love tweaking WordPress websites, though, and have built quite a few of them. The plugin community is part of what makes it so…

Sep 10
2010

Evernote introduced Site Memory today, providing an easy way to help people clip to Evernote from your site while maintaining control over how your content appears and is attributed. While some instructions are provided for WordPress, some of us will obviously want to customize things a little further.

Jul 24
2010

NOTE: Be sure to read through the comments, there’s a lot of additional and very useful information in there. I’ll compile the notes as soon as I’m able and add them to the main post.

First, the hack described here is not MediaTemple’s fault, nor an exploit of their security system. It’s a reminder to all of us that checking permissions and updating…

Jul 01
2010

I have an admin username (it’s not admin) which I use to manage my WordPress blog, and an editor user with which I write posts and leave comments. Sometimes, though, I get confused, lazy or both, and end up leaving comments as my admin user. This rather defeats the purpose of using a non-default admin username, which is generally done for security purposes (if they can’t guess the…

May 26
2010

I ran into a problem recently. I wanted to have links to images be “lightboxed,” but I also wanted to blog in Markdown and not have to write out link tags with “rel” attributes for every image link. There are several existing plugins for WordPress that will do this automatically, but I’ve been sticking with the jQuery Lightbox plugin, which handles WordPress galleries in this…

Apr 17
2010

I was working on a quick website for my wife, and trying to make things as simple as possible for both of us. For me, I just wanted to give her a flexible template that I didn’t have to hack much on (I went with Thesis), and for her, I wanted her to be able to start posting with a minimal learning curve. She just got a Flip, and wanted to start posting video. Since she was…