MOHA blogging news and thoughts…
Web Invoice – Invoicing and billing for WordPress plugin has exceeded 1000 downloads. It has 1172 dowloads to date. First release of the plugin was made on March 15, 2009 and now in less than 1 month it has more than 1000 downloads.
Web Invoice is ideal for web developers, SEO consultants, general contractors, or anyone with a WordPress blog and clients to bill. If you come under any of the above, you should give Web Invoice a try.
Download or read more about Web Invoice.
Web Invoice and WP-Invoice are two WordPress plugins that allow sending invoices and bills. Web Invoice is a fork of WP-Invoice with lot of new features that most people will want. In the current release (1.6.2) they are:
If you are already using WP-Invoice and would like to leverage these new features, it’s simple. Follow the 3 step process to switch from WP-Invoice to Web Invoice.
invoice_log to web_invoice_log, invoice_main to web_invoice_main, invoice_meta to web_invoice_meta. (Assuming $table_prefix is empty)That’s all, you can use Web Invoice without losing that you generated with WP-Invoice.
SyntaxHighlighter2 WordPress plugin was released yesterday on WordPress Extend plugin repository. SyntaxHighlighter2 allows you to easily post syntax highlighted code all without loosing it’s formatting or making an manual changes. Main addition is upgrade to SyntaxHighlighter JavaScript 2.0 by Alex Gorbatchev. Also in this release the web master/blogger is given the ability to choose from 6 themes for the SyntaxHighlighter.
If you already using SyntaxHighlighter WordPress plugin and using XHTML, you should upgrade to SyntaxHighlighter2 because SyntaxHighlighter uses invalid XHTML. Bellow you will find the sample WordPress configuration file with SyntaxHighlighter2 🙂 .
[sourcecode language=’php’ ]
[/sourcecode]
WordPress object cache with memcached backend is mainly meant for WPMU and doesn’t work well if you happened to have many vanilla WordPress installations using the same memcached backend like it is pointed out here and here.
I have created a simple patch which you can apply against object-cache.php (downloadable from WordPress plugin repository) or here is the file already patched. The patch prepends the $blog_id to the object key. You will have to specify global variable $blog_id in wp-config.php and give it a unique id (like your blog url).
[sourcecode language=’php’]global $blog_id;
$blog_id = ‘mohanjith_net’;[/sourcecode]
FeedBurner Widget 1.2 (WordPress plugin) was released last Friday with much needed MyBrand support. Thank you Alexander Dichev for the release.
To my despair Facebook went read only for a brief period of time (aproximately 10 minutes). I was not able to comment on my friend’s status messages, or like them, or post my own status message; I was confronted with the message bellow. However adding friends, approving requests were working fine. I believe the issue was isolated to status messages and related functionality (IMHO most popular).
Facebook do not dare to do something like this again, I need Facebook to keep in touch with my friends. I’m not a Facebook addict, just that the issue happened to coincide with the time of day I would get on Facebook to get an update on my friends andmake my own online presence.
I would like to know whether you had a similar issue, or was it just me. At the time of writing the issue is fixed. Thanks Facebook for the quick fix.
I had been using last.fm for a while and recently tried out jango. Though jango lacks the bells and whistles of last.fm like desktop client, feeds, etc it does it’s job; play music.
I like jango for it’s discovery algorithm. It plays music I’d like. With time it has been improving. In contrast last.fm would get worst with time, playing songs I’d not like at all. Either from genres I wouldn’t like or from artist I have marked as I dislike.
jango seems to have better collection of tracks (more about quality than quantity) compared to last.fm. I really get annoyed when last.fm plays mix tapes, which doesn’t happen on jango 🙂
Biggest minus point of jango is lack of a desktop client, but it doesn’t bother me because I can browse around jango site without the track stopping (I believe they use iframes). Next is a lack of an API/feed. At least a feed of items I recently listened would have been nice, so I could add to the blog 🙂
IMHO, jango is good if you would like to listen to good quality tracs from artist you like and last.fm is awesome for discovering new music, new artist, and even new genres. last.fm has an API for the inner geek as well. last.fm is truely a radio while jango is more of a juke box.
Either way both are awesome services that help you avoid boredom and know about artist you listen to. I would say I like both jango and last.fm, each with it’s plus and minus.
Google Analytics for WordPress plugin adds an onclick attribute to links when “Track outbound clicks & downloads” is enabled irrespective of whether there is already an onclick attribute. AddThis plugin adds a link with onclick attribute to the post when enabled. This combination causes WordPress to generate invalid mark up. Same would happen if the post contains any links with onclick attribute (very unlikely scenario).
I have created a patch (with Git) that adds the content of $coolBit to the existing onclick attribute (without onclick=””) else a new onclick attribute is added with the $coolBit. You can download the patch. I have also reported the issue to Joost (plugin developer).
Hope this will be useful for someone in a similar situation until the fix makes it into the plugin.
WordPress plugin Smart Throttle 1.0.0 released. With this release Smart Throttle is hosted on WordPress plugin repository allowing users to easily install and upgrade.
In this release I have added the ability to configure throttling parameters. You can download the latest release from either here, here or from your WordPress blog under Plugins -> Add New in wp-admin.
Please do not forget to rate the Smart Throttle plugin and give your ideas to improve it. 🙂
My blog was hit with a comment spam flood which almost brought down the server under load. There were aproximately 30 bots continuously posting spam comments, geez don’t they realize that none of the comments get published. With all the writes to the database, my servers came to a crawling stop. I disabled comments for a while, until I figure out a means to prevent the spam messages from being posted. First option was CAPTCHA, I installed re-CAPTCHA WordPress plugin. This did reduce the spam but in an ugly way. I was thinking of a means to stop the nuisance spam without even writing to the database. Then I came accross this, and gave me the idea for Smart Throttle WordPress plugin. It’s very simple, depending on the rate of comments in the last hour by the user the comment flood time out will be automatically adjusted. Check out the plugin home page for details how it’s done. The plugin is released under GPLv3. I have now disabled re-CAPTCHA plugin and so far things are looking good, most of the spam bots are lost in the you are posting too fast message 😉 . Give your blog a break with Smart Throttle.