A while ago my blog started to act up by randomly showing translated pages in place of the desired language. The culprit was a Wordpress caching plugin (Hyper Cache) that started to misbehave with the latest upgrade. I promptly disabled it and went on a search for a replacement.
As you may have read in one of my previous blog entries, specifically “NginX and Apache, but no memcached”, I prefer to use NginX as the front-end serving static files, and Apache as a back-end dealing with the dynamic pages. So it would be ideal if NginX could serve up static Wordpress files, which is exactly what I am doing now with the help of WP Super Cache. View Full Article »
Since I started this blog I have been using WordTwit by BraveNewCode (they ran out of spaces apparently). It’s a simple to use plugin for Wordpress that will update your Twitter status whenever you publish a new blog article.
You can customize your message and use [title] to replace it with the article’s actual title and [link] with a (shortened) URL to the article. So you could do something like “New blog entry ‘[title]‘ posted at [link]“ – Well, perhaps you’d want to keep it as short as possible though, but it’s to give you an idea.
So given that you can customize your message, you can also add one or two hashtags. But these are all done manually, for example “Blog [title] – [link] #blog” is what I was using myself.
But the #blog hashtag isn’t really something a lot of people will search for. So why not re-use the tags that I already have added to my article with Wordpress? Like this article for example, can’t I use its customization tag as the #customization hashtag in my Twitter update? Well, with some modifications to WordTwit, it’s possible. Here’s how. View Full Article »
I really like the efficiency and simplicity of the NginX web server (pron.: “Engine X”). In one of my previous blurbs, “NginX and Apache, but no memcached”, I gave some numbers on how well it performed on a no-frills server.
For Debian and Ubuntu users installing NginX couldn’t be easier. Simply issue the command apt-get install nginx command and do some basic configuration.
However, the version availble in the Debian and Ubuntu’s package repositories has not been compiled with IPv6 support. If you need this, or if you prefer to use bleeding-edge technology, then compiling NginX is the solution. View Full Article »
As you may know, the Opera 10 web browser was officially released today. I have been enjoying version 10 since it has been in Beta, and most features made it into the final version. A wonderful browser! But one feature that I had hoped for was never implemented in Opera at all: a Firefox-style search.
Let me explain what I mean. When you highlight text in Opera and right-click it, you can select “Search” or “Search With…” from a pop-up menu that appears. It’s a great feature, but the problem is that it uses the same window I’m currently using to browse a website. Firefox lets you search highlighted text as well, but it opens the search results in a new background tab.
Thankfully Opera is highly configurable and this how I added an extra menu option. View Full Article »
Whenever you reach this website from a search engine or a popular social or bookmarking website, a friendly greeting will welcome you and possibly suggest a few other articles based on your search keywords. This is courtesy the WP Greet Box plug-in for WordPress, developed by Thaya Kareeson.
The administration interface for this plug-in is quite intuitive and it will give the administrator a number of options of when and how often to show the message. For instance, you could set it to show a greeting to those arriving from Google and for a maximum amount of time only.
If enabled, a website visitor is also able to close the greeting box manually and thereby able to override the maximum amount of time set in the administration.
Unfortunately the greeting will remain at its set location for as long as the page is visible or until the user closes it manually. To avoid visitors having to manually close things that they do not wish to see, I’ve implemented an auto hide feature. View Full Article »
