Yoast

Technorati Pepper for Mint

Joost de Valk — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:42:47 +0000

I've been playing with the thought of developing a Pepper for Mint for ages, but never got to it. Tonight I decided to do it, and it turned out to be incredibly easy!

So I've developed a Pepper that has two panes, one displays your Technorati scores like this:

The other displays the latest links Technorati has found for your blog, like this:

I used the Duck Soup Technorati API library to do this, and have to say it's very easy to use.

Download it here.

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. If you want to do back-link analysis Yoast style, try out SEO Spyglass, the best desktop back-link checker out there, especially for it's price!

Technorati Pepper for Mint

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Twitter iPhone apps side by side

Joost de Valk — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:27:38 +0000

Twitter is now officially a part of my life. I find myself checking Twitter more often then my email, and that, I guess, forces me to be smart about how I use it.

I've been using Twitterific and Twinkle side by side for a while, but both annoyed me at times. They look like this:

I was missing the easy to reach replies tab, and found both to be a tad bit slow. I remembered from this post from Chris Brogan that he used Twittelator, so I downloaded that and played around. It's better, but it's not as simple and solid as I want my client to be. It's color schemes look cool though, check out this one:

The bad thing about it is that it takes too much screen per tweet, which makes it hard to read a lot of tweets quickly.

Now that I had installed 3 apps already, I thought what the heck, let's try the other ones. I found Twitterfon, and I think this one is here to stay. It's got everything you need, from a replies and direct messages tab to your normal timeline. It supports GPS and taking pictures and search with a history of your recent searches. And, to boot, it's by far the fastest Twitter app on my iPhone to start up. It looks clean like this:

Best thing about it? It's free!

So basically, I think Twitterfon will be my primary iPhone Twitter app for the coming months, as it seems to be everything I need from a Twitter client!

Twitter iPhone apps side by side

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Simple scripts for speedy WordPress actions

Joost de Valk — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:44:12 +0000

Sometimes, when moving or installing WordPress blogs, you'll have a need for some simple scripts to help do simple things. I found a couple of those that helped me out, and I thought I'd share them with you!

Easily install WordPress

This first one I shared on my newsletter a couple of weeks back: EasyWP Installer is a script that helps you quickly install a WordPress if the only thing you have is FTP access. What it does?

It downloads all the WordPress files for you, so you only have to upload this 8kb file, instead of uploading the entire WordPress directory! Especially on somewhat slower connections, this can be a huge timesaver.

Easily backup your database

For the same reason, when you have no other access to your database than through localhost, you'll want to dump it through a simple script instead of having to install something like phpMySQLadmin. For this purpose, Huang Kai developed a script aptly called mysqldump. In this script, you'd have to enter db name, username, host etc.

I have adapted his script. If you upload it to a WordPress directory, it will auto load the values from the wp-config directory, and allow you an easy way of dumping the database to a MySQL file. Download my version of the script here.

Resetting your administrator password

Something went wrong in your install? Or you lost the admin password to your blog in some other way? Use the script emergency.php to easily reset it. It allows you to reset the password and then automatically sends an email to the blog administrator telling him what happened.

Simple scripts for speedy WordPress actions

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Personal note: wedding pictures!

Joost de Valk — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:45:55 +0000

So I've been meaning to show a couple of these to all my readers for a while but just didn't get to doing it, but here goes. Serge Chamuleau of Trouwen in Arnhem made these wonderful pictures of my wife Marieke and son Tycho at our wedding (ow yeah, warning, I'm in some of them too).

Personal note: wedding pictures!

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Your homepage: your blogs showcase

Joost de Valk — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:18:47 +0000

When you get to a blog you've never visited before, through a search, a listing on a social network site or a link on another blog, what kind of page do you land up on? Usually, it'll be an article page. You'll read the article, and decide, based on that article and the other info and look & feel offered to you on that page, whether you'll go on through the site or not.

If you decide to go on, you'll either go directly to another article, or you'll most probably hit one of two links: the blogs about page, or its homepage. This time, you pick the homepage. If the site you're visiting has a "default" theme, you'll see a listing of the last 10 posts and the same sidebar you already saw on the article you just read. That's it.

Isn't that a blatant misuse of the trust you've just given that site? Wouldn't it be way more appropriate if the site showed you the very best content it can offer you, and gave you a sample of what kind of content you can find on it?

That is your homepage! It's a showcase of your blog. Whether people went to it because they heard from someone "you should go to *****.com, it's cool" or because they've just read an article and want to learn more about your site, that page is probably your best chance of getting a new subscriber.

So what should be on your homepage? This is the bare minimum I'd say:

An about text about yourself / about text about the blog.
A big call to action, the action being subscribing, either through email or RSS.
A listing of your latest posts.
Your "taxonomies", either your category structure, your tag structure or both.

After that it's all about personal preferences. I like to show off some of my best content by having featured posts and plugins, and of course I show off my Twitter.

So, how does your blogs homepage do on these criteria? What would you do differently?

Your homepage: your blogs showcase

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Using the Technorati API on your blog

Joost de Valk — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:34:00 +0000

In my effort to remove all badges from my front page and decrease the load time, I have now moved to using the Technorati API to display Technorati info. It looks like this:

The code is almost as easy as the code to display your FeedBurner subscribers or your last tweet. You'll need to create an account with Technorati and then get your API key. That page will also tell you how much queries you've made that day, and what your daily allowance is.

This is the code, including caching:

$technorati = get_option("technorati");
if ($technorati['lastcheck'] < ( mktime() - 600 ) ) {
	$apikey 	= "apikey";
	$endpoint 	= "http://api.technorati.com/cosmos?key=".$apikey;
	$request 	= $endpoint."&url=yoast.com&limit=10";
	$snoopy 	= new Snoopy;
	$result 	= $snoopy->fetch($request);
	if ($result) {
		$pattern1 = '/([0-9]+)<\/inboundblogs>/';
		$pattern2 = '/([0-9]+)<\/inboundlinks>/';
		$pattern3 = '/([0-9]+)<\/rank>/';
		preg_match($pattern1, $snoopy->results, $matches);
		preg_match($pattern2, $snoopy->results, $matches2);
		preg_match($pattern3, $snoopy->results, $matches3);
		$technorati['inboundblogs'] = number_format($matches[1]);
		$technorati['inboundlinks'] = number_format($matches2[1]);
		$technorati['rank'] 	= number_format($matches3[1]);
		$technorati['lastcheck']= mktime();
		update_option("technorati",$technorati);
	}
}
echo "Technorati
";
echo "".$technorati['inboundblogs']." blogs linked
	".$technorati['inboundlinks']." times in the last 6 months,
	ranking it as ".$technorati['rank']." among all blogs.
";

That's it! Let me know if you've got any questions!

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The full guide to mailto links!

Joost de Valk — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:08:24 +0000

For a small project I had to create a smart mailto: link to make my life a bit easier. I wanted it to hold not only a to and the subject (I'd figured that much out) but a multi lined body too.

Turns out that is pretty darn easy to do. So, for my own reference, and yours, here's a complete overview of everything possible with a mailto link.

There are a couple of variables you can use, and you'd have to do that in standard URL format:

mail link

Here are the variables you can use in these mailto links:

mailto:	to set the recipient, or recipients, separate with comma
&cc=	to set the CC recipient(s)
&bcc=	to set the BCC recipient(s)
&subject=	to set the email subject, URL encode for longer sentences, so replace spaces with %20, etc.
&body=	to set the body of the message, you can add entire sentences here, including line breaks. Line breaks should be converted to `%0A`.

Some mailto examples

Simple mailto link:

mail link

mailto link with subject:

mail link

mailto link with multiple recipients:

mail link

mailto link with a CC:

mail link

mailto with message body already started:

mail link

mailto with 3 lines of message body:

mail link

mailto with 3 lines of message body and a BCC:

mail link

As you can see, you can add as many of these as you want and stack them on top of each other. Remember that after the email address you'll use a question mark to prefix the first variable, and ampersands ( & ) for each consecutive variable.

On top of that, for the code to be valid HTML, you have to replace every & with &.

Happy mailing!

The full guide to mailto links!

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Showing off your FeedBurner subscribers

Joost de Valk — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:47:54 +0000

Quite a few websites have started to show of their FeedBurner subscriber count with something else than a widget. To do that, you have to be able to grab the number of subscribers through the FeedBurner API.

Now I bet you want to know how! It's bloody easy in WordPress, just do this:

$fb = get_option("feedburnersubscribecount");
if ($fb['lastcheck'] < ( mktime() - 600 ) ) {
	$snoopy = new Snoopy;
	$result = $snoopy->fetch("http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburnerid");
	if ($result) {
		preg_match('/circulation=\"([0-9]+)\"/',$snoopy->results, $matches);
		if ($matches[1] != 0)
			$fb['count'] = $matches[1];
		$fb['lastcheck'] = mktime();
		update_option("feedburnersubscribecount",$fb);
	}
}
echo ''.$fb['count'].' Subscribers can\'t be wrong! Subscribe by email or to the RSS feed now!';

Copy, paste, replace feedburnerid with your own FeedBurner ID, and you're done!

Update: updated the code to include caching, as you might overload the FeedBurner API otherwise.

Update 2: if you get an error saying it can't find the class Snoopy, add this above the code:

require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/class-snoopy.php');

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Easily display your last Tweet

Joost de Valk — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:13:45 +0000

I wanted to show my latest tweet on the front page of this site, and although I know there are several plugins which probably could've helped me do this, I decided to see how easy the API was to use.

It turned out to be incredibly easy, as long as you have PHP 5.2 or higher, that is.

This is the code:

require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/class-snoopy.php');
$snoopy = new Snoopy;
$snoopy->fetch("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/jdevalk.json?count=1");
$twitterdata = json_decode($snoopy->results,true);
echo "\"".$twitterdata[0]["text"]."\"
";

As you can see, I use the Snoopy library to fetch the data, as that comes with WordPress by default. Than I decode the JSON results by using the json_decode function. This is the reason you need PHP 5.2 or up, as this was only included with this version of PHP.

Next, we output it. Of course, this is a quick & dirty implementation. If I got dugg now, and 1,000 people a minute came looking at that page, it should have some sort of caching in there. For now though, this is fine as it is!

Update: As Kim noticed in the comments, I've added some code to automatically link any @username mentions to those usernames. Replace the last echo line above with this:

$pattern = '/\@([a-zA-Z]+)/';
$replace = '.strtolower('\1').'">@\1';
$output = preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$twitterdata[0]["text"]);
echo "\"".$output."\"
";

You could even decide to add rel="nofollow" the $replace if you don't want those links to give juice.

Update 2: To make it even more complex, here is the entire code I now use, which excludes replies and caches the Twitter API requests so you won't overload the API:

require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/class-snoopy.php');
$tweet   = get_option("lasttweet");
$url  = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/jdevalk.json?count=20";
if ($tweet['lastcheck'] < ( mktime() - 60 ) ) {
  $snoopy = new Snoopy;
  $result = $snoopy->fetch($url);
  if ($result) {
    $twitterdata   = json_decode($snoopy->results,true);
    $i = 0;
    while ($twitterdata[$i]['in_reply_to_user_id'] != '') {
      $i++;
    }
    $pattern  = '/\@([a-zA-Z]+)/';
    $replace  = '.strtolower('\1').'">@\1';
    $output   = preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$twitterdata[$i]["text"]);  
 
    $tweet['lastcheck'] = mktime();
    $tweet['data']    = $output;
    $tweet['rawdata']  = $twitterdata;
    $tweet['followers'] = $twitterdata[0]['user']['followers_count'];
    update_option('lasttweet',$tweet);
  } else {
    echo "Twitter API not responding.";
  }
} else {
  $output = $tweet['data'];
}
echo "\"".$output."\"
";

As you can see it also saves the amount of followers you have into $tweet['followers'], which I then use to display this:


  
    $tweet['followers']?> followers on Twitter, and you?

Update 3: Another fix to automatically make all links clickable, below this line:

$output = preg_replace($pattern,$replace,$twitterdata[$i]["text"]);

Add:

$output = make_clickable($output);

This will use the WordPress internal make_clickable function to make sure that all URL's are clickable.

Enjoy!

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Install WordPress 2.6.3

Joost de Valk — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 07:01:34 +0000

Apparently, a security flaw has been found in the Snoopy library that WordPress uses. This has made the WordPress team put out a new release, WordPress 2.6.3. According to their blog post, you only have to change that class and the file holding the version number, but an astute developer on the WordPress developer mailing list noticed that they'd slipped one other minor fix in to. So to upgrade to 2.6.3, all you have to do is download these 3 files from wordpress.org:

And overwrite them in their appropriate directories. Make very sure that you're not overwriting the wp-includes/media.php but the one in wp-admin/includes/media.php.

Probably one of the easiest WordPress upgrades you've ever had in your life. It should be noted that I use the Snoopy library in several of my plugins, so you'd better upgrade!

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