His tips in particular are useful for optimizing the performance of social media buttons and ads etc, but keep in mind there are lots of aspects of WordPress to optimize, like SEO, database performance and more.

Killer Performance Tips from the Expert is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

We talked about which area's of WordPress are under utilized according to Aaron, and he mentioned an area that is dear to my heart as well: the widget functionality that was introduced in 2.8. WP Engineer has a great post on how to build widgets 2.8 style, but if you're a TextMate user, like both Aaron and myself, you should really check out both my TextMate bundle for WordPress and Mark Jaquith's TextMate WordPress widget snippet.

Then we talked briefly about BackPress, which is the attempt to normalise all the code that is shared between BBPress and WordPress into one library of functions and classes that can be used separately as well. Aaron mentioned using it for some non WordPress projects and I've done the same.

We also ranted together on WordPress security, mainly because Aaron did a post on Technosailor with the title WordPress Security and How I’m Going to Take All Your Money. He explained his point: the people who know how to fix this stuff have jobs, they usually make their living building WordPress sites, we don't have the time to fix your blog, so please please upgrade, and if you do get hacked, and it's your dumb fault, we will charge you a lot of money for it.

When asked about his book signing tour it turns out that WordPress authors don't get flown around the world yet to promote their books, which probably has something to do with the WordCamp's being quite local and cheap to go to. I did mention that Aaron should actually be at WordCampNL, where I'll be speaking too October 31st, and he seemed eager to come but probably not this year...

There was a lot more that I'm not going to type out, you'll just have to listen to the show!

Make sure to subscribe to Press This by using the appropriate subscribe button on the Press This page, or tune in live on webmasterradio.fm each tuesday at 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern, 10 PM GMT, so you can join in the chat! Next week I'll be talking to my buddy Todd Garland of BuySellAds about how to monetize your blog!

Press This with Aaron Brazell is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The issue is that WordPress calls them both "taxonomies", when they're actually not. They're not, because the word taxonomy, as described in another Wikipedia page, assumes a hierarchy of sorts. Now, with version 2.8, WordPress introduces (or actually gives more easy access to the already available backend for) custom taxonomies.

These custom taxonomies can be either non-hierarchical (eg. "tag" like) or hierarchical (eg. "category" like), but for now only the non-hierarchical taxonomies benefit from the smooth integration. These taxonomies are more "real" taxonomies though, as they add a level of hierarchy to the tag structure.

Let me give you an example: you could have a People and a Places taxonomy. Now, when you write a new post, you decide to add a keyword in the People taxonomy. By doing that, you're saying that it's a keyword (or tag, if you want) of the type People, so it is hierarchical in a way. But it also makes the keyword that much more informative, as it adds another layer of information.

For those more visually inclined, my buddy Roy Huiskes helped me by making a graphical explanation of the subject:

Now as said, WordPress 2.8 gives more easy access to these new "non-hierarchical" taxonomies, but I wanted to make it even easier. Hence, my newest plugin: Simple Taxonomies. It takes care of creating the taxonomies, making sure their URL rewrites work (eg. http://example.com/people/joost/), creating widgets for it, allowing you to add it to the end of posts and excerpts, and even comes with a set of template tags for tag titles and descriptions.

What are “custom taxonomies”? is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• randomize the ad positions
• shows an "advertise here"button
• add styling to your images
• add specific styling to the advertise here button
• just type in the ad image URL, and the destination URL

Currently it allows for four ads, but I'm thinking of a way to make it allow for as much ads as you want. I'm wondering: what would you be wanting from such a widget? And would you be willing to pay for it?

Ads Widget for WordPress is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The code basically looks like this:

function widget_about_me($args) {
if (is_home()) {
extract($args);
query_posts('page_id=<pageid>');
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
echo $before_widget;
echo $before_title.get_the_title().$after_title;
the_content('');
echo $after_widget;
endwhile;
query_posts('');
}
}

The is_home() makes sure the widget only shows up on the homepage, and then you enter into a new loop with a specific page id. After having done that, I open the "normal" loop again, to make sure other widgets and stuff that relies on is_home() keeps working.

Of course you have to make sure that you 301 redirect the "page" you're using in the widget when it get's opened directly to your homepage. There's no reason for anyone to want to see just that content.

Conditional WordPress widgets with rich editable text is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!