Another quick tip to help you optimize your site: sometimes you want to load one or more images in a post in a nice Thickbox or Lightbox. But in most cases, you don’t need to load these scripts, wouldn’t it be cool if you could load these scripts only when you want them to load?

I decided, that the only time I want Thickbox to load, is when I manually add class=”thickbox” to the code of a post or page…

Warning: major geekery ahead! Sometimes you need to see what’s wrong with a WordPress install, and you need to see it fast. I’ve had a set of hacks around for a while to do that, but finally started combining it into a WordPress Debug Theme. This theme is quite simple for now, as it only does a few things, but does them quite effectively.

The first thing it does, on the homepage of the blog you’ve activated it on, is show the most important constants for that blog (see this screenshot)…

I was upgrading a WordPress MU site we work on and came across an annoying issue: core update wouldn’t work the way it’s supposed to. I got the following error:

Unpacking the update.
Could not copy files.
Installation Failed.

After a bit of Googling I found a thread in the WordPress forums that contained a gem of a fix:

In the file /wp-admin/includes/class-wp-upgrader.php change this:

// Copy update-core…

This morning I was pleasantly surprised to find a new advertiser had signed on to my blog. The guys at Automattic have placed an ad for VideoPress, and I had to admit that I had briefly looked at the service but hadn’t done anything with it yet. I guess this was a good time to change that, and to be honest, I’m impressed.

I’ve made a short video, which covers how to get your VideoPress account on WordPress…

One of my colleagues was working on a site for a client of ours, and needed to apply styling to the previous and next post link. As in most of our sites we use Lester Chan’s excellent wp-pagenavi plugin so I dove into that to check how I could style it.

Turns out Lester is being very good about it and is using the WordPress internal functions next_posts_link and previous_posts_link. This is good because both of these functions have a simple filter that we can hook onto to add a class to those links, and the code below will work in all instances, also when you’re not using Lester’s plugin but just plain old WordPress…

Justin Cutroni wrote a great post a while back on Tracking Zero Result Searches in Google Analytics. Tracking zero result searches on your website (corporate site, e-commerce website or your blog) is vital to get a glimpse of what your visitors are looking for but can’t find on your website.

Beneath you will find more info the updated Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress and a guide on setting up zero result search tracking on your blog, but first we’ll go in depth with the marketing and usability perspective of tracking those failed searches…

Last nights Press This featured a very pleasant conversation with Aaron Brazell, also known as Technosailor, the author of the upcoming WordPress Bible. We discussed a lot of things, as usual, and as I promised in the comments on my previous Press This update, I’ve kept more notes so I can do this post and give you all the links to the stuff we talked about!

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…

So since I haven’t gone as far as adding the Press This podcast straight into my feed (I think I will though, if you have a problem with that, I’d love for you to let me know in the comments), I wanted to give you an update here on the recent shows.

There have been three guest on three different shows:

• Mark Jaquith on the Future of Wordpress An interesting show and discussion for those of you interested how WordPress will develop over the next few versions…

Over the last few months I’ve been doing a lot of work on my plugins. I’ve found out that with each new release, they get more users, which is good, and get more time demanding, which is unfortunate. Now with OrangeValley going so well, and the things we have planned there, as well as my wife being 7 months pregnant and the fact that we’ll thus have a 2nd kid soon, I probably won’t have as much time as I used to have to maintain all my plugins…

Think Visibility by sk8geek

So I’m starting to wake up from Think Visibility, after flying back yesterday to dive straight into a family party. I can honestly say it was very cool, my presentation went quite well I think, judging by the average of the reactions. Julian’s presentation after mine was very interesting as it was the first time I ever heard someone who actually works at a newspaper in Europe talk smartly about SEO…

In about 2 weeks (on september 12th) I’ll be keynoting the ThinkVisibility conference in Leeds, talking about WordPress, blogging, SEO, online marketing and more.

If you’re in the area, or even if you’re not, ThinkVisibility looks like an awesome conference, with speakers and panelists like Judith Lewis, Patrick Altoft, Chris Garrett, to name but a few of my friends I saw in the list.

If you’re coming, use the coupon code YOAST, that’ll get you 20 pounds off the already low ticket price!

ThinkVisibility is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites…

Last night, Carl Hancock of Gravity Forms was my guest on the 3rd episode of Press This. We discussed what this awesome new plugin does, how they went about developing it and a whole lot more. If you’re interested, listen to the show.

I wanted to talk a bit more about Gravity Forms though. I have my own contact form plugin, and yet, I have decided to go with Gravity Forms for all the contact forms on this site, and it’s now the only contact form we use for all our client projects…

Last night was the night of the second episode of Press This, and I hadn’t even found time to blog about the first one yet! The first show was with John Godley, of HeadSpace2 / Redirection and other plugin fame, this second one was with Frederick Townes, the CTO of Mashable.

In the show with John Godley we discussed WordPress Plugins and plugin development, and how the “world” works for WordPress plugin developers…

One of the things we’re doing more and more of recently is building multilingual, multi domain corporate sites in WordPress. Doing that used to be a fair amount of work, but we’ve been able to make it a lot simpler lately.

We start the process with a simple WordPress MU install, to which we then add the Multi Site Manager plugin, to be able to run multiple domains off of it. Now this is all pretty simple and straight forward…

While Sociable comes with a pretty large set of sites, there are always people that want to add their own. While this is pretty easy to do, you’d have to update the plugin every time it’s updated, which is quite often, so that’s not really a workable solution.

Today, I’ve fixed that. I’ve just submitted version 3.4 to wordpress.org, this version makes it possible to add sites to Sociable from either a plugin or from your theme…

I’ve been doing some changes to how the WordPress newsletter gets sent out recently, and one of those changes was because I have switched to using MailChimp. I was getting sick of Aweber after some issues, and when the folks from MailChimp decided to advertise on my blog I contacted them.

So now, MailChimp is the newest sponsor of this blog, or actually of the accompanying newsletter, and the day I switched they also released a very cool plugin, that will be a great companion to my Google Analytics plugin, called Analytics360°…

Sometimes the cool plugins are the small little things. With the advent of the new changelog addition to the WordPress readme.txt standard, it became possible to parse these changelogs and show the changes straight into your WP Plugins section. This is exactly what the ChangeLogger plugin does.

It looks like this:

Pretty nifty huh? I thought this was kinda funny by the way:

Cool plugin find: Changelogger is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites…

One of the most annoying features ever in WordPress is the “feature” to convert smilies into images of smileys, MSN style. Where lots of stuff like this is dismissed these days as “plugin territory”, this annoying feature has been in WP since 0.71…

Anyway, sometimes you’ll want to disable this feature from within your theme, or maybe even as a sitewide plugin to disable it all over your WordPress MU installation…

I’ve been working on one of the largest WordPress MU projects we’ve taken on so far the last couple of days. We’ve been migrating the blogo.nl blogs (a Dutch blog network started in 2005) over to WordPress MU. There were several things in this project that were nice to figure out, I’ll go over two of them, but not before giving a shout out to the guys at WPMU Dev, their support and WP MU plugins have been a huge help…

…

So I’m a big fan of CSS image replacement, for several reasons, most importantly because it allows for a semantically correct page while having some text replaced with images, but also because I love sprites and I love using them well.

I’ve also always been in favor of the use of CSS Image Replacement for headings, while not wanting to fake the search engines, I’ve kept a simple rule: if you OCR the page, it should be exactly the same as when you read the HTML…

While I was working on a new system for my WordPress newsletter, a system that uses its own custom feed (skipping FeedBurner which caused errors last week), I had to figure out how to exclude a category from my blogs regular feed as well as my homepage and some other pages.

There’s a couple of ways to go about this, but what I decided to do was the following:

function mail_feed_query($query) {
if ($query->is_home || $query->is_front_page) {
$query->set(’cat’,'-120′);
}
return $query;
}
add_filter(’pre_get_posts’,'mail_feed_query’);

(120 is the category ID here)

This filters out the query from the home page and/or front page of your blog…

…

They’re back! And with “they”, I mean the articles specifically written for the WordPress newsletter. Some of you noticed that I started sending out my feed to all of you, because I found out that a lot of you (and there’s almost 6,000 of you now) weren’t reading my blog.

Most of you wanted the “original” newsletter back though, so I decided to do something special: I’ve set up a special category on my blog, that isn’t shown on the homepage and is just for you girls and guys…

With all the new API enhancements in the last few versions of WordPress, I thought it was time to give my WordPress Textmate bundle an update, as I first released it exactly a year ago. Here are the things I’ve added:

• Added ‘esc’ tab-expansion: with the help of Mark Jaquith’s great article Escaping API updates for WordPress 2.8, typing esc and then pressing tab now brings up a menu with options to choose the proper escaping function…

I’ve just released Sociable 3.3 which comes with a very cool new feature: awe.sm integration. Awe.sm is a URL shortener. Free for those with an account (it’s in private beta right now), and then it uses awe.sm, but for $100 you get a URL shortener on your OWN domain!

Now I happened to have a cool domain lying around which I registered specifically for this purpose: yoa.st, and that is what I’m using now within my Sociable…

While in a previous post I talked about WordPress database optimization, with this post I intend to show you how to improve your sites performance a bit more by hosting your javascripts with Google.

This only works if you’re using jQuery, prototype or another library that is supported by Google’s AJAX Librararies API.

While those javascript libraries are included with WordPress and WordPress can already serve them in a reasonably efficient way, there’s an even better solution: use the Google Libraries plugin…

I use FeedBurner to track all my feed subscribers, but sometimes I want to provide a different feed to other people (without my feed signature for instance, or using excerpts instead of full feeds).

Now when you use FeedBurner’s Feedsmith plugin, this’ll redirect all of your normal feeds to FeedBurner, and that’s a smart thing to do: you don’t want to give those custom feeds to people they aren’t meant for…

WordPress, with version 2.3, introduced the concept of Tags. As described by Wikipedia, a tag is “a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information”. This meant WordPress had a hierarchical way of classifying information (categories), and a non hierarchical way of classifying information. As far back as in 2006, people were discussing the fact that tags are not categories.

The issue is that WordPress calls them both “taxonomies”, when they’re actually not…

This is quite big news for me, and for OrangeValley Projects, the development side of OrangeValley that we’ve been starting up over the last few months. In short: Brian Gardner, of StudioPress and Revolution fame, and myself, have decided to partner up, to provide better SEO’d themes to StudioPress customers.

Brian is the one who kickstarted the premium theme space, and he was also the first premium theme developer to realize that he could stick to the GPL and still have his themes be premium…