Tag: plugins

Found a Tag Cloud Plugin for WordPress

Ashley Bischoff7 Comments

I’ve been able to use more specific categories with my posts since installing the Cat2Tag plugin for WordPress. In short, it adds a text field below the textarea on the “Write Post” page where you can enter a comma-separated list of categories for the post. And, if a category doesn’t already exist, it’s automatically created for you.

One benefit to having more specific categories is more relevant categorization within Technorati. Each post in Technorati is listed by its tags and it assigns those tags based on the categories into which the post was placed. (Or, from the technical perspective, Technorati reads your RSS and extracts the categories from there.)

Anyhow, Cat2Tag has been working nicely; the only downside is that a regular list of categories could be a bit on the lengthy side. So, I’ve made use of Christoph Wimmer’s Heat Map Plugin for WordPress which you can see in the sidebar. The effect, also called a tag cloud, lists the categories sequentially but assigns font sizes based on the number of posts in each category.

I'm pleased with how the Heat Map Plugin worked out and Wimmer was thorough in his implementation. For one thing, rather than arbitrarily using pixel-based font-sizes, one of the function's parameters is a font-size unit — so, you can have it specify the sizing in ems, percentages, pts, or even inches.

And, as is common for WordPress plugins which “get data from the database and output it”, the function also allows you to specify code to insert before and after each link; so, if you set that to <li> and </li>, you can have a semantic unordered list (for those who aren't using a visual web browser).

Prevent Lost WordPress Posts

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

You may recall an entry from a couple weeks ago about pretty URLs in WordPress. As it turns out, I ended up writing that entry twice. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the first version, but I just accidentally closed that tab in Firefox at the time (oops). I meant to click on the right-most tab in my browser but I instead clicked on the “close tab” button right there instead. Poof!

I was a little bit annoyed but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I wrote the entry a second time and I later looked around to see if there were any utilities which might help prevent that kind of thing in the future. One that I thought to look for was some kind of “undo close tab” extension. Well, ask and ye shall receive — a guy named Dorando created an extension called Undo Close Tab (how apropos). And, if you'd normally be wary of downloading an extension from a forum post, rest assured that he has a home page for his extensions as well, though the bulk of the information on Undo Close Tab is in his forum post.

I then took aim at the second thorn in my side, that dumb close-tab button which foiled my plans earlier. After all, even though an undo-close-tab extension would have saved me from the predicament last time, I wouldn’t have even been in that scrape if it wasn’t so easy to hit that button ;). Fortunately, that’s easily done as well. This MozillaZine Knowledgebase article writes about moving the tabbar (to the bottom of the browser or elsewhere on your screen) but it also includes the steps on removing the close-tab button (regardless of whether you want to move the tab bar as well). In short, you can remove your close-tab button but shutting down your Firefox and adding these lines to userchrome.css:

/* remove the close-tab button */
.tabbrowser-tabs > stack {
display: none;
}

Your userchrome.css file goes in your Firefox profile directory but the file doesn’t exist by default. Rather, there’s an example file called “userChrome-example.css” which you can Save-As to userchrome.css and make use of that. And, that previous link on the profile directory offers some tips on where your profile directory is located; that information is fine, though you may find it just as easy to just search your drive — starting from C:\Documents and Settings\ — for “userChrome-example.css”.

I felt better after getting those Firefox bits in order, and I then came across a WordPress plugin which also looked helpful. Gregory Wild-Smith wrote a plugin called Twilight AutoSave which “uses cookies and JavaScript to save the data you are typing and allow you to restore it (or delete it) later”. With that and the Firefox goodies in place, I should have a lesser chance of losing my posts next time. Not that I’m going to tempt fate, but I do have some peace of mind about it now.