• Use CSS to Style Link Types
• Horizontal layout trends
• 30 Most Inspirational Light Web Designs
• 10 Ways to Optimize a Popular Post on Your Blog
• Why Tags Are Better Than Categories
• Optimize your Blog for the iPhone with the IWPhone WordPress Plugin
• Showcase: Comment form design
• 20 Free Wordpress Magazine Style Themes
• 9 Common Challenges in Blog Theme Design
• How to Display Your RSS Count in a Cool Tooltip
• Need a favicon? How about a WebClip icon for iPhone users? Iconiza will design both for you for only $34.
• Textures and Patterns Design Showcase
• Prepare Your Blog for the iPhone, Easily - Michael cashes in on the iPhone 3G launch by writing a post to ride off the buzz. Okay, I’m just sore that he beat me to it…

Kreativuse.com has put together a nice collection of interestingly designed Twitter status displays from various blogs.

Showcase: Twitter status design

There are some really good ones in there, though it’s not a definitive list. I’ve seen some really cool Twitter status displays, though I never thought to compile a list. I can’t even remember that really cool one I found through Design Float… (It was a word bubble coming from the blog name, that’s all I have to go off. )

If the showcase inspires you to put your Tweets in your blog template, here are a couple methods you can use to display the updates:

• Alex King’s Twitter Tools Plugin
• Remy Sharp’s Lightweight Twitter.js Script

After a few months of planning and work, I’ve finally released my new WordPress plugin. I’d had the idea sine around the time I started selling 125×125 ads on Webmaster-Source. I thought it was a bit of a pain to hard-code ads in and manually take them down after their run was over. And I don’t like figuring out end dates by counting ahead on a calendar either. That’s why I put together WP125, a WordPress plugin for easy 125×125 ad management.

I built the plugin to simplfy the management of 125×125 ads, and lower the barrier to get started selling them a little. Some of the features include

• Custom ad layout options.
• A widget to drop into your sidebar to make it easier to set the plugin up. Or you can use a template tag if you’re pro-code like me.
• Click tracking.
• Ads are automatically taken down on their end date.
• The plugin can figure out an ad’s expiration date automatically, based off how many days you say the ad should run for (no more counting forward on your calendar!). It took a bit of time and effort to get this feature working, but it was certainly worth it.

Try the plugin out, and tell me what you think. It’s a first release (1.0.0), and it’s barely been out tweleve hours, so it may have some bugs or interface oddities that need fixing. (It’s not on Wordpress plugin site quite yet either, but I’m working on that…) Tell me what you like, what needs fixing, etc.

I think WP125 is off to a good start, but I had to shave off a couple features I’d originally planned in order to get it out the door in time for the WLTC WordPress Plugin Competition. Sadly, that means I’m unable to use it on Webmaster-Source to manage my ads. I built the plugin to work the way I figured most people woud prefer, and pushed my preferences to the side for now. I handle my ads a little differently than other people, and it would have taken too much extra time and work to build support for that into the plugin. Hopefully I’ll have the time to include the settings I’d like at a later date.

Enjoy the plugin, and send your feedback along!

Planet Ozh has a new post up by the name of What Plugin Coders Must Know About WordPress 2.6. Ozh put out a similar post back when 2.5 was in development, and I found it very useful. This time around, there’s even more to worry about, er, be aware of.

It seems that users will be able to move their /wp-content directory wherever they want when the new release is out. That means you can’t rely on it being located at /wp-content anymore. A user could have it at /stuff/w-content or ../lib/wp-content, or anywhere, really.

Luckily, Ozh explains how to programmatically find the /wp-content URL or path.

A couple days ago, I missed a day blogging because I had to remove malware from a computer (not mine). Though it wasn’t the computer I use for my blogging, the main idea still stands: Maintain your computer, and take care to avoid having harm come to it, or you could spend a day (or a week) dealing with an issue.

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen the epic saga unfold: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12.

The malware that invaded the Dell laptop, which is mainly used by my parents, though my younger brother used it that day, is known as “VirusWebProtect2008.” It’s one of those “Smitfraud” faux antivirus software packages that installs itself via a compromised website, causes mayhem, and trys to sell you “antivirus software” that will supposedly remove the virus. Essentially it Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found quite a few interesting articles on Blogsessive.com. I haven’t subscribed quite yet, but I’m considering. They have some interesting posts, and it might be worth your while to check some of them out. Here are a few noteable posts of theirs:

• How to Make Your Comments Stand Out
• Blogging Myths Busted
• 20 Free Corporate WordPress Themes
• 20 Reasons Why Your Make Money Online Blog Will Fail

Maybe I’ll subscribe once I finish weeding-out the feeds I could do without from my aggregator.

WordPress 2.6 is currently in beta, and will “ship” later this year. It will probably bring some bug fixes and security updates as usual, but what about the fun part? What new features will we get?

Technosailor’s 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6 addresses just that.

Some noteable inclusions are

• Post versioning
• The return of PressThis
• Google Gears support

I won’t spoil the post by including too many. Check out the Technosailor post for the full details.

• 7 Elements to Make Your Blog Look Great
• Twitter’s weakening pulse
• 30,000 Canadians petition for iPhone rate relief
• Google, Yahoo to search inside Flash files - Great. Now people will think it’s okay to build entire sites in Flash again… (The horror!)
• Should Links Open In New Windows?
• What You Need To Know About WordPress 2.6
• Have you noticed that the StumbleUpon toolbar has started auto-bookmarking everything you submit or thumb-up? Here’s how to turn the annoying feature off.
• 15 CSS and HTML Tutorials You Can Use In Your Projects
• If you have some design skills, but don’t want to be bothered with putting together a design from scratch? A premium WordPress theme can be a good starting place, a shortcut of sorts. Take a look at this design; I bet you wouldn’t recognize it as a derivative of Adii’s Premium News Theme, would you?
• TUTS is looking for a designer! - The *TUTS sites (PSDTUTS, NETTUTS, etc) are looking for a redesign.

One of the most well-known domain registrars, and purveyors of budget hosting, is GoDaddy. They run ads all over the place, and have done a good job at placing themselves as the #1 company newbies think of when they decide they want a website.

The trouble is, they tend to have bad customer service, and they seem a little shady. It seems that they

• Monitor domain searches run through their website, and register them themselves if the domain is percieved to be of any value. They park it and sell it for a lot for than their normal rate.
• Fail to renew domains, allowing “domainers” to pick them up.
• Arbitrarily suspend accounts and hold your domain ransom.
• Make it hard for you to move your domain to another registrar.

Plus, I don’t like their cluttered and spammy-looking website, but that’s irrelevant.

The enraged (former) GoDaddy customers have formed a community at NoDaddy.com. They’ve compiled a list of horror stories and alternative registrars, and have set up a forum where you can post your own story, or ask for advice if GoDaddy is being…bad.

EDIT: I later saw this post on the NoDaddy forum:

It is widely known that GD pushes the dedicated servers.  I mentioned why in another post.  Customer pays what, $120/mo for a dedicated host.  Customer does not know that it is a $300-$400 shuttle box.  And shared hosting is always slow, they max out the users (of course! that just makes good business sense).  I think they have from 1000 - 3000 customers per host, but im not exactly sure on the figure. (Link)

That alone is bad. We all know that shared hosting is oversold, but GoDaddy seems to be on the extreme end of overselling (though Dreamhost is real bad about it too). And dedicated servers… Ugh. The low-end Shuttle computers are recommended for “basic word processing, e-mail, web browsing.” A box like that shouldn’t be used as a web server.

If you do much reading about web optimization, you will have heard people say that you should cram all your CSS into a single large file, and all the JavaScript into another, in order to save on loading times.

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages. (Yahoo Developer Network)

In other places, you will be told that you should separate your CSS into multiple files to make it easier to manage. One for layout, one for typography, one for colors…

Which do you think is a better idea? Personally, I prefer quick loading times. Your users will thank you for faster pages; they don’t care if it’s easy to edit parts of your site or not. Generally I prefer to put all of the main CSS into one file, but on pages that require a large amount of unique styles, I include a separate file with the page-specific styles.