I’ve developed a few WordPress plugins and I love to hack WordPress, so there are times when I need to write and test PHP within the WordPress framework. Because my plugins are site-wide sidebar widgets, any errors I may introduce while testing have the potential to affect every page on my site.

Instead of testing my widgets live, I test the underlying PHP in a designated test area that his hidden from regular readers. That way, if PHP barks at me for missing an underscore, it’s more of a private message to me, and not a public broadcast to all of my readers.

Creating a WordPress test area is a simple addition of a page template and test page to your WordPress theme files. Any PHP that you put in the test template can be executed by refreshing a draft preview of the page assigned to it. Because the test page is never actually published, there’s no possibility of it reaching your readers and interrupting the flow of your site.

Want to set up your own Wordpress PHP test area?

Can you believe that today marks seven years that this blog has been running? It was started on January 10, 2002 at 9:11 AM with a post entitled 10 Print “Hello World”. Since then, I’ve published over 1575 posts, and have averaged more than four posts per week. Some of them, like the Life of Riley series eat as many words as you’d find in a twenty page paper.

Around 150,000 unique visitors stop by here every month, and the most visitors I’ve had storm the castle in a single day was 85,424. That’s just shy of the population of the city of Quincy, Massachusetts. I wish it was because I’m extremely clever or a master of internet marketing, but the truth is that I don’t know why people show up here.

I’m really, really glad you do, though. The blogsphere is so crowded that attention has become a precious resource, and I appreciate you stopping by to spend a little of yours on me. Without you reading this nonsense, I’d probably end up shouting it on a street corner or on top of a desk, and that tends to freak people out a little.

Thanks!

Thanks to the thousands and thousands of people behind the sites who have linked here over the years, and a big, fat thanks to Dave Masters and Louise Brown for putting my beardsanity into three major newspapers. I really spend a lot of time trying to keep track of you all because each link is a small gift that can lead to some interesting relationships.

My thanks also go out to folks like N0ia, M-shel, Keidra, Brian, Tankboy, Sarah Veale, BonzoGal, KF Chud, Macoosh, Digitaldarryl, M, V, JR, Jo Jo Monkey Man, Jo, Pablo, Doles, Erin, Joyce, Palsh, Svalka, Tara, The Finetunettes, and the entire cast of The MaBeGroMo Beardos for keeping the discussion lively and validating the unique brand of crazy around here.

And my most hugest thanks goes out to #1GF! for editing all of my stupid misteaks and giving me all the encouragement that I couldn’t give myself.

And thank you. Yes, you. Just because I don’t know your name, don’t think that I feel that you’re any less important. I know you’re out there, and I’m glad you stopped by.

Thanks for not making me look as crazy as I feel.

-Jon

Every web guru will tell you that having a list of your best posts readily available for new visitors is important to attracting new readers. Unfortunately, creating and updating that list can be very time consuming. Best Foot Forward is a WordPress plugin that I wrote to take some of the grunt work out of creating those lists and get you back to writing.

With the Best Foot Forward widget, you simply tag your top posts with a specific keyword (like “favorite-september-08″ or whatever you prefer) and then tell the plugin to show all posts tagged with your keyword. When you want to add a post to the list, you simply add your keyword to the post’s tags. This means you can create “best of” lists on the fly without wasting time creating and formatting lists of links.

WordPress 2.6.X now saves multiple revisions of posts, and Best Foot Forward was updated to version 1.2 to stop those revisions from showing up in your sidebar.

For more information, head over to my Best Foot Forward WordPress Widget Page.

I’ve written about Stumbleupon in the past because it has driven so much traffic back to this site, but I mainly use my Stumbleupon page as an overflow for all of the funny stuff that I can’t seem to work into my blog. It’s so easy to use that it has become one of my most frequently used social networks. Back in August, StumbleUpon announced that they’d be making changes to the way their friend system works, and it looks like the new system is finally in place. Curious about some of the changes? Well, let’s check them out.

No More 200 Friend Limit

Most people will be really happy about this because they can have more friends, but I have mixed feelings. I regularly bumped off the limit, and would have to make room for new stumblers by weeding out inactive stumblers or those who no longer focused on content that I was interested in. The constant revision was a pain, but it made sure that I got the most relevant content for me. Removing the limit certainly creates less work, but it also removes the reminder to let go of stumblers who have moved on to other topics.

I put together Better Blogroll to give Wordpress users a lot more control over the way that Wordpress handles and displays their blogrolls.

Version 2.8 was written in response to a user request for the inclusion of XFN data in the blogroll links. XFN stands for “XHTML Friends Network”, and it’s a way site owners can specify what type of relationship they have (such as friend, co-worker, neighbor) with the people they’re linking to. The format is built into the WordPress link manager, but I never included it in Better Blogroll because I didn’t think people used it.

If you specify XFN data in the WordPress links manager, Better Blogroll will now display it. If you don’t use XFN, your links will look the same as they did before. Because “nofollow” and XFN both use the rel tag, setting links to “nofollow” in the plugin will override XFN data.

If you’d like to know more about XFN in WordPress, check out the WordPress XFN page. For more information about Better Blogroll, head on over to my Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

When you use Firefox’s built in search bar, the default behavior is for the search results to be returned in your current tab. This is fine for most people, but for bloggers, it can mean that the search results overwrite something long and unsaved that the back button can’t salvage.

If you have this issue, you can eliminate it by forcing search results to open in a new tab. It’s like a built in safety mechanism for absent-minded bloggers, and it’s really easy to implement through a simple change to the Firefox configuration page.

1. Open a new tab and type about:config into your browser’s address bar as if you were trying to go to a web page. If you’ve never seen the configuration page before, this is where you can make all the custom tweaks that can make Firefox into your own personal browsing machine.
2. There are a lot of properties, so type browser.search.openintab into the filter box to filter out everything except the property that we’re going to modify.
3. Double click anywhere on the line that shows up, and the line will became bold and the value will be set to true.

That’s it. Modifications to about:config are instantaneous, so you will no longer have to worry about losing whatever you’re working on to search results. If you ever give up blogging and want search results to show up in the current tab, just find and double click the property again to set it back to false.

I mentioned yesterday how you can add an list to your sidebar composed of all the people that are linking to you, but didn’t mention that, by default, all the links are “dofollow”. Because there is no approval process for links included in an RSS feed, some people prefer to set the links to “nofollow” so that Google is aware that you do not directly endorse every link that appears.

The RSS widget doesn’t include the option to set links to nofollow, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t add it. This is going to require a hack to one of the Wordpress core files, widgets.php, which you can find in your wp-includes directory. Because you’re hacking a core file, you will lose these changes every time you upgrade WordPress.

Ready for a little WordPress hackin’? Well, let’s get to it.

I’ve mentioned before that I do my best to give a little something back to people who link to me, but during my recent flood of traffic, I found that sifting through incoming links would eat entire days. I won’t pretend that I minded, but I wondered if there was a more automated method of thanking linkers for people who have jobs that get in the way of spending eight hours a day dedicated to their blogs. Well, there is, and it’s really easy to implement.

If you’re running Wordpress, you have probably seen the “Incoming Links” panel on your dashboard that lists people who are linking to you. With Wordpress 2.3 and above, that data is simply an RSS feed from Google blogs. Because that same RSS feed can be added to your sidebar through an RSS widget, giving a link back to people who link to you is a snap.

Over the last week, you may have noticed that the comments on this site now have little pictures next to them. Have you been wondering what they are? Those are gravatars from Gravatar.com. A gravatar (or globally recognized avatar) is simply a picture that follows a commenter around from site to site when they leave comments.

Why Would You Want That?

A picture is worth a thousand words, really. As a commenter, having gravatar allows you to create a more recognizable online identity that spans across sites. As a site owner, allowing a commenter to have a picture next to their comment makes them infinitely more recognizable when you run across them in your surfing. Unfortunately, gravatars only show up on sites that have gravatar support enabled.

Since Gravatar.com is run by Automattic, the same company that runs WordPress, gravatar.com support was rolled into WordPress 2.5. If you have a WordPress blog, you can easily add support for gravatars by adding a few lines of code to your current Wordpress theme. If this is something you’d like to do, the complete instructions are below.

Having a list of your best posts is essential to retaining visitors, but creating and maintaining that list can be time consuming. Best Foot Forward is a WordPress plugin that I wrote to take some of the grunt work out of creating those lists.

With Best Foot Forward, you simply tag your top posts with a specific keyword (like “favorite” or whatever you prefer) and then tell the plugin to show anything marked with your keyword. When you want to add a post to the list, you simply add your keyword to the post’s tags. This means you can create “best of” lists on the fly without wasting time copying and formatting.

The plugin was updated to version 1.1 to fix a bug that created incorrect links for certain users, so if you had a problem with version 1.0, it’s time to upgrade.

For more information, head over to my Best Foot Forward WordPress Widget Page.

You want more traffic? Of course you do! If you’re ready to learn the top five mind-blowing secrets that will help you to generate more traffic and achieve your dreams, then read on.

1. Pick a subject that people are drawn to but have no expertise in like “How To Score a Porn Star Girlfriend In 5 minutes” or “5 Ways To Rake In Easy Money On The Web”. Who’s going to dispute you? Tommy Lee? Darren Rowse? Fuck no. Those guys are too busy banging porn stars and stuffing mattresses full of money to find the time to debunk your claims. And the average person wouldn’t be reading your list if they had any idea if you were right or wrong, so picking that obscure but interesting subject will allow you to kick back and snort a line of that ever increasing pile of stats that are at the heart of your very existence.

2. Make sure that your points are very general. Research and testing are for scientists and nerds. Do you have a lab coat or a twelve sided die there, Bilbo? Hell no. Being ambiguous will make it seem like you know what you’re talking about, while letting you spend less time writing, and more time compulsively checking your stats. The trick is to make statements that seem like good advice, but are really nothing more than logical generalities like “write good content” and “don’t forget to breathe”.

I wrote The Better Blogroll WordPress Widget to give Wordpress users a lot more control over the way that Wordpress handles and displays their blogrolls.

Version 2.7 was written in response to a couple of user requests. Ed Brady requested that links with multiple categories only be displayed once, and Ness asked that the plugin be modified so that she could display links from every category but one.

This version contains those changes, and I also threw in the ability to be super picky about which link categories get displayed on your blogroll. You can now display links from all categories, specify a subset of categories, or even go in the other direction and show all categories except the ones that you specify.

If you want more information about Better Blogroll or have your own development suggestions, head on over to my Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

Give it a try and get more bang from your blogroll.

When a new visitor shows up to your site, they will make a decision on whether you have something to offer them within ten seconds. If you don’t have something interesting for them to read once they’re finished with your most recent post, you may lose them. That’s why a lot of the top bloggers highlight their best content at the top of their blogs.

Whether you create your list manually or don’t have a “Best Of” list yet, the Best Foot Forward Wordpress plugin can make creating that post list a little easier. The plugin works in conjunction with the WordPress tagging system to display posts that are tagged with a certain word (or words) of your choice. For example, by tagging your favorite posts with the word “favorite” and then tell the plugin to display anything tagged with “favorite”, your best of list is automatically created. To add other posts, simply tag them with “favorite”. To remove a post from the list, just delete the tag from your post.

You can use any tags that you choose, so if you want to get really fancy, you could tag your March favorites with “favMarch2008″ and then tag April’s with “favApril2008″, and then tell the plugin to display both, so that you could easily create a cumulative list of your best posts without having to delete any tags from older favorites. That could make year end “Best of” lists very easy to compile.

For more information about this plugin, head over to my Best Foot Forward WordPress Widget Page.

I was talking with Sarah a while back about Better Blogroll and she asked whether I knew of a similar widget for Blogspot users that would show a random subset of links from a Blogspot blogroll. Today, I finally spent a little time putting something together that would work within Blogspot’s unique framework. While I didn’t come up with anything that has as many options as Better Blogroll, I did manage to come up with a hack that will allow Blogger users to display a random subset of links from the Blogger Links Widget.

This is a hack, so you’re going to have to get a little dirty to make it work. In the end, you’ll have a random blogroll, but the widget will ignore the “number of items to show” and “sort” options in the widget because those will be controlled from within the new code.

If you’re interested in creating a random links list on your own Blogger/Blogspot blog, read on for the complete instructions.

Do you let your WordPress blogroll go stale because importing and recategorizing hundreds of your current reads is too much of a chore? I do. Although WordPress will import an OPML file of all my feeds, the importer is only capable of importing my links into a single category. If you’ve ever used this function to import a large number of links spread over several categories, you know that having to manually move each individual link to the correct category is enough of a chore that it’s easier to let your links go stale.

Yesterday, I spent the entire day working on the issue that stood between me and blogroll full of fresh, categorized links. While I know that it’s bad form to edit core WordPress files, the result of my effort is a hacked version of link-import.php that makes WordPress (v. 2.3.3) recognize categories when importing an OPML file. I tested it with a few variations exported from both Google Reader and Thunderbird, and it seems to work pretty well.

What This Hack Will Do

• If you only have one category of links in your feed reader, everything should work the same as it did before.
• If you keep your feeds in multiple folders in your feed reader, the importer will check to see if each folder name is an existing category in the WordPress Links Manager. If it is, all the links from that folder get imported into the corresponding category. If there is no identically named link category, the links get dropped in the default category.
• When it’s finished, the importer notifies you of which folder names were not found so you can either create the missing categories, or check your spelling.

I was talking to a couple of people who were unhappy with the demise of the Cliq network, which allowed them to show headlines from their friends’ sites in their sidebar, so I offered to try to mimic the basic functionality in a WordPress plugin.

Well, the result was version 1.0 of Buddy Love. The plugin is a WordPress widget that will pull a configurable number of the latest headlines from sites listed in your WordPress blogroll and show them on your sidebar. It should let you show a little more love to your friends by pointing people to their latest content, and you can even configure a unique icon for each individual site. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the plugin is a bit slow because there is some overhead associated with going out and grabbing the latest headlines from your friends’ sites. If you experience slowness, I can only suggest cutting the number of headlines you show.

If you decide to take Buddy Love for a spin, be sure to let me know what you think.

A lot of you know what hotlinking is, but for those that don’t: hotlinking is the act of using images on your own site that are stored on someone else’s server. Generally the practice is frowned upon without linking back to the original site, because it wastes people’s bandwidth without sending them any traffic.

While I generally prefer a link back if someone is using images hosted here, I’m not adamant enough that I’d shut off hotlinking altogether. I generally don’t care if people leech off my bandwidth here and there, but when I find someone who is extensively hotlinking, instead of blocking them, I sometimes prank them with the old switcharoo.

Say for example, you are some N00b who enjoyed my Dimmu Burger icon so much that you not only hotlinked it, but you’re using it as your profile icon in a forum. That means every time you post something in the forum, it uses my bandwidth to show your profile. One of your normal forum posts might look like this:

Maybe it strikes me as funny that your profile lists your location as “Behind You…”, so I change the image on my site slightly just to see if you’re paying attention. Maybe your profile icon on all of your posts now looks something like this:

That way, even though you’re you’re sucking my bandwidth harder than your mother when the fleet is in town, I at least get a chuckle out of it.

The results of the latest Smokin’ Poll are in:

If RSS Feeds Were Sex, I’d Be

• A big, fat whore: 26%
• In a weekly gang bang: 33%
• A horny virgin: 18%
• A priest/nun: 23%

A while ago, I mentioned to #1GF! that the number of subscribers hasn’t really risen in proportion to the extra hours I’ve put into the site since I quit my job.

“Oh, honey,” she said, “those people are bloggers. Normal people don’t use RSS.”

I disagreed. “RSS is has been around for nearly a decade and the number of feed readers available makes it an invaluable for getting information. RSS isn’t just for bloggers.”

To settle the argument, this Smokin’ Poll was born.

The results? A whopping 62% of you use RSS feeds to get information from the web, with another 18% of you being interested, but not knowing how to get started.

While I would love to claim that #1GF! was wrong on this one, we all know that my readers are anything but normal.

To the Digital Whores And Syndicated Gang Bangers

Thanks for your support. I’m glad you’re along for the ride.

For the Horny Virgins

If you’re looking for information on how you can make things easier with RSS, head over to my subscription page. I explain RSS in easy to understand terms and list a few links on how you can get started.

Using RSS can cut your web searching time by making the updates come to you. If you still don’t get it, drop me a mail and I’ll help you as best I can.

For the Clergy

Almost a quarter of you are not interested in RSS at all. There’s nothing wrong with that. RSS isn’t for everybody.

If you’re in that camp, you can still save yourself time by having any new dyers.org posts sent to you in a daily e-mail. It’s never more than one e-mail a day, and because I’m as concerned about privacy as you are, I can assure you that your e-mail address is used only to send you a daily update. If you ever want to stop getting updates, you can easily unsubscribe at any time with a single click.

Where did you fall in the distribution? Are you an RSS tramp or virgin?

The Better Blogroll WordPress Widget was written to give Wordpress users a lot more control over the way that Wordpress handles and displays blogrolls.

Version 2.6 was written in response to a user request, and allows site owners to limit the display of links to a single category, if they so desire.

More information about the widget and how to download it can be found on my Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

Take it for a test drive and get more out of your blogroll.

When someone links to your blog, do you think:

“Another link? I’m so awesome. I deserved that link because I’m hotter than Hasselhoff and twice as entertaining. Sometimes I wish I were someone else just so that I could experience the awesome feeling that comes with linking to me. Wait. No, I’d cry if I were someone else. Other people are so lucky that I let them link to me. I’m remarkable, I’m amazing, and it’s no wonder that I’m huge in Scandinavia.“

If you’ve spent any amount of time around me, you know that even though I can understand the needs and inner workings of applications, understanding the subtlety and cues of people has never been my strong suit. It’s actually been said that women who flirt with me should start the conversations off by lifting their shirts to give me a 60% chance of figuring out that I was being flirted with.

It’s true. I’ve never been good at deciphering human.

This became very clear this week as I was deciding on what topics to write about. I realized that even though I had some ideas that I could write about, I really have no idea what you want me to write about.

Some of you want WordPress hacks, others want to hear what a geek does after jettisoning the bosses of the corporate world, and some of you simply want web games, web games, and more web games. As I was trying to figure out what would be the most useful for the most readers, I thought, “Why not just ask the readers what they want?” And it seemed like an interesting idea. So,

What would you like to see more of, and what could you do without on dyers.org?

By letting me know what you really want (or don’t), you can be instrumental in making this blog more useful for everyone.

Be as brutal and honest as you want because, as I mentioned, the subtle hints will go right over my head.

Thanks, everyone!

I wrote the Better Blogroll WordPress Widget because I wasn’t very happy with the inflexible way that Wordpress handles blogrolls. Instead of displaying an endless list of links like WordPress’s default Links widget, Better Blogroll focuses your readers attention by displaying a random, rotating subset of your links from your blogroll. To provide your readers with a better idea of what they are clicking, the category of each link can be displayed to its right. I added a couple of features to this release that should make it even more useful.

For those of you who have tried to leave comments and had my web server accuse you of being involved with spam or illegal activities, I do apologize. I use an excellent spam-fighting Wordpress Plugin called Bad Behavior and the author of the plugin made a change to a blacklist that inadvertently blew up a lot of blogs including this one.

From the explanation on Homeland Stupidity:

“Yesterday I moved all of my sites to a new dedicated server. In the process, I decommissioned an old blacklist I was running which I thought wasn’t being used, not realizing that Bad Behavior was still set to use it. Shortly afterward, I found myself locked out of my own blog, just as you all did..”

If you have a Wordpress blog and use Bad Behavior, you have to download the latest version of the software to avoid being locked out of your blog.

(Special thanks to N0ia for letting me know about my site’s bad behavior earlier this morning. Thanks, N0ia!)

“Stupid. Not funny. Tries way too hard.”

“I wish i could give this ten thumbs down”

“I’m confused why the creators wasted their time making this.”

-Recent quotes about dyers.org

You may already know from my StumbleUpon post that a lot of work and a little luck has pushed the traffic around here to ten times what it was a few months ago. Although traffic bumps give you the opportunity to meet some really great people, they also bring you into contact with an expanding group of critics who aren’t shy about voicing exactly what it is about you that they find unappealing.

It’s statistically unavoidable, so how do you deal with people who simply want to drag you down?

When I blogged as a hobby, I thought that building traffic meant seeking out and commenting on other blogs. Because very few readers get past the first few comments on a post, and even fewer visit commenter links, most comments only reach one reader: the site owner.

After years of flat traffic growth, I can tell you that commenting is a good way to make friends and network with other site owners, but relying on its one-to-one nature is much more time consuming and less effective than building traffic through social sites like StumbleUpon.

Before we get to how it can exponentially increase your traffic, let’s take a quick look at how StumbleUpon works.

I’ve read a million different articles about making money on the web, and they all have one mantra in common: Start with a niche. Start with a niche. Start with a niche. Niche niche niche niche niche.

For personal bloggers, this piece of money making scripture almost seems to guarantee that personal bloggers will never make money from their personal site. Unfortunately, no one ever mentions why.

If you’re a Wordpress user who typically has a ton of drafts, you know how painful it can be to be limited to viewing only 15 posts at a time in the Wordpress admin panel. You are also probably aware that there is currently no option available to change this.

Update:This hack will only work in Wordpress versions lower than 2.5. It will not work in Wordpress 2.5 and above.

Below I’ve outlined two methods to allow you to change this limit and make the admin panel bend to your will. The first is a simple edit to one of the Wordpress core files that just about anyone should be able to do in under two minutes. The second is a little more complex, but gives you the flexibility of adding an option to your Writing Options page so that you can change the number of posts shown in your admin panel whenever you feel like it.

Both methods require editing of Wordpress core files, so make changes with care and understand that any changes you make will probably have to be reapplied the next time you upgrade Wordpress.

Recently, I had a former co-worker drop a comment on my site that essentially said, “This post sucks.” After writing out a sarcastic response, I realized that continuing the thread would only make both of us look like jerks. Instead of publishing, I deleted my comment and dumped his as well.

I’m all for people disagreeing with me and even ask for constructive criticism, but when comments don’t offer anything beyond an attack on me or my writing, they are bound to become casualties of moderation. Because I used to work with the guy, I sent an apologetic email letting him know why his comment got deleted.

In the five years that this site has been up, comment deletion has never turned into an issue with a reader, so I was pretty surprised when I got a harsh email back telling me about my god complex and explaining the proper way to run my site. The email closed stating that the guy would never leave a comment again.

The Better Blogroll is a Wordpress widget that I wrote to replace the default “Links’ widget. It works by displaying a random subset of links from your blogroll which change each time the page is refreshed. To provide a reader some better insight into what they might be clicking, the category of each link is displayed to its right (you can see this widget in action in my sidebar under the heading “Rolling Blogroll”).

Displaying link categories doesn’t really make sense for bloggers who only use one category, so I updated the plugin to make the visibility of the link categories optional in this release.

More information about the widget and the download link can be found on my Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

Take it for a spin and help your readers to get more out of your blogroll.

Unless you read a lot about web marketing and SEO, you may not have heard of Sphinn, a Digg-like community where people go to share and vote on web marketing articles.

Because I’ve gotten spoiled by the simplicity of adding bookmarks to StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us through buttons on my Firefox tool bar, submitting good articles to Sphinn seemed like too many steps. It’s certainly not a big deal to copy a url, open Sphinn, find the submit page, and so on, but it’s not as easy as clicking a button.

Well, now it is.

If you’re a Sphinn user, I created a Firefox extension which will allow you to quickly add the current page you’re reading to Sphinn. When you find a page that you want to add, clicking the Sphinn It! toolbar button will open a new tab and submit the url for you.

If you want it, head over to my Sphinn Toolbar Button For Firefox page.

Enjoy!