Thanks to the new Onswipe WordPress plugin this weblog is even more iPad friendly. Onswipe detects when a site is being viewed by an iPad and substitutes a nice looking swipe-enabled theme.
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Category Archives: WordPress
WordPress on my iPhone
First post from the new iPhone WordPress application. Looks like a nice little app.
Weblog client that supports WordPress custom fields
Does anyone know if there’s a weblog client, ideally for Mac, that supports WordPress custom fields? I’ve tried popular editors such as Ecto and MarsEdit but I’ve not yet found a client that allows you to specify custom fields. I think custom fields are a killer feature of WordPress because you can store metadata separately from the post itself and do the kinds of cool tricks my Technotags plugin allows such as geotagging and adding reference links at the foot of posts.
Geotag your WordPress posts
If you’d like to geotag you WordPress posts you can do so using my Technotags plugin. The plugin does two things. It allows you to add metadata to your posts including geotag coordinates and it automatically creates a link to Google Maps to show the location of your coordinates.
Get the latest version of the plugin here.
To use this geotagging goodness simply add a custom field key called ‘gmap’ to your post and enter the latitude and longitude in decimal format as the value. Coordinates must be in decimal formal e.g. 52.4509934727,-1.93881244894 rather than as degrees, minutes and seconds e.g. +52° 27′ 3.57", -1° 56′ 19.72" for this to work. Most if not all GPS devices will give you coordinates in decimal format.
The custom fields from an example geotagged post will look like this…
Your post is now geotagged! By adding coordinates to your post’s metadata you will be future-proofing your geotags because any future applications that can use latitude and longitude data will be able to extract these without affecting the post itself.
To help your readers visualise the location specified by your geotag coordinates the Technotags plugin creates an link to Google Maps using your coordinates at the end of your post. Because you entered coordinates using custom fields, the Google Map link is separate to your post, like all good metadata should be.
The Technotags plugin does other cool things like create links to Flickr and Technorati tags and much more. Check it out!
Have fun and let me know how you get on. Happy geotagging!
Technotags plugin updated
I’ve updated my Technotags WordPress plugin to v1.1. You can now add Google search links as well as tags to each WP post. Increasingly I wanted to be able to add ‘further reading’ links to my posts without having to break up the flow of a piece. Adding Technorati tags etc. are useful but still far from being a comprehensive way of linking to related information. Plain old Google searches are still probably the easiest way of finding related information so you can now add Google search links to your posts metadata, and have them rendered as a clean and simple further reading section at the end of each piece. I’ve also added CSS support so you can style your links/tags however you like.
Grab a copy of the plugin and let me know how you get on.
Technotags WordPress plugin
Thought I’d see out the year by releasing my first WordPress plugin. The Technotags plugin allows you to specify Technorati, Flickr, and del.icio.us tags as well as geo tag your post using Google Maps. Tags are stored as custom fields in your WordPress database. I implemented tags in this way as I believe that your posts’ metadata, the tags themselves, should be stored separately from the post itself to future-proof your tags rather than lock them into post content.
Get the plugin here. Let me know how you get on and please be gentle as this is not only my first WordPress plugin but also one of my first attempts at PHP scripting.
Exploring WordPress metadata
Sweet. My adventures with WordPress have lead me to explore the metadata capabilities of the posts database. I wanted a way of adding Technorati tags to my posts in such a way that I can optionally render the same tags as Flickr or Del.icio.us tags. Plus I wanted to future-proof my tags (metadata). There are a number of existing plugins that allow you to add Technorati tags for example and editors such as Ecto even allow you to specify tags by importing from your Del.icio.us account. But in most of the plugins that I found, tags are added into the post body itself and are not stored as seperate metadata in the database. I didn’t want to mix my data with metadata so I looked around for a solution that allowed me to create metadata using WP’s custom fields. Aha! I thought, another excuse to learn a bit more about the WordPress gubbins and PHP. So I delved, read the WP Codex of wisdom and wrote my first plugin.
My first WordPress plugin allows you to add tags as custom fields then render them as hyper-linked tags, Technorati tags by default but also Flickr and Del.icio.us tags and in fact tags for any web service that you care to develop an API for. I’m very pleased with the result. No doubt there’s already a plugin that does something similar but heck, this is my plugin and I had fun learning more about WordPress in the process of writing it. I don’t have any plans to release it to the wider world but if anyone’s interested, even if it’s from the point of view of a newbie like me who wanted to find out how to write WP plugins and to explore WP metadata, then drop me a line. The tag links you see at the end of this post are courtesy of my first few steps with PHP.