More Blog Tools
By Ray on April 29th, 2009
I admit that I have been very bad about doing a regular set of blogging this month. Especially as I was officially kicking off a second and third blog in the thirty to fifty days. However as I count it up, I think I have managed pretty close to one post a day between the three blogs. Of course the plan was to have one a day from all three of them. Anyway, that is me now rambling. What I really wanted to talk about was a couple of new blog tools that I found this evening that I am pretty excited about.
Obviously, as my preference for a blogging platform is the very flexible WordPress platform, these are offered as plugins. The first one I was going to mention is called edit comments xt. This plugin gives a user who leaves a comment a time window in which to edit the comment. I can really appreciate that tool given the number of times that I have posted a comment on a blog only to realize as soon as I hit accept that I had a major spelling or grammatical error. Some platforms have as an option the ability to delete and start over but few have an edit the comment option.
This ads that function to your WordPress blog, defaulting to a thirty minute window. However, it cuts off at twenty-five minutes to keep you from starting and not being able to finish. The one thing I would suggest to the author is the window is thirty minutes and you flash a five-minute window to finish editing before it times out to the user when they click the edit.
The next tool that I have found likable for the real function it adds is called wp-pagenavi. You can see this one in action at the bottom of the home page. Typically WordPress only has a previous and next on the posts that show on the main pages. This plugin actually gives up to nine different pages in relation to your location of those pages as well as go to the beginning and end and a total number of pages. The usability this ads to the blog is awesome in my humble opinion.
A couple of things to note about this plugin however. First, it has its on CSS file for defining how it looks. I think the author would have been smarter to have pulled the appropriate color scheme (at a very minimum) from appropriate elements that are already defined in the main CSS definition for any theme that is installed on the blog (obviously I need to clean up the CSS for this blog). A nitpick beyond that, I found it more pleasing when it was centered below the generally body instead of left aligned – which if you do nothing is what you will get.
Lastly, there is a snippet of code you have put into your footer file in your theme that does a check to see if the function exist and then calls it. This is maybe a bit beyond what some folks would want but it would really not be to bad if it truly resided in the footer file. However, in the two blogs I have installed this on so far, I had to go through several files to find the correct location to comment out the current code snippet that does the previous/next buttons and put in the code to do this nifty advanced page navigation.
An aside note or two on this last tool. When I was trying to figure ou the placement of the code snippet I checked out the support forums for the tool. I thought the author, while I understand the volume and even repetition of the stupid questions, had a bit of a chip on his shoulder to be asking for PayPal donations. My advice, honey gets more bees (or something like that). The second is that I had run pretty much all of my blogs as the pages showing six entries at a time on the page. With this tool, I find it making much more logical sense to have increments of ten insead – long live the metric system and base ten!
More Blog Tools
By Ray on April 29th, 2009
Obviously, as my preference for a blogging platform is the very flexible WordPress platform, these are offered as plugins. The first one I was going to mention is called edit comments xt. This plugin gives a user who leaves a comment a time window in which to edit the comment. I can really appreciate that tool given the number of times that I have posted a comment on a blog only to realize as soon as I hit accept that I had a major spelling or grammatical error. Some platforms have as an option the ability to delete and start over but few have an edit the comment option.
This ads that function to your WordPress blog, defaulting to a thirty minute window. However, it cuts off at twenty-five minutes to keep you from starting and not being able to finish. The one thing I would suggest to the author is the window is thirty minutes and you flash a five-minute window to finish editing before it times out to the user when they click the edit.
The next tool that I have found likable for the real function it adds is called wp-pagenavi. You can see this one in action at the bottom of the home page. Typically WordPress only has a previous and next on the posts that show on the main pages. This plugin actually gives up to nine different pages in relation to your location of those pages as well as go to the beginning and end and a total number of pages. The usability this ads to the blog is awesome in my humble opinion.
A couple of things to note about this plugin however. First, it has its on CSS file for defining how it looks. I think the author would have been smarter to have pulled the appropriate color scheme (at a very minimum) from appropriate elements that are already defined in the main CSS definition for any theme that is installed on the blog (obviously I need to clean up the CSS for this blog). A nitpick beyond that, I found it more pleasing when it was centered below the generally body instead of left aligned – which if you do nothing is what you will get.
Lastly, there is a snippet of code you have put into your footer file in your theme that does a check to see if the function exist and then calls it. This is maybe a bit beyond what some folks would want but it would really not be to bad if it truly resided in the footer file. However, in the two blogs I have installed this on so far, I had to go through several files to find the correct location to comment out the current code snippet that does the previous/next buttons and put in the code to do this nifty advanced page navigation.
An aside note or two on this last tool. When I was trying to figure ou the placement of the code snippet I checked out the support forums for the tool. I thought the author, while I understand the volume and even repetition of the stupid questions, had a bit of a chip on his shoulder to be asking for PayPal donations. My advice, honey gets more bees (or something like that). The second is that I had run pretty much all of my blogs as the pages showing six entries at a time on the page. With this tool, I find it making much more logical sense to have increments of ten insead – long live the metric system and base ten!
Tagged with: blog, blogging, code, CSS, edit comments, Plugins, wordpress, wp-pagenavi.