Tim Trott's Blog
The weblog of an amateur Astronomer, Photographer, Programmer and car enthusiast.
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Folding Category Plugin 0.4.3 Released
Sunday 30th December 2007
After a few hiccups with 0.4, version 0.4.3 is released which fixed a lot of bugs people may have experienced.
The latest 0.4 version introduced a much faster XML recursion based algorithm, rather than four foreach loops, the code is now much faster to execute and does not iterate unless it needs to.
Unfortunately, there were a few problems with the initial 0.4 release, much of the base code had been changed and it reacted differently on every combination of server/php versions. There has been a report of incompatibility with PHP 4.2, however I am unable to verify this. If anybody is running the plugin on PHP less than 5.2 I would like to hear from you, or if its not working for you. There were also a number of minor bugs, all of which have been resolved in this version.
0.4 is also the first version added to WP-Extend, so you can download and receive notifications through wordpress.org.
You can download the latest version from the folding category list page, or from the Wordpress plugin site.
Comments: 2 responses so far
This post is filed under Wordpress Plugins by Lonewolf at 3:01am
Wordpress Folding Category Plugin 0.3 Released
Wednesday 12th December 2007
My Wordpress Folding Category Plug-in received a minor bug fix today when I transpired that the table prefix wasn’t coded properly in some installations. This has now been fixed along with a few other minor bugs including the use of the before_widget and after_widget variables.
Version 0.3 also adds a new feature where you can assign a page a category using a custom field, which will expand the navigation list to a given category.
Full update, features and download are available on the plug-in page: http://lonewolf-online.net/computers/web-development/wordpress-folding-category-widget/
Comments: One response so far
This post is filed under Wordpress Plugins by Lonewolf at 9:52pm
Folding Category Plugin 0.2 Released
Tuesday 20th November 2007
I am pleased to announce the release of version 0.2 of the Folding Category List Widget for Wordpress 2.3+. This version fixes a few bugs and introduces new features:
- Full configuration via Widget Control Panel - no more editing the plugin source.
- Option to cache navigation structure to further reduce server load (experimental)
- Added unique ID for each category to enable CSS styling per id.
The plugin is available for download on the plugin homepage: Wordpress Folding Category Widget
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This post is filed under Wordpress Plugins by Lonewolf at 10:44pm
Folding Category List widget for Wordpress 2.3
Monday 5th November 2007
As your blog gets more and more posts, inevitably you will create more categories to cope. Eventually your categories will take up more room on your screen, and scroll across many pages. I have a blog, which has around 300 categories, and with this number the standard Wordpress category list expands the page and pushes the content below navigation to three or four pages down.
In order to solve this problem, categories can be made ‘children’ of ‘parent’ categories, and a tree like structure is created similar to the folder view in Windows Explorer.
This plug-in provides a Folding Category Plugin widget for Wordpress version 2.3 and above. It is still in a relatively early phase of development, however it is being run on this website and my paranormal website (Your Paranormal).
Quick Features
- Only uses one SQL query so it does not put strain on server (except when post count is enabled)
- Priority based category selection where multiple categories are available (e.g. single post view)
- Wordpress 2.3 support
Please see the plugin homepage for further details and downloads: Wordpress Folding Category Widget
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This post is filed under Wordpress Plugins by Lonewolf at 10:27pm
Tuesday 17th July 2007
Your new website not performing as well as it should be? Have you optimised your site for Search Engines? This guide will help you improve search engine ranking.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of making your website or page more attractive to the major search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Google, Yahoo and MSN Live are becoming more and more important for online marketing. Ten years ago it was rare to find a search engine (in fact the author can remember using Google in 1997 when there were only 300,000 pages indexed!), most websites were then still using word of mouth and direct marketing such as print and magazines to promote their website and gain traffic.
Over the past ten years the number of pages indexed by Google has increased by a factor of 6000, and competition has become more and more fierce for the top places.
This article will give you some optimisation tips to gain the edge over your competitors in search engine rankings.
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This post is filed under Articles, Internet, Search Engine Optimisation, WWW by Lonewolf at 4:36pm
Trials and Tribulations of SEO
Friday 29th June 2007
The internet is a very competitive market these days, and getting high rankings on search engines such as Google and Yahoo is becoming more and more difficult.
When I started this site 18 months ago, I only had a few pages, most of which was relating to my Honda Civic. I wrote a couple of articles about removing the radio (a task which is quite tricky) and removing the rear speakers (again a tricky task). I hadn’t even heard of SEO when writing these pages, but within 6 months they were ranked in the top 10 for Google. Today they both rank number 1. So if I can write a high ranking article with no knowledge of SEO, why doesn’t any of my other pages rank high now I know a few SEO tips?
There are a few pages relating to Astronomy and Photography that I have been trying to get higher rankings for since January, make a change… wait a month and see what happens. Sometimes hits went down, other times they went up slightly. Search engine ranking remained the same, or went down.
So where am I going wrong? Maybe the key is to unlearn my SEO knowledge and revert back to 1990’s style websites…
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This post is filed under Search Engine Optimisation by Lonewolf at 10:26am
Thursday 21st June 2007
I have two new websites to add to my portfolio. Your Paranormal and the Paranormal Forums is a online community dedicated to the paranormal world. The site features mysteries of the ancient world, ghost stories, monsters, UFO’s, the Occult and the otherwise Unexplained. The site also features a world map locating as many paranormal places as possible. By switching to “Satellite” mode you can zoom in on places such as Area 51, or see crop circles and stone henge.
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This post is filed under Internet, WWW by Lonewolf at 9:30am
Saturday 24th March 2007
Clean URL’s seem to be something of a buzzword these days, along with SEO, CSS, AJAX and Blogs. I have also jumped onto the proverbial bandwagon and completely rewritten this site from scratch using Clean URL’s and CSS with some AJAX and XML thrown in. And my blog will be up soon as well!
Clean URL’s are things that can benefit most sites, including this one. Most URL’s on this site consist of a page with a .php extension followed by a few parameters. For example my page on Astronomy Gadgets used to look like this: “doarticle.php?article=astro_toys”. After the move to clean URL’s it now looks like this: “/astronomy/reviews/gadgets”. This clean form looks professional, its easier to remember and type in and it is “Google Friendly”, that is Google does not like ? and & in URL’s and does not rank pages as high. Since most of my visitors come from Google, I want to be nice to it.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are another buzzword at the moment, although its been around for donkeys years. CSS allows developers to separate content from layout and style allowing different browsers and platforms to see the content differently, sometimes with no style at all. Some PDA’s and Mobile Phones only show black and white text, so using css they can strip out all the layout and style to show the plain content. CSS can also make a site look good for people browsing with a desktop PC or Mac.
AJAX, or Asyncronous Javascript And Xml, has been used in a limited fashion on the contact me sections to send visitor comments to me without reloading the page. There is also AJAX at work on the Top Gear Quotes page where you can see a random Stig introduction quote.
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This post is filed under Search Engine Optimisation, Site News by Lonewolf at 7:48pm
