I didn’t want to manually try half of the selectors and see if it would change anything somehow so I started to look for some online tools to do this tasks. There are quite a few but in the end I went for a Firebug extension called ‘ Dust-me selectors‘.

The way it works is quite inventive. Instead of trying to scan and parse your pages you can simply select ‘scan’ and click around your site. Every selector encountered is listed as ‘used’ so in the end you end up with a list of unused selectors which you can export to another file.

If you have a very polluted stylesheet you can just replace to old one (backup!) with the new one and start working from there by deleting the UNUSED tags Dust Me creates and rebuilding whatever needed to be done anyway. In my case I just a diff tool to just for differences and work my way through the stylesheet in this matter.

Hint: If you are scanning your pages be sure to click through every possible page. Especially unfolding menu’s and selectors like a:hover, a:visited are sometimes ‘forgotten’ while being in use.

Conclusion

Dust-me selectors is not a magic stick which will output very clean CSS just by the click of a button but is a very useful tool to help you in cleaning CSS stylesheets in an organized way.

The post How-to clean CSS stylesheets fast appeared first on Weblog Mechanic.

One of the core features of FAF has always been to be able to easily extend the feature set. With the most recent version it’s easy to drop your own filter into FAF. This post will also serve as the beginning of some public documentation.

Warning! After this it will get a bit technical

FAFFilter Class


public static $name = "remove_html";
public static $description = "Remove HTML from post";
public static $context = "posts";
protected static $controls = "search_title, search_excerpt, search_content, html_allow_styles, html_allow_images,html_allow_links,html_allow_custom";

static void getControls ()
static void setControls ()
fafFilter __construct ( $post, $args)
void display ()
Array execute ()


This is what a basic filter looks like.

The class properties define name, description (‘nice name’ – this will be used in the interface), context (either posts or categories. Will load the filter as an option on one of these Feedwordpress pages ) and a comma-delimited line of required fields.

The static functions are used to define your input controls in the interface. Basically it defines which options you want to give the user.

The only required function is ‘execute’ which is where you put your actual filter functionality and is called when the filter is invoked on a post during the update process.

The display function is used for an upcoming overview page. The use will be to correctly display plugin options there.

Interface

If you want to add a custom field option to your plugin. This is the format of a control. It is fairly straight-forward:
$controls["name of option"] = array(
"name" => "your field name",
"desc" => __("you field description"),
"type" => "text",
"default" => "",
"required" => true);

These controls should be defined in the setControls() function of your filter class

The name of option is used for the $controls property in your class. Name is the field name and will be the name of your HTML field and stored in database. This is also the value you query when executing your filter. Desc will be shown to user.

Type is the type of your control. Currently it can be either ‘text’ ( input type text ) or ‘checkbox’. Others are not yet supported but will be if need arises. The third option can be a custom name like ‘my_field_box’. This allows you to control custom output for a field in your filter. FAF will search for a function by that name in your plugin class ( e.g you need a function my_field_box(); which outputs desired content ).

Default is the default value when the user adds your filter. For a checkbox to be checked the value should be ’1′, for text a default string of characters.

When required is set the plugin will not save settings but instead give an error stating this options is required. Obviously this is not smart to do on anything of type checkbox since it would for the user to check it.

Executing the filter

The Filter constructor will load two properties in your class: $post and $args. $post is the post_array containing all the fields of the post about to be inserted. $args are all options set, i.e your form fields in an array.

$post = $this->post;
$args = $this->args;
$content = $post["post_content"];
$field = $args["your_field_name"];


With this information you can filter the post. Important! Your filter should ALWAYS return the updated post array back. If not the whole post will be dropped, only do this if that is the point of your filter.


$post["content"] = $my_updated_content;
return $post;


Don’t forget to update the post array and then return it.

Activation

Drop your filter in the ‘/filters/’ subdirectory of the plugin. Everything in this directory with the extention .php will be loaded into FAF. Be sure to test first locally though since bad coding or fatal errors will break, well, everything. Also be sure that your filter ‘extends’ the fafFilter abstract class!

Samples

Yes this is not for the novice, but it ain’t that hard either. The best thing to do is just look at the already existing filters. You can copy one of them and start editing to fit your needs. As a reminder: this feature is for experienced coders, use at your own peril.

Share!

Feedwordpress Advanced Filters is constantly looking to add new filters to be the best option for Feedwordpress. If you miss a feature and decide to write your own filter please consider sharing it if it would benefit other people as well.

Any questions are welcome in the comments (or support area). I will try to get back to you best way I can.

The post Custom filter in Feedwordpress Advanced Filters appeared first on Weblog Mechanic.

See the changelog for the bugs fixed.

You can get the latest version via the WordPress auto-update or download the plugin from the WordPress site.

For the next version I have a multitude of enhancements and new features on my list:

• Filter for expiring posts. Posts will be unpublished or deleted after a certain time.
• Filter for checking and fixing URL’s (i.e a www link without http:// resulting in incorrect links )
• A page where you can overview all your filter settings on all feeds
• A filter to search for duplicated posts and ignore the new ones based on a certain threshold ( i.e posts who are 99% the same are ignored )

Since of course my time is also limited I’m wondering which of these to do first or maybe concentrate on something totally different ( multi-language support for instance ). You can help me by providing feedback of which features you are dearly waiting for by commenting or contacting me. Or just to say ‘yeah’ of course.

The post Feedwordpress Advanced Filters 0.5.5 appeared first on Weblog Mechanic.

Decent that is with a nice interface, everything working and fairly stable. I have been using the plugin in development for a while already and a few people were interested at testing the alpha-versions as well. For me it works like a charm, so I’m pretty excited about releasing this plugin today.

You can get the plugin and view information about it at the plugin page!

The post FeedWordPress Advanced Filters version 0.5 released! appeared first on Weblog Mechanic.

Often I used IrfanView on Wine, but of course that is also suboptimal and not really comfortable. Even apart from some quirks that Wine seems to introduce. Gimp always seems to be a bit ‘too much’ when just wanting to quickly edit a bunch of photos.

Today I ran into Fotoxx ( which sounds a little weird ) by accident and I was happily surprised by the amount of features it has while keeping stuff simple. The interface is clunky and takes some time to get used to. Hopefully this will be a matter of attention in future versions to come.

Features include everything I need for daily life like crop ( called ‘trim’ ), resizing, sharpen and everything else you might except from fast, simple photo editing software. There is also a gallery which does what it needs to do, but also suffers from bad design decisions ( like single-click map navigating, why? ).

Another good thing is that Fotoxx comes with a lot of batch-filter options, in case you need to transform a whole bunch of images. I didn’t look at this closely but might come in handy if you are stuck with a use load of similar photo editing you have to do.

Concluding, I don’t think it’s a perfect solution yet but it certainly is much better than what I have seen so far. In some ironic way it looks like IrFanView since the latter’s interface is also far from being perfect. Be aware of very old versions that some distributions still seem to carry by default. You can get the latest packages here.

If you are aware of better solutions for a good Linux image editor share it in the comments!

The post Fotoxx : The IrFanView of Linux? appeared first on Weblog Mechanic.

Instead of making a test page, altering and refreshing minor changes all day I decided to look around a bit for a handy tool. There are a lot of them out there but I found a nice one.

The cool thing is you can easily switch between modes, modifiers and it automatically refreshed. The only minor point is that it is sometimes hard to see the difference between no match and an expression crash.

Check it out: Online regular expressions tester

Let me know if you found a better one!

The post Regular expressions – test online appeared first on Weblog Mechanic.

Avid readers of this blog (hi mom!) know that I dive a lot into the Feedwordpress plugin. But still some things are not satisfying enough for me.

RSS is a great technique to get data, but unfortunately some of the sites I gather my feeds from are, let’s say, not very good. A lot of feeds out there need editing and molding to make it decent. This is one of the reasons I need Feedwordpress filters to shape the content a little bit.

For simply excluding posts there is the quite nice ADA Feedwordpress plugin (if hope to use this logic some day, since it’s good). But I yet couldn’t find any plugin that let’s you do what I want.

Introducing FeedWordpress Advanced Filters

I wanted a flexible yet easy method to filter content from feeds. So I decided to start my own plugin. I have had some experience writing small plugins ( replacing this or doing that ) and digging around other peoples plugin, but this is my biggest project so far.

Features:

Filter-wise:

• Filter certain keywords from the feed
• Removing HTML from the post
• Being to able to add posts to an extra category if a certain keyword is found
• Resize images found in feed to standard WordPress sizes (i.e. ‘medium’)
• Ability to move images to front or bottom of post

General:

• Well-written and clear code respecting namespaces etc
• Easily extendible ( other filters )
• Fitting in the Feedwordpress framework

So far

By now I’m testing the plugin on one of my real sites to see if everything is according to wish, squish bugs and improve things that come up.

The idea is to release to code to the WordPress community (of course) but I want to be sure that no really weird things can happen first.

What other filters would you like to see for Feedwordpress? If you came to this article because you are looking for similar functionality and you want to have a go with it on a Test installation feel free to comment or contact me!

The post Feedwordpress Filters (announcement) appeared first on Weblog Mechanic.

Along with some other functions you shouldn’t be using anymore anyway. See the incompatible list.

For up-to-date plugins and software this shouldn’t be a problem since it was deprecated for a while already.

For me it notably breaks the Feedwordpress plugin in WordPress and gives a fatal error, which is annoying. A simple solution is present but you need to dive into the code and replace a few lines. See the solution here.

I fear older plugins of various kinds are also vulnerable for this problem, so I advice to check your installation locally against a new php version to see if any problems arise before your host decides to upgrade their installation!

The post PHP 5.4 and call-time-pass-by-reference appeared first on Weblog Mechanic.

The catch is that WordPress already serializes data send to the function. When invoking get_option the data will be unserialized. Obviously this causes an error if you try to unserialize the whole thing after that.

In short, just push an unserialized array unto update_option and everything will be fine!

update_option("stuff",array('foo','bar'));
$foobar = get_option("stuff");


See this blog post for more backgrounds.

The post WordPress Update_option and serialize appeared first on Weblog Mechanic.

I have been talking with lot’s of not-internet savvy people looking to jump in online with their own site, either personal or for a small business. Five hings to consider first before even starting a new site.

1. Do I need a website?

It seems like a weird question, but this should be the beginning of your journey. And the reason why most websites die within a few weeks.

If you have a small business (or any business) the question will be ‘yes’. No matter how small, your own online presence will be a good thing.

If you want a personal site, the question is probably ‘no’. I would recommend to first try a free service and see if you can keep up. But most likely after using social media an own site might seem like too much. Be happy with the fact that nobody will visit your website, outside of your family and maybe some friends ( and they will lie about it too! ) .

2. Which information do I have to offer?

Closely related to question 1: What kind of information I have to offer that isn’t already widely available everywhere else?

In case of your business I would keep it simple. What do we do, what products do we offer, where are we located and when are we open?

It’s incredible that some very small companies will go through the trouble of creating a huge website, online ordering and payments, and forget to mention where in the world they are located and when the real-life counterpart is open.

3. How ofter can I update?

That brings you to maybe to most important question. Do you really have time to sit down every few days and update your website? Most websites die in the sea of ambition. Before starting there are a zillion ideas. ‘Let’s maintain this open directory of everything that is happening in my city!’ .

If a site is out-of-date people will click away instantly.

There is nothing wrong with not having a blog if you won’t write on it. If you only have to offer static information, fine. That’s a lot better than knowing the special offers of 2008.

4. Don’t believe everybody

When starting out with your online presence it doesn’t have to be perfect. You don’t need to have all . It much more important to do a few things good, then a lot of things bad.

There are many companies, people and websites around that will try to convince you of the latter. Especially of course when they smell a lot of work.

This is how most of us work: we just take a stack of paper ( yes, no fancy tools ) and a pencil and just write down a list of must-have content. And then we make a few sketches ( if you are a web 2.0 windbag you can call it mood-boarding ) and see what works and what not.

5. The critical eye

Sit down for an evening and settle yourself in front of the computer and start browsing. Learn yourself to consciously think about what you are seeing on other pages.

For instance what do you feel? Chaotic blinking stuff or a sober layout? Nice fonts? Too small or too big? Are the links on the place you’d expect? Do you find your thoughts drifting off from what you are searching here? Or can you find everything quickly?

Be warned..

You can play site-bingo. Take the subjects from this post and collect sites who do them right or wrong or just a few of them right. This way you will teach yourself. Recognizing good ideas and bad ideas will help you tremendously with your own work.

Stack this with your design on the wall and never forget.

And lastly, (almost) nobody’s getting millionaire next week from putting a site online. If you know how to do this, you wouldn’t be reading this.

The post 5 things to think about when starting a new site appeared first on Weblog Mechanic.