April 20th, 2013

WP Lynx 0.6.0

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

Say hello to a new, better organized, settings page. Settings are now organized by context, with many of the advanced, infrequently used settings sitting under the advanced tab. In the process of updating the settings page, the underlying plugin core was updated to the latest mtekk_adminKit, which already ships with Breadcrumb NavXT.

Additionally, WP Lynx now supports capturing a screenshot of a website and using that as the thumbnail image. This is provided though Snapito!, you’ll need to grab an API key for it to work. Note that the site screenshot will always be the second image in a thumbnail set, unless no other thumbnails were found. Also note that the initial loading of a screenshot may take several seconds. Please wait for the screenshot to load in the window before inserting the lynx print to ensure WP Lynx can cache the image properly.

Lastly, a few tweaks were made to the scraping engine to fix the causes of PHP notices in cases where something went wrong in retrieving a site.

Note that this release is the first in a series of planned releases between now and 1.0. Each will add a minor number of features, tracked in the WP Lynx GitHub Repository.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

March 29th, 2013

Weblogs.us Site Speed Tips

Posted by John Havlik in Weblogs.us

Weblogs.us supports two resource loading optimizations that can give your site a slight bump in performance. While neither are enabled by default on individual sites, we will be rolling them out over the next three months. However, you can try them out before they are rolled out to your site.
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March 28th, 2013

I’m Speaking at WordCamp Minneapolis

Posted by John Havlik in Announcements > WordPress

My presentation titled “The Power of Custom Types” was accepted into the “Intermediate” track for WordCamp Minneapolis 2013. This is based off of the presentation I gave twice at WordCamp NYC last year. Based on some feedback from organizers this presentation will take a slightly different path than its predecessor.

Yes, it is still on Custom Post Types. However, custom taxonomies and post (custom) meta will also be covered. Inspiring members of the audience to use WordPress’ custom types in their next project is the aim of the presentation. In the presentation I will be covering the basics of CPTs, taxonomies, and post meta, presenting a few cool tips and tricks, discussing when a CPT, taxonomy, or post meta use is appropriate, and showcasing some cool plugins that use a combination of CPTs, taxonomies and post meta. As always, there will be plenty of time for Q&A so bring your questions.

Psst. If you haven’t registered yet, register for WordCamp Minneapolis while you still can.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

March 2nd, 2013

Fix Plex Placing Albums into “Various Artists”

Posted by John Havlik in Guides

Plex is a pretty nifty media server and app for deices such as Roku. However, with a large music library, it can do some goofy things. One of the most annoying is placing albums under the “artist” Various Artists (when they shouldn’t be there).

Case in point, two albums that I ripped from CD ended up in this category. The first was Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 3, and the second was Daft Punk’s Discovery. Neither of these should be under Various Artists. What was the problem? Plex’s media scanner picks up on the Artist ID3 tag. If for a given album there are two or more artists it will throw it in the Various Artists group. The easy solution is to use an ID3 tag editor (EasyTAG and Kid3 are two open source options) to clean up and homogenize the artist field for all tracks in the album.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]