G-Loaded Journal » Plugins

The Read-It-Later extension

George Notaras — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 10:46:13 +0000

I just discovered the Read-It-Later addon for the Firefox browser. This is one of the most fantastic plugins I’ve seen in a while. From what I see, there have been about 4 million downloads already. This means I am too late, but as they say “better late than never“! This extension makes it possible to maintain a queue of unread content locally or remotely. It is also possible to save the text locally and read it at a later time even if you are offline. Really cool.

Here is a list of the features:

Save pages to a reading list to read when you have time.

Offline reading mode lets you read the items you’ve saved for later on the plane, train, or anywhere without an internet connection.

Sync your list to all of your computers, at work or home.

Sync your list to Read It Later apps for iPhone, iPod, iPad, Android and more.

After reading, bookmark pages on your preferred bookmarking service or share them with friends.

Click to Save Mode lets you quickly batch a reading list just by clicking on interesting links.

Text view strips away images, ads, and layout from articles and presents them in an easy to consume way.

Until today I have been keeping content that I wished to read at a later time in the browser’s bookmark system or I left yet another tab open or stored the URL in a text file. This plugin seems that it will provide a decent solution and eliminate the trouble. I haven’t used the remote service yet and I am not sure if I will ever do. The local “read queue” works really well.

The Read-It-Later extension, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

CPU Time saved by WP-Super-Cache

George Notaras — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 23:29:22 +0000

I needed to make some changes to the website layout this afternoon, so I turned off WP-Super-Cache for a while. As you can clearly see in the following graph the CPU time consumed by php-cgi processes increased by 2-4 times when caching was turned off between 14:00-17:00. And this increase was caused by a single WordPress installation during low traffic hours. This is one of the many reasons I love caching plugins.

CPU consumption with WP-Super-Cache turned off between 14:00-17:00

CPU Time saved by WP-Super-Cache, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

Declutter Plugin for WordPress

George Notaras — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 21:28:04 +0000

Web applications that add unnecessary HTTP headers or meta tags and links in the HTML HEAD section of my web pages usually make me nervous. Today, WordPress, once again, made me spend my free time trying to find which filters add such useless data in my web pages and try to remove it. Removing the meta tags and links from the HTML head was rather easy using the remove_action() function, but the HTTP headers gave me a hard time. Before giving up, I decided to search for a plugin that could possibly provide a solution. Fortunately, I discovered a great plugin, named WP-Declutter, which makes it possible to remove all that useless stuff in one go. Below, there is some information about which items I have removed.

First of all, I should say that the plugin’s feature set by far exceeded my expectations as it can remove links and metatags from the HTML HEAD area, HTTP headers added by WordPress, the generator element of the feeds, and also various classes WP adds to various HTML elements.

I removed the following items from the HTML HEAD:

Link to the Really Simple Discovery service endpoint. That’s the link to: /xmlrpc.php?rsd
Link to the first post on your blog.
Link to the Windows Live Writer manifest file. That’s the link to: /wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
The generator meta tag.
The shortlink.

From the “feeds” section I removed the the “generator” element.

Finally, from the HTTP headers section I removed everything. In my case, the ETag, Expires and Cache-Control headers are added by the webserver (FileETags and mod_expires). If this is not the case for you, then consider keeping these enabled.

Another thing you should keep in mind is that if you use any caching mechanism, like WP-Super-Cache, make sure you clear the cache after you make any changes in the WP-Clutter’s administration panel, otherwise the changes you made will be visible after the cached pages expire.

Declutter Plugin for WordPress, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

How to upgrade WP-Super-Cache

George Notaras — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:11:58 +0000

A while ago, I had published a step-by-step guide about how to install WP-Super-Cache in WordPress successfully. Now, I’m going through the upgrade procedure, so to safely and effortlessly upgrade the plugin whenever a new version is released. I know that documenting this sh** should not be needed, but it turns out the installation of this software is rather complicated (compared to other WordPress plugins I use), so a step-by-step upgrade guide is almost mandatory.

First of all, go to the plugin’s administration panel and set caching to OFF.
Delete the expired and cached pages by pressing the relevant buttons on the same page.
Make the wp-content directory writeable (how to make a directory writeable)
Go to WordPress’ plugin administration panel and de-activate WP-Super-Cache.
Now, replace the old version of the plugin with the new one in wp-content/plugins/. This should be straightforward.
Now, go to WordPress’ plugin administration panel and activate WP-Super-Cache.
Go to WP-Super-Chache’s admin panel and set caching to ON again.
Remove the write-bit from wp-content directory so to make it read-only for the web server process (f.ex: chmod go-w wp-content).

That should be it.

Procedure last updated on: May 7, 2009 for WP-Super-Cache v0.9.4.3

How to upgrade WP-Super-Cache, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

Fast-Static-Feed WordPress Plugin

George Notaras — Sat, 10 May 2008 04:44:56 +0000

Syndicated content has almost become the standard way of distributing web content nowadays. WordPress can deliver its content in various different feed formats -RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0, RDF, RSS 0.92- and can generate feeds for both the published posts -grouped by time, category, tag, author etc- and the comments that have been submitted by readers. Moreover, some RSS add-on modules are being used in the generated feeds, so that modern feed readers can even retrieve the submitted comments for each of the feed entries. It is obvious that all these features greatly enhance the user experience, but, on the other hand, depending on the website’s traffic they might increase the server load and thus the content delivery times.

Taking these things into consideration, I decided to write Fast-Static-Feed, a plugin that can cache the site’s entries feed, and deliver a static XML file instead of constantly generating the feed content on every client request. This, combined with the fact that the web server can compress the web content on-the-fly, has greatly reduced the waste of bandwidth and system resources.

How it works

Fast-Static-Feed performs the following actions:

Every time a post is published or an already published post is edited, the plugin dumps the entries feed (that is the feed of the blog posts) to a file. This way, the static XML file is always contains the most fresh content of your blog.
Every time a feed is requested, instead of re-generating the XML content over and over, this plugin delivers the static XML file. This is completely transparent to the client as there are no HTTP redirects involved. Your content is just being delivered faster!
If the plugin is enabled, but the static files have not been created yet, the plugin will try to generate them automatically. Upon failure to do so, a 404 Not Found HTTP error code will be returned to the client.
It also checks if the client’s request includes the If-Modified-Since HTTP header and, in such a case, it checks the static file’s modification time. If the client’s cache is current, it just returns a 304 Not Modified status to further reduce bandwidth usage.

The plugin caches all four types of feeds WordPress supports -RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0, RDF, RSS 0.92-.

Only the feeds that contain your blog posts are cached. The comments feed, each individual post’s comments feed, feeds for categories, tags, authors etc are still generated dynamically every time they are requested.

This plugin does not interefere in any way with the generation of rewrite rules and the generation of your site’s feed links.

Configuration

Generally, the plugin does not require any configuration in order to work.

One mandatory prerequisite is that the wp-content/ directory is writable by the web server. If it is not, the plugin will not be able to create the static files and, consequently, the clients who request a feed will receive a 404 Not Found HTTP code.

Furthermore, there are two options within the source code fast-static-feed.php that can be set.

// By default, the WordPress feeds contain elements of the 'wfw' namespace
// (CommentAPI), so a feed reader can fetch each feed entry's comments.
// By setting the following to 1, these elements will be stripped
// from the static feed.
// It is recommended to set this to 1 in order to save bandwidth.
// More info: http://wellformedweb.org/news/wfw_namespace_elements/
$FSF_STRIP_COMMENTS = 0;
// Set the following to 1 and various messages will be recorded in the logfile,
// which is located in the cache dir (wp-content/cache-xml/)
$FSF_DEBUG = 0;

It has already been mentioned, but it is important to note it again: The only mandatory prerequisite is that wp-content/ is writable by the webserver.

Installation

Make any changes to the configuration options within fast-static-feed.php and upload the file to wp-content/plugins/ directory. Then, activate the plugin through the WordPress administration panel.

License

Fast-Static-Feed is an open-source project, released as Free Software under the terms of the Apache License version 2.

Downloads, Issue Tracking, Support

For the latest releases of Fast-Static-Feed please visit the downloads section of the Fast-Static-Feed Development Portal.

The development website also hosts an issue tracking facility, where you can submit your feature requests or report bugs, and discussion boards, where you can get first class support from the community of users.

Donate

This plugin is released as free software. Nevertheless, its development requires time and effort. A small donation, as a sign of appreciation of the effort, is welcome. Please, use the following button to visit the Donations page. Thanks in advance for your support!

Fast-Static-Feed WordPress Plugin, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag WordPress Plugin

George Notaras — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:14:23 +0000

Yesterday, I noticed that the template tag, which existed inside the default WordPress theme and added the Generator meta tag to the HTML head area, has been replaced by an internal action. This change makes the removal of that specific meta tag a bit harder for users. I can understand that the project may use the generator metatag for statistical purposes, but, on the other hand, it reveals the WordPress version, which makes it easy for automated scanners to locate a confirmed-to-be-vulnerable WordPress version. Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag is a very small plugin, an one-liner actually, that gently removes the action that writes the Generator meta tag to your HTML pages.

Installation

To install the plugin just upload the remove-generator-meta-tag.php file inside the wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it through the administration panel. No configuration is required.

License

Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag is an open-source project, released as Free Software under the terms of the Apache License version 2.

Downloads, Issue Tracking, Support

For the latest releases of Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag please visit the downloads section of the Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag Development Portal.

Donate

Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag WordPress Plugin, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

More-Feed-Excerpt WordPress Plugin

George Notaras — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:53:44 +0000

Since WordPress v2.5, it is no longer possible to use the tag within a post in order to define an excerpt which will be used on both the web and feeds. Now, WordPress uses this tag to split a post for the web only, while the feeds can contain either the full-text or an excerpt that is calculated by WP. G-Loaded delivers the More-Feed-Excerpt plugin to all those whose who have gotten used to the old behavior and do not feel comfortable with this change.

Installation

To install the plugin, upload the more-feed-excerpt.php file in your wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it through the WordPress Administration panel. No other action or configuration is required. The plugin does not interfere with the WordPress database or templates in any way, so uninstalling it is as simple as de-activating it.

License

More-Feed-Excerpt is an open-source project, released as Free Software under the terms of the Apache License version 2.

Downloads, Issue Tracking, Support

For the latest releases of More-Feed-Excerpt please visit the downloads section of the More-Feed-Excerpt Development Portal.

Donate

This plugin is released as free software. Nevertheless, its development requires time and effort. A small donation, as a sign of appreciation of the effort, is welcome and highly appreciated. Please, use the following button to visit the Donations page. Thanks in advance for your support!

Special Thanks

I would like to publicly thank PiXELWiT for the support and Andrew Arensburger for code contribution.

More-Feed-Excerpt WordPress Plugin, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

Fixed: tab-session-management.py now works with Python 2.5

George Notaras — Fri, 18 May 2007 09:34:13 +0000

This is a notice that I have updated the tab-session-management extension for Epiphany, so to make it work in environments that use Python version 2.5. This mainly involves the newest Fedora and Ubuntu distributions – at the time of writing. The plugin makes use of the cElementTree module, which has been moved into Python’s Standard Library in Python v2.5, inside the xml package (xml.etree.cElementTree). This issue has been addressed in the 0.2 version of the extension. Furthermore, the extension’s homepage has been updated with much more information. Last, but not least, a Nautilus action, which makes it possible to load saved tab sessions right from within Nautilus, has been added for download.

Fixed: tab-session-management.py now works with Python 2.5, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

bbPress for WordPress

George Notaras — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:57:37 +0000

Some of you might have noticed that there have been some changes in the way readers can interact with g-loaded.eu over the last month. Comments and trackbacks are being disabled 20-30 days after the publication of a post, while a new facility, a discussion board, has been set up in order to compensate for the loss of this functionality. The bbPress forum software has been chosen to serve as the bulletin board. In this post I will try to outline the reasons that lead to this policy change and also explain why bbPress was chosen among many other forum software.

One might think that integrating a forum in a blog is pure nonsense, since the blog platform, WordPress in our case, already includes a comment system. I would agree with that for those blogs which serve as diaries or as a place where one can freely express his/her opinion about various topics or events that are all over the news, but, for a blog which hosts technical or howto articles, tips, software etc, I would say that the comment system, not only is inadequate, but also, under certain circumstances, it can harm the web site in a variety of ways.

A blog that hosts articles or software needs to provide the reader with a way to report problems, make suggestions etc. The WordPress comment system may seem adequate for this type of communication, at least for the first 20-25 comments, but, when their number grows bigger than that, then various problems may rise. The page length might grow to an unexpected amount of bytes, which, not only adds unnecessary load to the server, but also, it gives the readers a hard time while the webpage is loading. Moreover, depending on the quality of the comments (language, duplicate feedback, etc), it might make the article page less attractive to a search engine. One could suggest to use the alternate comments-popup WordPress template, but this would not improve the comments page load time. A possible solution would be to use a plugin that displays comments in pages, but, admitedly, from the reader’s perspective, this would not be a convenient way of following the discussion. All these, combined with the fact that wordpress does not provide a facility to search comments by default, make the idea of adding a forum to the blog not seem that nonsense after all.
Another reason for integrating a forum in a technical WordPress blog is that it makes dealing with spam easier. As I have written earlier, disabling comments in such a blog is not an option. Readers need to leave feedback. So, comments need to be left enabled practically forever. On the other hand, it is well known that there are numerous spiders that crawl the web on behalf of spammers. Once your website has been indexed by those spiders, then the usual automated comment submissions are what consumes your bandwidth and ruins your web site access statistics. By adding a discussion system under a single path, eg g-loaded forums makes it easier to control spam attempts or isolate them when analyzing the web site traffic. Even if a spam message sneaks into the forum, which is very unlikely as I will explain later, it will definitely won’t be under your published article, but under the less important forum path. Last but not least, forums usually require that users register with the web site in order to post, which is another important measure against automatic message submissions.

So, after some thought I decided to proceed into writing a small plugin for WordPress which gives the administrator the ability to control whether comments and pingbacks are enabled or not on all posts that have been published before a specified number of days. This plugin is in alpha stage, so I haven’t made a release yet. It is too bad that WordPress does not provide such functionality by default. I could discuss further about the possible reasons for this behaviour, but this is not what I’d like to do right now.

From now on, comments on the blog, without the requirement of registration, will be left enabled for the very first days after the publication of a post. Further discussion will take place in the forum, in which you will need to register. This will be permanent.

Why bbPress

I have chosen bbPress as the forum backend application. This might change in the future, but for now it seems to serve quite well.

Here are the reasons why I have made this choice:

bbPress is extremely lightweight with only the absolutely necessary feature set. On the other hand, like WordPress, it features a flexible plugin system which makes the addition of new features easy.
bbPress is being developed by those people who are involved in the WordPress development. This gives some assurance that the integration of bbPress into WordPress (users, theme, etc) will be rather easy.
It supports Akismet. All posts that contain hyperlinks or are identified as spam are held for moderation.
Based on some internal rules, it automatically marks some registered user accounts (mainly accounts intended for spam) as bozos.
It supports adding tags to posts.
It supports the editting of a post by its poster after it has been posted.
All hyperlinks have the “nofollow” relation, thus discouraging potential spammers or those who care only for promoting their own websites by posting stupid messages.

Note: Actually, hyperlinks inside posts do not have the nofollow relation. I have written a very small plugin for bbPress (this is an one-liner) that adds nofollow to all hyperlinks inside posts when the latter are publicly displayed.

You can download it here: nofollow-posts.zip

How to install: create a directory named “my-plugins” under the root dir of your bbpress forum and throw nofollow-posts.php in this directory. Enjoy!

Some other forum software that are definitely interesting are SMF, phpBB and punBB. Off course there are a lot more. Check them out at the Forum Matrix.

bbPress for WordPress, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

CC Configurator plugin version 1.0 is out!

George Notaras — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:40:57 +0000

I proudly present the latest and greatest version 1.0 of the Creative Commons configurator plugin for WordPress. The code was almost re-written from scratch, but now the plugin is feature-rich, more flexible and is 100% ready for localization! Greek users will find the Greek translation at the plugin home page. This is the first time I try to translate technical terminology from English to Greek, but I hope the result is acceptable. This is by far the most complete of the plugins I have written so far. Contributions, suggestions and corrections are always appreciated and welcome.

CC Configurator plugin version 1.0 is out!, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

G-Loaded Journal » Plugins

The Read-It-Later extension

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Fast-Static-Feed WordPress Plugin

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Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag WordPress Plugin

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More-Feed-Excerpt WordPress Plugin

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Further Reading

Special Thanks

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