Oh yes.

This is why I love going to WordCamps. Stilly stuff like this that you can laugh about later.

Last night around 10:15 decided to head out for dinner, and somewhat randomly picked the Cuban restaurant Guantanamera because it was nearby. Sat down in a booth near the bar, facing the band, and ordered some mojitos. Over the din of the other diners I thought “hey this house band isn’t half bad.”

Within a few minutes of listening it became very apparent that beyond “not half bad” they were actually really remarkable. What a treat! Ordered a steak and sank in, letting the music (and mojito) flow over me. A half hour later a lady from one of the front tables got up to sing with the band — which isn’t always a good thing. They started on The Man I Love and it was sublime. The song started out as a ballad but then they kicked it up to a fast afro-Cuban beat, and the singer scatted over the beats for a good 4-5 minutes. It turns out it was Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer! I felt particularly fortunate as I had been bummed to miss the Manhattan Transfer show at the Montréal Jazz Festival in June, but here, of all the most random places, was one of my favorite members performing at a small family joint in Midtown West.

Janis sat down after one song but a string of similarly talented musicians came in and out of the band until the restaurant started to close down. I didn’t recognize any of them but the music was so good.

There was a recording device above the band that was collected by a fellow who I caught up with outside the restaurant as he was hailing a taxi. His name was Paul Siegel and he’s the co-president of Hudson Music which is a music education group (with a website powered by WordPress). I learned the percussionist leader of the house band was Pedro Martínez and Paul follows and records him several times a week at different venues. Apparently Guantanamera is a long-time musician hang-out where even folks like Eric Clapton sat in with the band.

Only in New York.

On the new Chic & Geek website (no relation to Chic Meets Geek events) I was invited to do a “Questionnaire de Proust” style interview which has just been published in French. Lots of little tidbits that I’ve never talked about before. (Translation here.)

I overhauled my Tweet Tweet plugin for WordPress yesterday so it would work with the new Twitter OAuth mechanism. This morning I made it possible to download your older tweets, up to the max limit of 3,200 tweets that Twitter allows.

It’s still a work in progress but I want to get a new release out as soon as I can for current users who are using the basic auth that doesn’t work any more. If you’re feeling adventurous give the development version on the download page a go and tell me what you think!

99% of the OAuth code was ripped from Alex King’s Twitter Tools which in turn uses Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth.php library and OAuth.php from oauth.net. Thank you all for doing the heavy lifting required!

Related Posts

• Tweet Tweet
• Tweet Tweet 0.1 for WordPress
• TechLudd Cork 2008

Lorelle VanFossen has published a recap of her Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins session given on August 29th at OpenCamp in Addison, TX.

To Lorelle, “a mind blowing WordPress Plugin is one that breaks the rules. It is unique and original in its implementation, and pushes WordPress. It might not be a Plugin that everyone must have on their site. It might not be a Plugin that even interests you. What these will do is to get you to look at the incredible diversity of Plugins available.”

Her recap not only briefly covers the topics discussed during her session, but she also lists all of the plugins that were featured, and that list is well worth exploring. Even if you think your blog couldn’t possibly use any more plugins, you might find something that you (or rather your blog) just can’t live without.

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On September 8th, I’ll be at the Tampa Bay WordPress meetup to talk about WordPress custom post types. If you’re a WordPress developer or themer in the area, you should stop by! The meetup is at 7pm at CDB’s Southside in South Tampa.

WordCamp Portland is on September 18th and 19th at Webtrends. My talk is called “Swan Dive! …into the Best WordPress of your Life,” and it’s all about using WordPress to its fullest. Everything from hosting to scaling and everything from upgrades to insider ninja moves will be covered.

Since last year when we wrote about “WordPress in Demand on Elance“, WordPress has surged into the top ten, and now is the sixth most in demand skill on Elance!

Online publishing dominates this list. It’s exciting that the ever evolving WordPress, built on it’s PHP, MySQL, and CSS stack, continues to be the web development platform in demand.

Elance’s 2010 Q2 Online Employment Report also includes a single profile, that of Ron Z Zvagelsky, highlighting his success as a WordPress Expert on Elance.  Represent!

I really enjoyed attending WordCamps in Houston, Savannah, and Salt Lake City the past few weeks. You can always find upcoming WordCamps here, and I’m currently planning on attending Jerusalem (this Sunday), Portland (September 18-19), and Philippines (October 2). I’m looking forward to meeting more of the WordPress community and also answering your questions in the Town Hall sessions.

Around the time of the Thesis GPL debates, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg made an offer to send people free t-shirts. When I talked to him at WordCamp Savannah, he said that he had gotten about 300 requests. I got my care package right after I returned from the WordCamp. In addition to the shirt, it included some Gravatar and WordPress stickers, and a nice certificate, proclaiming that I am “One of the Three Most Important People in WordPress”. Of course, so are the other 300 people who got a certificate in their care packages. Awesomesauce.

Related posts:

1. Analytics360 Plugin for WordPress
2. My Favorite WordPress Plugins
3. Customize Your WordPress Dashboard

New plugins

Facebook Like for Tags converts a standard Facebook Like button from a one-time sharing feature to a one-on-one relationship for ongoing updates and sharing based on tags (keywords) or categories defined by you, the blogger/author.

LBAK Google Checkout is aimed mainly at small projects that just want to sell a few things on their blog through Google Checkout and don’t want too much else apart from ease of use.

Pingdom Status lets you display your Pingdom monitoring data on your WordPress site, essentially creating a status page for whatever it is you are monitoring.

WP Tweetbox adds a highly customizable Tweetbox at the end of blog posts and pages.

Updated plugins

Relevanssi replaces the basic WordPress search with a partial-match search that sorts the results based on relevance.

WP-reCAPTCHA integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam methods with WordPress including comment, registration, and email spam protection.

WP-SimpleViewer allows you to easily create SimpleViewer galleries with WordPress.

WP-Stats-Dashboard displays your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard.

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Liz Strauss gave a masterclass tonight; at least, that’s how it felt to both Frederick and myself. We talked about communicating with your audience, and Liz shared some experiences about open comment nights. We discussed positioning yourself and your blog, and how important personal branding can be.

She told us about feedback loops, and how to use them to listen to your users / clients / audience. She tought us to build our network before we need it, and why and how you should be treating your blog like a business, even if it’s just a hobby. Aren’t you curious yet? Start listening then. You’ll be a wiser man or woman for it at the end of this.

In Dallas, August 29, 2010, at OpenCamp I presented “Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins.” Here are the WordPress Plugins and more features during my presentation. Let me first define what my qualifications for a “mind blowing WordPress Plugin” were, as I had to sift through thousands of Plugins and then filter down to include the following [...]

The WordPress mobile apps for Android and BlackBerry have both been updated with some shiny new features, like a new comment notification system and improved VideoPress integration.

There’s no word yet on an update to the iOS mobile app, but the team still has its eyes set on making this one a major bug-fixing release.

These recent updates would not have been possible without your feedback and beta testing skills, so keep doing whatever you can to make each release better than the last!

Do you use any of the WordPress mobile apps?  I use the iOS mobile app and can honestly say that it has certainly simplified my life when it comes to moderating comments and making last-minute post corrections. How about you? Have the WordPress mobile apps added to or detracted from your WordPress blogging experience?

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Bombax is a nicely crafted theme with 5 different color schemes and configurable options such as right or left or holy grail or no sidebar, magazine style or traditional style, custom header, and custom background.

Lukoo is a simple and stylish theme based around the color green.

Modernist is a beautifully built yet transparent theme. It was designed with a focus on optimal typography in order to better showcase your content.

Twist of Ten is a simple clean CMS style theme.

Us and Them is a modern, clean, blog-style, 960 – 1200 px grid-based, smooth WordPress theme and features some cool jQuery plugins just out of the box as some neat tool-tips and accordions.

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A short hike up to Cecret Lake and along Sugarloaf peak in Little Cottonwood Canyon near Alta, UT. The Wasatch Mountains are a great place to be outdoors. Guest photographer: Sheri Bigelow.

Remember the old days when your computer would crash because you were running too many applications simultaneously? Well, you might be surprised to know that WordPress can fall victim to the very same thing.

You see, your server may be packed with 4 GB of RAM, but that doesn’t mean that all 4 GB have been allocated to PHP on your account. In fact, most decent hosting providers only allocate 32 MB to PHP under each account. Now, most WordPress installations with a good amount of plugins will run fine under 32 MB, but there’s always a chance that one more plugin or one seemingly innocent admin panel task (like exporting or importing posts) may put you over the edge, and you’ll see either a blank screen or the infamous error which starts off something like “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted.”

If you see a blank screen, refer to WordPress and the White Screen of Death before continuing.

Update: Thanks to Big Dave Zatz for reminding me that if you see this error either suddenly (no specific task was done to cause the error) or frequently, try deactivating all plugins to rule-out a plugin-specific issue and try switching themes to rule-out a theme-specific issue.

If you see the infamous fatal memory error, there are three things that you can do before asking your hosting provider for assistance. Which method you use depends entirely on your server configuration. If one method doesn’t work, try the next. Keep in mind that most hosting providers closely monitor memory overrides and don’t take too kindly to frequent use.

1. If you’re using WordPress 2.9.2 or lower, try adding define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M'); to your wp-config.php file. If you’re using WordPress 3.0 or higher, WordPress automatically does this for a variety of tasks, so there’s really no reason to try it in this case.

2. If you can edit or override the system php.ini file, increase the memory limit. For example, memory_limit = 256M

3. If you cannot edit or override the system php.ini file, add php_value memory_limit 256M to your .htaccess file.

If neither of these work, it’s time to ask your hosting provider to temporarily increase PHP’s memory allocation on your account. Keep in mind that most decent hosting providers allocate 32 MB to PHP under each account, and most decent hosting providers allow users to temporarily increase the memory allocation. If your hosting provider won’t accommodate you, perhaps it’s time to find a new hosting provider.

As always, if you need further assistance, the volunteers in the WordPress Support Forums will be more than happy to help you.

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New plugins

Custom sidebars allows you to create your own widgetized areas and custom sidebars, and select what sidebars to use for each post or page.

LBAK User Tracking is a fully featured, page by page tracking plugin for your blog.

Simple SEO lets you optimize your web site or blog by changing the title and menu output for any page or post.

Term Management Tools allows you to merge terms and change the category hierarchy more easily.

UserAgent Theme Switcher lets you change the theme to be displayed according to the detected browser.

Updated plugins

The AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

BackWPup allows you to backup your WordPress blog database and files.

eShop is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with various features.

User Avatar provides a thumbnail area in Your Profile, for users to upload and crop new images in an overlay to be saved and stored to their profile.

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm mobile devices.

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You may be wondering why anyone would want to do this. Think about it, you probably have hundreds of articles that you wrote years ago and when those same articles appear on Google search engine results, the dates appear next to the description.  You might think that this is great, users searching the web should be able to see when an article originally published, but research shows that users discriminate against older content just because it is old. An article that may be valuable despite its age would be subject to a user completely ignoring it and would click on the newer article, just because it was newer.

As you can see in the image above, the search results page lists the post date for the article followed by the description.

Do not confuse the intent here, if you are running a news site or writing about topics whose value is short lived then the adequate thing to do is to continue using dates. However if your traffic from search engines is suffering from users who refuse to visit an old article (and your topics are timeless) then you might want to consider removing the post date from your articles.

So how would you go about removing dates in WordPress?

Google is smart about locating dates on posts so you have to be aware of all the dates present on your WordPress site. Based on discussions on the web it appears that Google uses the post date when listed on a page and when the post date is missing, Google uses dates in comments and even within the post itself. So removing dates will take some cunning.

In order to remove the post date from the posts on your WordPress site you will have to remove the post date from your theme’s template file. In terms of indexing the post date, it appears that Google uses the post date from the single post and not the archive, so for the sake of users and simplicity we are only going to remove the post date from the “single.php” template file.

WARNING! Before proceeding with the modification of any template files, please make sure that you back up your files.

Remove date from single posts

1. Open the single.php file located in the theme directory in WordPress (usually server//wordpress/wp-content/themes/your theme name).

2. Locate the following line of code and remove it (or comment it out) from the template;

<?php the_time(); ?>

Note: The code used by the theme developer may vary from theme to theme and location so make sure you look for the <?php the_time within the single.php template to be sure.

3. Save the changes and refresh your website to see the modification. If the changes don’t appear right away make sure to clear the cache if you are using a plugin like WP-Supercache.

Remove date from comments

In order to make sure that Google cannot find a date on your blog post we will also need to remove the dates associated with comments. This can be a bit frustrating for users who want to follow a comment thread so it is entirely up to you.

1. Open the comments.php file located in the theme directory in WordPress (usually server//wordpress/wp-content/themes/your theme name).

2. Locate the following line of code and remove it (or comment it out) from the template;

<?php comment_date() ?>

Note: The code used by the theme developer may vary from theme to theme and location so make sure you look for the <?php the_time within the comments.php template to be sure.

3. Save the changes and refresh your website to see the modification. If the changes don’t appear right away make sure to clear the cache if you are using a plugin like WP-Supercache.

When removing these PHP functions make sure that you take into account the formatting of your posts and comments to ensure that the removal of this element doesn’t interfere with your theme’s design or break the code.

After these changes are made you will need to wait a couple of hours or days in order for Google’s index to reflect those changes. The variance in time is due to your site’s crawl rate so if your site is very popular and is crawled frequently you may see the update in hours. If your site still appears in the search results with the date, make sure you visit the page and search for the date, remember even dates within the content (originally published on [date]) will be used by Google to stamp a date on the site.

Other solutions for the removal of comments and post dates

If you use a commenting system like Disqus or IntenseDebate that is based on JavaScript then there is no concern for the removal of the date from the comments template. If you are using an older version of WordPress or you feel a bit adventurous you could download the Date Exclusion SEO Plugin from the WordPress plugin directory, just keep in mind that the plugin hasn’t been updated in over 500 days and it’s officially compatible up to 2.71.

Will You Remove Dates from Your Posts?

I’ve mentioned some of the Pro’s related to removal of post and comment dates on your blog:

• Users searching for content on search engines are more likely to click on your link compared to others with older dates.
• Visitors arriving from search engines will not discriminate the age of the content and will instead focus on the content itself, which should increase readership, time on site, etc.

Of course, as with anything as radical as this there can be some repercussions:

• If you employ this “hack” and you run a news site, visitors will arrive, but will quickly realize that the content is dated and leave the site.
• Some users like to know when an article was published and may get frustrated if there is no publish date.
• If you decide to stay away from Disqus or IntenseDebate to manange your comments and remove the dates from the comments, users may be confused and frustrated because they can’t follow a comment thread or identify when it a particular comment was posted. In which case they respond by leaving the site or by leaving a nice comment.

If the content on your blog is timeless and you could increase the amount of traffic coming to your blog from search engines, would you remove the post and comment dates?

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The SXSW staff wants to hear your feedback on the proposed panels for SXSW 2011. Your votes on the proposed panels will account for 30% of the final vote, so start voting today!

Currently, there are ten WordPress-related panel proposals awaiting your feedback:

• Beyond Blogging: WordPress is a CMS
• Don’t Be Ashamed to Use WordPress
• Essential WordPress Search Metrics
• Knocking Out Application Layer and Open Source Threats
• Life After Blackbaud
• Making Money with WordPress (Without Working at Automattic)
• Web Development Simplified: Unifying Multiple Tools and Platforms
• WordPress: The Small Business Swiss Army Knife
• WordPress 3.0: The TV Series Publishing Platform
• Yahoo! and WordPress: A Marriage Made in Hell

Are you planning to attend SXSW 2011? Which panel proposals captured your interest?

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It’s that time of year to promote your SxSW panels. I’m slated for two WordPress panels I’d like you to consider voting for.

1. Beyond Blogging: WordPress is a CMS – much of the work that we do at Crowd Favorite is creating advanced CMS websites with WordPress. It’s what’s driven us to create the Carrington theme platform and Carrington Build.
2. Making Money with WordPress (Without Working at Automattic) – I’ve really enjoyed talking shop with Shane and Peter as we’ve gotten to know each other over the last few years. Though our shops are very different we have similar experiences and challenges. We’re all trying to create great things, support the community and support ourselves and our teams at the same time.

Both of these have great groups of panelists/moderators and I think they’d be great events at SxSWi for WordPress developers, consultants and users.

Thanks for your consideration.