Tag Archives: php

My new plugin – Drafts Scheduler

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This started last year as a simple project. I needed a way to bulk-schedule a whole bunch of posts in WordPress over a period of time. WordPress doesn’t have an easy way to do this, so I started writing my own.

I got stuck, then busy and it got left behind. Well, the other day, I picked it up, dusted it off and decided to finish it.

It’s now available in the WordPress Extend repository – meaning it can be downloaded from WordPress.org or installed directly inside your WordPress install. You can download it here: http;//www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/drafts-scheduler

It does just one thing – lets you scheduler ALL of your drafts in one go.

Options? Yeah, we got options.

  1. You can schedule the drafts sequentially or randomly at an arbitrary interval of your choosing (3h 9m for example) starting at a set date.
  2. You can schedule drafts ENTIRELY randomly. Sort of. You still pick the starting date, the maximum number of posts per day, and also the start and end times within the day to confine your posts. After that, all bets are off. So you could schedule your posts to post up to 5 times a day, and only between 9am and 5pm if you wanted. Or between 10pm and 11:47pm if that makes you happy.
  3. That’s it. There is no 3.

I’m anxious for feedback. This was a fairly simple plugin that I should have created FIRST before my other, more complicated projects, but didn’t. Anyway, enjoy and leave me your comments here or on my development site: http://www.installedforyou.com/wordpress/new-plugin-drafts-scheduler/393/

My WordPress Adventures

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WordPress
Image via Wikipedia

For the non-techies out there, this website or blog runs on the WordPress platform. WordPress is a tool that makes blogging easier by simplifying a lot of the “tech” bits.

That said, I like my “tech” bits, so I dig a little deeper.

I run several (over 10) WordPress blogs, and even started looking at WordPress MU to build communities.

I also started developing plugins, or add-ons, to give it even more functionality. My first attempt was a good idea, poorly implemented, that I haven’t been back to revisit.

Recently, I’ve been working with a commercial or premium plugin with my friend Alex called Standout Comments and it’s nearly ready. We’ve designed it to be an all-in-one comment plugin with lots of great features for your average site owner, but also for Internet Marketers who want “everything”. It’s not perfect, but it’s “good enough” for a beta release.

Alex has lined up Vancouver blogger and big-man-on-campus, John Chow to help us (awesome) and given a couple of people a private beta copy. I’ve installed it on all of my main blogs (including this one) but am looking for more testers.

You can test Standout Comments in one of 2 ways.

  1. Leave comments here and/or tweet about posts using the Tweetback URL provided – this is the function I’ve tested least. Tweetbacks should be tracked and show up in comments automatically.
  2. Request a beta copy by leaving a comment below. I’ll take a look at your site and make a decision. Ideally you get a bunch of visitors and comments daily to put the plugin through it’s paces.

Beta testers will get free access to the software when it’s launched.

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Shortening URLs for fun and… well… fun

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So I think we’ve established that I’m a dork, geek, nerd etc and an unabashed one at that. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows me.

For a while, I’ve been trying to learn and understand the Zend Framework and the mysteries of the MVC design pattern or whatever you want to call it. Man, that shit’s hard.

So while trying to find a project to use as a test, beyond what they all show in the tutorials, I decided I needed a small project, possibly as a baseline. Something to build in standard procedural PHP that I might be able to rebuild in MVC in the future.

One of the things that the internet is lacking (not) is the URL Shortener. You know, like tinyurl.com, twurl.cc, and about 100 other sites. They take long unmanageable URLs with lots of parameters etc and shrink them down so they’re neater and cleaner. They also let affiliates cloak their links. So all you see is something like: http://cliklet.com/97bu8q and you don’t know where it goes so you can’t cheat them out of their commissions.

It also means you can Tweet them. Since they’re under 30 characters they don’t take a huge toll on your 140 character Tweet limit.

So I decided to build http://cliklet.com for lack of anything better to do for a few hours. The original setup is easy. The code is simple, and probably doesn’t need to be re-written in MVC. The main project has 4 pages. The index page, the shuffle code, the ajax page and the forward page. Technically that’s 2 more than I need, but I’m also playing with JQuery.

Tell your friends about Cliklet.com! Tell them to use it! Use it yourself. It’s awesome.

To round out the project and make it worthy of expansion, I’ll add some more features:

  • Login system to track cliklets, make cliklets private and access other “beta” features
  • Public display of the latest ## cliklets
  • Public display of the hottest ## cliklets
  • Possibly ad or self-promotion supported thin frame at the top (ala Twitpwr.com)
  • Ability to create custom links (not random)

There seems to be a few problems with this concept.

  1. No business model. Nobody pays for this, even for advanced features so the most you can hope for is some Adsense clicks if you have that on the main site or possibly some “newsletter” related sales or affiliate sales if you communicate with registered users
  2. Limited feature set. When reviewing other sites providing these links, additional features range from none (twurl) to about 6 and they tend to be the same. I haven’t looked at the “out of the box” stuff yet.
  3. Medium-low cost. Basically it depends on how busy you are. Serving a few links that aren’t that busy won’t cause much bandwidth but if it gets busier either in creating or serving links then bandwidth costs will increase slightly. Since we’re mostly redirecting it’s minor.

Keep an eye on Cliklet.com for changes, designs and updates.