Need: The ability to control the thumbnail to be used when sharing a post with Facebook.
The Catch: I was trying to share a post with Facebook that had no thumbnail attached to it.
How to specify a Facebook thumbnail when sharing a post
March 17th, 2010 by Ron ZPublish2 JSON Feed Without A Plugin
March 9th, 2010 by Ron ZNeed: A way to display the JSON data provided by Publish2 on a WordPress blog.
The Catch: I wanted to have multiple instances of the feed from different JSON data feeds on the post. Furthermore, each required unique items from its respective JSON feed and I wanted to style each instance differently.
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GoDaddy and Increasing Your WordPress Max Upload Size
February 26th, 2010 by Ron ZSo I’ve never been crazy about GoDaddy’s hosting service, for a number of different reasons, but today I had an awesome experience with their customer service. A client of mine has a shared hosting account and they wanted to increase the Maximum File Upload size allowed in WordPress. He called GoDaddy and their support provided him with a link which directed him to modify the PHP.INI file through SSH.
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WordPress Location Search By Zip Code
February 22nd, 2010 by Ron ZLast week I completed a Worpress CMS conversion for a site that was running a custom Ruby on Rails CMS. Everything was pretty straightforward, only caveat was that they wanted to be able to search their 12K+ locations by zip code, paginate the results, and also display them as markers on a Google map.
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WordPress Calendar Plugin: Display Posts By Date & Category
February 10th, 2010 by Ron ZIn my ongoing effort of not re-inventing the wheel, I spent hours upon hours looking through ALL of the available WordPress calendar plugins for a project that I had been working on.
My Needs:
- AJAX (required asynchronous navigation between months)
- Query posts by category (would be nice if I could select the category)
- Associate posts with their dates.
- Highlight calendar date when a post exists.
- A tooltip that would display post titles and link to individual posts (past, current, and future) when a highlighted date is selected.
Note: The tooltip would also allow me to display multiple posts per day should that be the case.
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Favorite Lightbox For Images and Video
January 14th, 2010 by Ron ZLast year I was working on a project that was utilizing the jQuery Cycle plugin for a slideshow and I was struggling to find a compatible jQuery lightbox script which would play FLV videos hosted on the same server (with a built in media player). Unfortunately, the best one I came across was written in MooTools which would’ve led to conflicts. Worried that I would have to re-write the slideshow using MooTools or calling jQuery.noConflict() which I hate, I was relived when I stumbled upon Shadowbox.js, a lightbox style Media Viewer which was compatible with major JS frameworks like Prototype, jQuery, and MooTools. In addition to being incredibly easy to install (when compared to other lightbox scripts), it’s automatically adapts to whatever Javascript framework is being used! Best of all, no conflicts! It also does images, galleries, embedded video, and tons more.
Displaying YouTube Thumbails in Your WordPress Posts
January 9th, 2010 by Ron ZSince I already wrote the snippet of code to get the thumbnails from the embedded Vimeo video, I thought I might as well do the same for YouTube. It will search through your posts’ content for YouTube embed code and will generate a thumbnail for you. It’s not fancy but it gets the job done.
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Displaying Vimeo Thumbnails In Your Blog Post or Archive
January 7th, 2010 by Ron ZWith WordPress 2.9, you can now embed videos by simply pasting the URL into your blog post and have it create the embed code. I was using Vimeo and wanted to pull the thumbnail associated with the Vimeo video which was embedded in my posts.
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Favorite Internet Explorer 6 PNG Fix
December 25th, 2009 by Ron ZRarely will you find the words “Favorite” and Internet Explorer 6 in the same sentence…it has been the bane of my existence ever since I began in Web Development. If I had my way I would make it illegal to even run a copy of IE6…not a far stretch considering all the pain and suffering developers have had to endure over the years. One of the MANY issues plaguing IE6 is it’s inability to deal with transparent PNG images. Instead of listing out all of the PNG solutions available (there are dozens)…I’ll just let you in on what I’ve found to work best:
It’s not perfect but it has been an invaluable tool in this ongoing battle. Yes Javascript would need to be enabled, but at some point we need to take a stand and say NO to visitors that insist on running IE6 with JS disabled while viewing the site on a 15” 800×600 CRT monitor.
Blogger Image Import – Reloaded
December 24th, 2009 by Ron ZA few months back I was working on a large Blogger to WordPress conversion and had to import thousands of images over to a hosted WordPress installation. The import went smoothly but the images that came over with the posts were still hosted by blogger. Going through all of the posts and uploading all over again was not an option so I quickly searched online for any existing plugins that would allow me to:
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