This week, I was planning to continue with my WordPress plugin development for a GEDCOM viewer, after making myself busy with OS upgrading and testing, as well as niche blog building since last year.

Alas, when I checked the WP.org Extend directory to request a repository for my GEDCOM project, I’ve found that a GEDCOM viewer plugin has already been developed. So I thought that since mine is still a beta, I might as well not reinvent the wheel and let someone else do the hard work (and believe me, there’s a lot of hard work and reading going on with my GEDCOM plugin development).

l’ve decided to stop development of my GEDCOM plugin, and instead recommend you to check out WP Family Tree. There is also one simple but pretty-looking GEDCOM viewer called Family Tree PHP, which you can install if your web hosting provider supports PHP and MySQL. Last but not least, PhpGedView is one other option if you’re interested in a more extensive genealogy application on the Web, and was the basis of my WordPress plugin.

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1. Sticky Post on WordPress Themes & Templates

I only recently found the need to use sticky posts in a couple of my WordPress niche blogs. Sticky posts are basically blog posts that remain prominently displayed in the main page of your site, and won’t get bumped even as you post up new articles or posts into your blog.

Although this is a permanent feature made available in WordPress 2.7 and later, you also have to realize that you need a sticky-friendly theme to go with it in order to make them work. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? Many of the popular WordPress themes out there aren’t, in fact, sticky-friendly. Such is the nature of one of my favourite WordPress AdSense templates called ProSense, a design made famous by Dosh Dosh.

But fret not. It’s actually quite simple to modify your choice WordPress theme to make stickies work, as long as you’re comfortable doing a little bit of HTML/CSS editing or are familiar with the Theme Editor section of your WordPress blog dashboard. Quick Online Tips has a short and sweet step-by-step on how you can DIY, while Nathan Rice delved deeper into the innards of sticky posts, if you’re into those sort of thing.

Are you using ProSense, and would like to get the sticky-friendly version of it? Yeah, I have it. Just click any of the following links to download it: ProSense (original brown color), Prosense Blue, ProSense Grey.

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1. I’m scraping my WordPress GEDCOM project
2. Windows 7, Windows Live Writer, XAMPP, TortoiseSVN & WordPress

My penchant for using long titles in my blog posts, and my now active involvement in all things Facebook and Twitter, drove me to install this nifty but challenging plugin called YOURLS. I took for granted that this was going to be one of those normal WordPress plugins you get to install through the dashboard.

But it’s not.

My number 1 mistake was thinking that all I had to do was install the WordPress plugin version of it and it will run immediately. Nope, it doesn’t work that way. You actually have to download the package and FTP everything into your web folders. Next, you need to do some manual configuration for both the database and config file, then run it the first time via the admin panel, and ONLY THEN should you install and set up its complemental WordPress plugin within your WordPress dashboard. And I’m explaining these in way too simplistic terms.

My number 2 mistake was to not understand enough the statement in the FAQ that says “You cannot install YOURLS and, say, WordPress, in the same directory” because YOURLS needs its own .htaccess file.  I ignored that and tried anyway. Didn’t work, of course.

I tried to rectify it by reinstalling everything into its own subdirectory (e.g. http://webgrrrl.net/z/), as advised in the FAQ.

Guess what? IT DIDN’T WORK, EITHER!

But then, I had a light-bulb moment — why not set YOURLS up under a subdomain instead?! And that, ladies and gentlemen, did the trick. I hazard a guess that since my WordPress was installed in my root folder, my blog’s mod_rewrite settings were waging war against YOURLS’s, which in turn causes the shortened URL not to work. In any case, I’m fully satisfied with using the domain z.webgrrrl.net for my personal URL shortening service.

I’m currently using YOURLS / z.webgrrrl.net for this blog as well as Blogging Fu. My favourite option in YOURLS is its bookmarklet ability. Whenever I’m on a web page that I want to tweet and get its URL shortened, I just click the bookmarklet on my browser, and it will automatically bring me to z.webgrrrl’s console for me to generate the short URL. Nice.

Hey, by the way, did you get it? z.webgrrrl? As in Ze WebGrrrl? Hahah, hahahah!

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1. I’m scraping my WordPress GEDCOM project
2. Windows 7, Windows Live Writer, XAMPP, TortoiseSVN & WordPress
3. Reminiscing the growth of WebGrrrl.net, and how would you describe your blog?

Another TCW update has been posted in WordPress.org’s Plugins Repository to include two new additions based on user requests.

Show top commentators between certain dates: This option was requested by James Pearse of Avon School District, MA. In his e-mail, he included a link to his school’s blog, demonstrating the idea that having your name displayed in the site and getting listed in the top commentators’ list not only can be used to increase traffic to your blog, but more so to help generate interest and participation on the posts among your site visitors. What a delight it is to see how something as small as TCW can contribute so much to learning and education. It makes developing WordPress plugins that more worthwhile for me.

Open links in a new window: I received a surprising number of requests lately, both through the WP.org Support forum and e-mails, asking me to include this option in the widget, so there you go – pretty straight forward at that.

As always, feedback and bug reports are appreciated. Do so in the WP.org’s Support Forum (preferably) and remember to tag your post with the words top-commentators-widget, or drop me a line via my Contact Form.

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Since my last post concerning WordPress as a content management system (CMS), I’ve seen a few more sites that showcases this type of setup. Even WordPress.org has jumped on the bandwagon by highlighting sites that are deemed to be well-designed CMSes, and if any WordPress-powered site should aspire to look like a CMS, this is the place to go for inspiration.

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One site in the list is definitely noteworthy, like the New School University Student Senate web site. Golf Royalty is another nifty site and should have been ranked up there in the top 10, not those vote-rigged sites you see right now. Need more inspiration? Here are 10 more fantastic-looking WordPress CMS that Adrian from Rubiqube recommends.

A few tips to make your WordPress site less blog-like and more CMS-like: don’t go for the boring ol’ header-topnav-post-post-post-sidebar-footer layout. Get user interactivity into it (polls and such). Highlight important content and group them well (highlights, news, announcement). Snazzy graphics are welcomed, but not required. There are so many themes and plugins out there that can help your WordPress site stand out and not look like a blog.

If you’re still at a loss, you can always hire me

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The development of this plugin has been largely delayed by the robbery that happened to me earlier this year, so I had to start from scratch.

However, I’ve made my plan a bit more simpler, as I now plan on just adapting from a GPL-based genealogy software of my choice that’s running on PHP and MySQL. The same development concept was used when I developed the Top Commentators Widget, since I figured I shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel when there are better and more developed genealogy software.

I’m looking into adapting either phpmyfamily or GeneoTree, albeit in a smaller scale than what is offered by either one application. I’m hoping to achieve the following by the time a beta release is ready for public testing:

• Include a simple administration page to upload GEDCOM (.ged) file
• Provide the ability to display ancestry in a list order
• Provide the ability to display a person’s details

And that’s it, really. I’m putting off the rest of the options because, honestly speaking, this can grow into a pretty huge application that would match its original counterparts. If I’m bogged down with too many features, I’m worried that I might not be able to complete this by the end of this year. So, better something than nothing, I say

I still need your help finalizing the official name of this plugin. FamilyPress and WP-Genealogy are currently in equal footing as of the moment of this posting. Please use the poll below and vote for the official name. I’ll be announcing its official name the moment a beta is ready for deployment.

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To be honest, I didn’t want to blog about my web hosting provider, and selfishly wanted to keep this secret to myself. But their hosting deal and customer support are just too good for everyone to not experience it. So now, after more than a year of hosting with them, I decided to break the silence.

I have tried 3 hosting providers before finally settling with this excellent Web hosting provider. If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, you may have experienced the following common problems:

• You can’t automatically update your plugins and themes unless you CHMOD your folders to 777 and files to 666 (777 and 666 are the most unsecured folder and file settings, and your site will be prone to hacks).
• You can’t update your Permalinks unless you CHMOD your .htaccess file to 666.
• Your Fantastico panel can’t keep up with the latest WordPress version until after two weeks or more.
• Your hosting provider has no clue when it comes to problems with your WordPress install.
• Your hosting provider has crappy customer support.
• … and the most dreaded of all, your WordPress-powered site is using too much memory or CPU resource, that your hosting provider had to shut your site down, or even worse, suspend your hosting account!

I faced all these issues at one time or another during my first year after I started blogging with WordPress. The CPU resource hog was my worst nightmare — WebGrrrl.net wasn’t accessible for almost two weeks because I was using 0.5% more than the 4% CPU limit! Frantically but cautiously, I began my search for the best WordPress hosting I can get without breaking the bank.

Until today, my experience helping others with their WordPress install on Dreamhost, Bluehost, Godaddy and HostGator proved that I made the best choice by selecting WP WebHost for my WordPress sites. This is one hosting that sounds too good to be true, but is, actually, absolutely superb, that I don’t think I’ll be happier with any other hosting provider.

Thanks to their WordPress-optimized servers, my hosting issues are now virtually non-existent, and their support is kick-ass, to say the least. Even through e-mail support which I prefer to use, most of the time the response is almost immediate that it boggles the mind! WP WebHost’s Fantastico panel also shows the latest WordPress version a day or two after the update is available, which makes upgrading my more than 10 WordPress sites feel like peanuts.

Best of all, you, the WebGrrrl.net readers, are now eligible to get your very own WordPress hosting with WP WebHost at a crazy 30% DISCOUNT! Yes you heard me right! This means that, using the promotional code WEBGRRRL30, you will get a one-time 30% off all WP WebHost hosting plans, like so:

• For the monthly plan, it’ll only cost you US$5.60 for the first month, then US$8/month for subsequent months
• For the annual plan, it’ll only cost you US$4.67/month (US$56/year) for the first year, then US$6.67/month (US$80/year) for subsequent years (billing is annually)
• For the 2-year plan, it’ll only cost you US$3.50/month (US$84/2 years) for the first 2 years, then US$5/month (US$120/2 years) for every 2-years thereafter (billing is biennially)

You can ask them to transfer your WordPress site from your old hosting provider for free, and I don’t think you’ll be using their 100-day money back guarantee any time soon.

Wow, I’ve been drafting this post for so long, because I really want to do justice to how special WP WebHost is — they make me love WordPress even more!

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I mentioned before that one of my goals slash New Year’s resolutions for WebGrrrl.net is to create a new WordPress plugin that can support the GEDCOM data scheme to create a genealogy (family tree) site powered by WordPress. I plan to start it within this week.

Here’s my predicament — I can’t come up with a snazzy name for this plugin, so can you help me? Please vote or suggest a name using the poll form below and even let me know what you’re expecting from this plugin. Deadline? I guess this poll will be open until I’m ready to put out an alpha version of it, probably in 3-5 months’ time.

The poll above contains a few titles I’ve been playing around with. That WordPress TNG thing is actually a reference to my favorite Star Trek series, The Next Generation. Sure it sounds a little tacky, but I think it’s funny, and funny is always a good thing, heh.

Any help with digging this and adding to your social network sites will be much appreciated

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I’ve finally come around to fixing the bugs in this version of TCW. I have added in most of the codes that support Gravatar, thanks to the work of Sergio Nascimento.

Hopefully the next update would include the ability to add multiple TCW to more than one sidebar within a blog, as suggested by someone via Facebook. I’ll do what I can

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1. Top Commentators Widget v.1.2 now up
2. WebGrrrl.net now an URL shortener with YOURLS

I found out about this a couple of days ago through the Top 10 WorPress Plugin Authors post, but only decided to talk about it now, coz this is a scheduled post, muahahahahah!!

I should have felt happier that I ranked in the 200s for the Top Commentators widget, but really, the credit should go to Personal Finance Advisor for developing the original plugin in the first place. The TCW, as I fondly call it, still has bugs to squash, so it’s not perfect. The new update will be published sometime this month, together with the start of the WordPress GEDCOM plugin I plan to develop.

You should really take a look at the Top 1000 list, as they contain some wonderful plugins such as Article Templates, Amazon Reloaded for WordPress, eShop, WordPress Download Monitor, and many more. If you’re creative, a lot of them can be used for your niche sites, either to improve usability or improve SEO!

How’s that for a first post in 2009?

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