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Google Chart WordPress Shortcode
Google charts are awesome. I use them on about a dozen sites to visually represent all kinds of data. If you don’t know what Google Charts are, it’s worth checking out the massive resources available on the Google Chart Tools website. Google describes their service as “… [the] perfect way to visualize data on your [...]
Website Snapshots with WordPress Shortcode
WordPress.com uses a nifty little tool to take screenshots of Commercial Themes. If you right click on a few of the screenshots on that page you’ll see that they have consistent URL form. The following shortcode makes use of the functionality on WordPress.com by rendering a screenshot of any webpage in your blog post. I [...]
Resizing Images using TimThumb.php
I recently had a request for some shortcode that would render formatted images and text in a particular way. When I tried to imagine how the average author on one of my blogs would apply the shortcode, I ran into the problem of how image scaling would be handled. Some of the people I work [...]
Conversion Rate Optimisation opportunities for people near YOU – Geographic information in WordPress Titles
Did my headline get your attention? The title should have rendered the city you’re in (or one you’re near) based on your geographic location. I’ve tested geographic based headlines on three sites for the last month with click-through-rates increasing by much as 600% – although it averaged about 300% on most days. That’s a massive [...]
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is orientated around optimising or converting the traffic that has landed on your website or blog. It’s easy to throw lots of money into Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and traffic generation but this means nothing if you have no plan to convert or monetise that traffic that you’re successful in attracting. [...]
Find and Replace Words in a WordPress Post
This PHP function will search for a particular string of text in a WordPress post and replace it with alternative text of any kind. If you’re just getting into the affiliate business, this is a great way of instantly monetising your blog via specific keywords. If you’ve ever written about Thesis, you could, via the [...]
PHP Threaded Comment Class
A few years ago I built a dodgy little site at Usenet.com.au that rendered Australian text Usenet newsgroups. I’ve since disabled posting while I give the website a complete face lift. One of the biggest challenges I faced in the early days was orientated around optimising threaded articles. With several million articles in the database [...]
Prevent WordPress Pages from appearing in Search Results
Michael Harvey of New York, USA, asks: “I’ve set up private WordPress pages that I’m only giving to friends and family. However, when people use the WordPress search function, these private pages appear in search results. Do you know a fix?” I use the same functionality on my own site(s). I have countless private pages [...]
Calculate and highlight the differences between strings of text with PHP
I was updating a CMS recently to archive various versions of data. If you’ve ever dealt with quality and version management you would appreciate the need to record all changes to specific text for the purpose of quality assurance. In my case, I needed to accomplish four tasks: Record specific changes to the published version [...]
Determine the Relationship between two Twitter Users
If you want to test the relationship between any two Twitter users (i.e. do they follow each other or don’t they), you can do so via a simple call to the following URL: http://twitter.com/friendships/exists.xml?user_a=martykhoury&user_b=kenpascoe This will return a XML file as follows: Alternatively, you could generate a JSON file that will simply render as either [...]
Marty has been involved with online application development for a number of years and has worked with large scale applications both as a coder and project manager. He is currently actively contributing to 7 blogs and maintains over 300 websites. 
Ken has been developing software solutions and managing IT projects for over 20 years. Ken has a computer science degree and, although his focus was previously on Windows based software, his focus is now on blogging and other online projects.
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