Create a WordPress Author Bio with Custom Social Links

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Tweet The WordPress platform comes with all the user options to build a small bio on each author but it doesn’t provide the functionality to include it by default. Instead, it is up to those that build themes to incorporate these features. They often don’t. This post will show you how to include a small [...]

Post a Form with CURL (and How Spammers Automate Spam Comments to WordPress)

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Tweet I hate spammers. More than you. However, in order to understand them, one must learn their trade. The following code is about as basic as it gets when it comes to submitting spam comments to WordPress… but it’s interesting nonetheless (and has countless legitimate application). Don’t worry, I’m not posting anything our spamming friends [...]

Create a Gmail RSS Feed with PHP

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Tweet This cool PHP function will create an RSS feed from the email in your Gmail inbox. It’s a good way of including your mail with all the other content you aggregate in your RSS reader. The PHP Function Rather than copy the following code, you should download the code below. <?php function checkGmail($username, $password) [...]

Skype Status (Text or Image) with WordPress Shortcode

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Tweet Skype is increasingly becoming a cost-effective means of business communication. As a business, it lessons the barriers associated with first contact and, as a consumer, it provides a safe and cost-effective alternative to traditional landline and cellular services. Apart from the personal and professional reasons I use Skype, I’m finding that I’m using it [...]

Twitter Style Time: “Posted n Seconds/Minutes/Hours/Days Ago” (and WordPress Shortcode to Reference Other Posts)

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Tweet The Twitter and Facebook style of referencing time since a post was published is becoming increasingly popular. Basically, instead of a standard date and time, both platforms will display a post timestamp in simple language (example: Posted 5 hours ago, Posted 2 days ago, Posted 15 seconds ago… and so on). This timestamp functionality [...]

Replace YouTube Links in Text with Embed Code (and Retrieve Video Details via the JSON API)

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Tweet One of my websites (at Usenet.com.au) is based on rendering threaded text Usenet newsgroups. The text itself within the post body is very static and forces visitors to leave the website to explore links and content suggested by others. Part of the massive revamp of that website involves rendering those static links into dynamic [...]

PHP Function to Create Keyword Tags from Text

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Tweet I’m building a few websites at the moment that require me to extract suggested keywords or tags from a string of text. The PHP function below will accomplish this with a little added extra functionality. Creating the Keywords/Tags Given the text body, I wanted to accomplish the following: Based on the entire text, I [...]

Create a Genesis Page Outside of WordPress

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Tweet Some time back I provided code that would permit you to use the WordPress header and footer (and associated functionality associated with the WordPress framework) outside of WordPress. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with the Genesis framework. When you build pages ‘outside’ of WordPress, you retain full access to the framework’s core features including navigation [...]

Retrieve Images from the (Depreciated) Google Images API

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Tweet The early version of the Google Images API was officially depreciated on the 26th May, 2011. Despite that, it will continue to work with some restrictions until such time as Google officially pulls the plug. With additional limitations – and more functionality – the image search is survived by the Google Custom Search API. [...]

iChoice.com.au

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Tweet Since 2005, I’ve been involved with a Mortgage/Finance company in Sydney, Australia. We’ve never had much of a web presence… and never really needed it given the type of business we conduct. However, in light of recent expansion and growing ‘franchise’ operations, we’ve just launched our primary home loan search page. The site was [...]

Tweet to Image Service

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Tweet There are a large number of websites that offer Twitter text to image type services and – although I don’t have a need to use any of them myself – I don’t like many of them at all. After a long look around, it seems that most of them plaster branding all over the [...]