One year after latest release, I am proud to announce third version of my plugin Gravatar Signup Encouragement.

This version improves existing and adds new features. You can check full changelog here but below I’ll highlight most important ones.

Now you can show message to registered user in admin bar so it will follow them through whole site.

Message shown in admin bar

If you use new bbPress plugin, you can show message in a reply form.

Message shown in a bbPress reply form of a Twenty Eleven theme in line with avatar

One issue that was preventing inserting correct e-mail address in field on Gravatar’s signup page was fixed too.

Other issues are under the hood. Everything now has documentation for developers, functions are reordered in a more logical way, plugin uses less resources since settings are moved to a separate file.

Finally, I prepared a video tutorial that shows plugin in use. Don’t forget to turn on captions (subtitles) since this is where you’ll get text.

If you like this plugin, promote it through tools below or donate.

I wanted to use TweetDeck desktop app for Windows to post on some Twitter accounts in Serbian but when I started typing Cyrillic letters, they didn’t show up. I looked through settings (apparently not good enough) but I didn’t find any related to my problem.

Then I did some searching and found solution. Thing is that for some strange reason TweetDeck allows you to type only in Latin script. If you want to type in Cyrillic, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese or any other script, you need to go to settings, then chose Color/Fonts and under TweetDeck Font choose International Font / TwitterKey.

I needed to join several video files into one larger. All files were of the same codec, container (AVI) so it should have been simple. But instead I needed to try several programs to actually succeed. Those that I tried didn’t work as expected or made unbelievable results (one made file 315 GB large from 7 files large 1,3 GB in total — that didn’t work).

The only program that worked is AVI Joiner. Unfortunately, it is a shareware program but it has a trial period (which was enough for me this time).

Files are merged relatively quickly and results are great: it’s doing joining fast, quality is identical as from original files, and size is same as sum of all files.

AVI Joiner is very simple to use so I recommend it to everyone that needs quick joining of AVI files.

I released a new version of Cache Images, 3.0. By popular users requests, it contains two new improvements: option to enable automatic caching, and option to also cache images that are only linked from posts.

Also it contains one more improvements: complete ajaxification. Now you can do all work on one page, without need for reloading.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find solution for one known issue but as soon as I find one, I release a new update.

I loved OpenX project. Actually, I loved it when it had old name, phpAdsNew. I even wrote a huge post recommending other to use it.

Unfortunately, OpenX open source project is like dead now. There is no good support, there are security vulnerabilities, installation have problems…

One of common problems (by looking in their forum) is that stats aren’t recorded. This is what happened to me. One day I logged to my OpenX installation and stats page said there wasn’t any impression on that day. I checked my sites and saw that ads are running normally. So I waited to see if it’s something temporary but even after days passed, nothing changed.

Then I noticed there is a new version 2.8.7 available (I was running 2.8.5) so I upgraded my installation. But nothing changed: ads were delivering, I can see old stats but not a new one.

I decided to see if there is some solution on the web and on OpenX forums, but I can see rantings and issues that weren’t applying to me. Then I saw one post of some guy who said that he optimized and repaired his database and after that everything started to work. I did that too. But by looking in my debug.log file, I also noticed that there weren’t plugins in my installation. It appeared that new versions don’t contain plugins in itself, just empty folders. So I copied plugins from old versions.

And then, stats started to record again.

My solution (which is maybe not applicable to everyone):

• check if you actually have plugins (at both place /plugins and /admin/plugins)
• optimize and repair your database; since this requires some time, turn off delivery from you websites

I feel sorry when I see how this once great software is dying. What is worse, there is no any open source alternative to it. The only alternative I see is DoubleClick for Publishers, formerly know as Google Ad Manager, which I’ll consider moving to.

Do you like new Gravatar Hovercards? Why don’t you prepare your visitors without Gravatar for the upcoming plugin with this feature for self-hosted WordPress installation by encouraging them to signup to Gravatar?

Almost one year after initial release, I am proud to announce second version of my plugin Gravatar Signup Encouragement.

This version improves existing and adds new features. You can check full changelog here but below I’ll highlight most important.

Now message is also shown to users who already left comment before. Also, it is much easier to show message on comment form that doesn’t follow standard WordPress markup (I added support Carrington Blog and Mystique themes though users can add support for any other too).

If you was limited with way of selecting page elements for showing of message there are good news: now you can add a message to literally any element by using any jQuery selector! Note that old custom IDs are automatically updated to new form on plugin’s upgrade.

You thought that message shown when comment is written was not visible enough? Welcome the new way to show message: in a dialog box after user posted comment as in picture below.

Message shown in a dialog over a Twenty Ten theme after comment is posted

This dialog will be shown only if user doesn’t have Gravatar, not to all users who left comment. It is not popup window, it is simply a Thickbox iframe showed on top of your page that will be easily hidden after user clicks close button or click on a link to Gravatar’s signup page.

You thought that message shown on profile page was not visible enough? Welcome the new way to show message in administration area for registered users: in an administration notices as in picture below.

Message shown in administration notices

Since WordPress MU was merged to main WordPress branch, I added support to multisite installations so you can show a message to users who signup on your network. Also, you can setup Gravatar Signup Encouragement on per site basis.

If you had problems with Gravatar Signup Encouragement settings, now you can simply click link “example of how this looks” to see screenshot of example of usage of that feature. Also, by clicking “Help” menu in top right corner, you’ll get links to Gravatar Signup Encouragement documentation and support forums.

If you thought that message was not descriptive enough, there is a new, more descriptive one which is shown by default.

Since Gravatar Signup Encouragement uses jQuery to show message, there is now an encouragement to install plugin Use Google Libraries which enables loading of jQuery file from Google’s CDN.

For developers, there are many new hooks and functions that can be used in themes and plugins. Post that describes this features will be posted in the future.

You can easily upgrade to new version via automatic upgrade tool in WordPress or by downloading zip archive.

You like Gravatar Signup Encouragement? Show your love by blogging about it, tweeting or sharing on Facebook or any other social site you use.

Send your thoughts about Gravatar Signup Encouragement in comments of this blog, or via official support forum.

I have tried for some time to make following: having WordPress installed in a root of host (like example.com) and having content below root (like example.com/page, or example.com/custom-post-type/entry), while having blog posts in special directory (like example.com/blog). This is needed when blog is not main type of content on WordPress powered website, but instead is just one part of a site. Example of usage is having a company website where pages are used for usual static content while there is blog or news section where updates are posted.

At first, this seems easy to achieve. Just change permalink structure on Settings → Permalinks page to something that starts with /blog/ (or whatever subfolder we want to use) as some people (and Codex entry) already suggested.

But there is a problem with this approach: your blog posts will be in your chosen subdirectory but blog’s index and paged pages won’t. This means that you wouldn’t see latest posts by going to blog’s subdirectory (example.com/blog), but instead only by going to front page (example.com).

Solution for this is very easy and I couldn’t believe how I didn’t remember it. I found it on WarriorForum, posted by user Dan Sherman. You simply need to create two empty pages and go to Settings → Reading page and choose those two pages as “Front page” and “Posts page”. Then you go to Settings → Permalinks and choose your new permalink structure.

What is important to remember is to give a name to page that should be chosen for “Posts page” with the same name as you want to name your subdirectory. Also note that for front page you need to either create content as you would for any page, or to use special page template.

Below is a video from WordPress.tv on how to create and setup “Front page” and “Posts page”.

I kind of adopted plugin Cache Images whose original author was infamous Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress. Since I needed this functionality for my own needs, and this (and all similar plugins) was outdated, I rewrote it and send my changes to Matt who in turn gave me rights to update this plugin in wordpress.org SVN repository.

You can now download it from here.

Congratulations to New Zealand for three great games at the World Cup. I’m sorry that they didn’t get in a second round but I expect that they’ll get over there in Brasil.

With my new plugin, Gravatar Signup Encouragement, I had a problem with translation of string that is used only on activation.

That string contains default message that is saved in database. No matter what I tried, it would always save original string, not translation.

After asking question on wp-hackers mailing list and exchanging several replies with Otto, I found solution for this. In your function that is used in register_activation_hook, you need to again use function load_plugin_textdomain, even if you loaded it already in init. It should be used before any string.

So if you encounter this problem, you know how to solve it.
Don’t forget to try my plugin mentioned here, Gravatar Signup Encouragement.