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It’s been a few days now since WordCamp and everything has begun to sink in a little. Here are my main bullet points from the event:

  • WordPress is huge.
  • It’s no longer a pain in the ass to run on Windows.
  • Responsive web design is the way to go.
  • Plugin development is something I’d like to dive deeper into.
  • I discovered the distraction free writing feature.

In the short term, responsive web design was the presentation that triggered me the most. I’m familiar with response web design and use a lot of responsive sites. Even this site is somewhat responsive, it’ll remove some white space on a device with a smaller screen, for instance a tablet device. Now I want to make the site’s design even more responsive and better looking on mobile devices. WPtouch is a great plugin, but when it’s possible to get the site to look familiar even on small screen, there’s really no need to use it.

One option would be to make the current theme more responsive, but that will probably be a lot of work for someone like me. Also, from past attempts to do my own redesign from scratch, I know my limitations. So my best bet is what I always do: Find a nice looking, free theme and hack away!

I’ve been looking around a little, and at this point Renova seems like a good option. But I’d prefer to have two columns, not just one. That can probably be arranged, though. It might take a while, but I’m positive the next design will be responsive. For more responsive goodness, have a look at the Media Queries showcase.

Here we are. It’s the 14th of Januar and the first of what will hopefully be annual WordCamp Norway. The event is sold out, the presenters look sharp and judging by the attendees list, the crowd is good looking. Even though no one is reading this, I intend to update with pictures throughout the day. I’m using the Android WordPress app, and I have to admit I’m struggling a bit with it. But we’ll send how it works out.

At least I managed to write wrestle through this entry and schedule it yesterday!

09:53 CET: After a good morning walk I’m at Thon Hotell Opera. I’ve got my name tag and t-shirt (another one of them convention t-shirts you never use) and the main room is starting to fill up, but it’s not crowded enough for a picture yet. I’ve seen one familiar face, one of the presenters – who looked somewhat hung over. There’s public Wi-Fi, by the way. I’m not connecting.

I’ve been trying to use the Android WordPress app to update, but holy crap, the thing is unstable when handling images: Crashes, XML parsing errors, disappearing updates. The WordPress app has them all. So I fell back to using Opera Mobile, which works, but it’s not ideal since the WordPress admin GUIDE isn’t exactly exactly made for mobile.

11:25 CET: After Hanni Ross’ opening remarks I know now even more ways how to contribute to WordPress. Not sure where she got the percentages on the Norwegian translations of WordPress, though, because they don’t match the ones on translate.wordpress.org. And now: “Writing a plugin” by Morten Hauan. Title in English, presentation in Norwegian. Trailer fraud?

12:08 CET: Hauan gave a great introduction to plugin writing in WordPress. I’ve only touched the surface of plugin development in WordPress myself, and got some ideas on how to change wp-days-ago with what I learned. Next up: “Responsive Web Design” by Wilhem Joys Andresen. Voted best dressed this evening.

12:38 CET: Woah, that was fast! Wilhem, former Opera Software employee, now independent consultant, briefly took us through media queries. Nothing new and groundbreaking, but the more you talk about it, the greater the chance designers around the world will see the light. It’s the future, man (and it started way back in 2001). Unlike 99% of other presenters, Joys Andresen finished twenty minutes before schedule. Soon it’s time for lunch and a room packed with nerds awkwardly socializing.

13:57 CET: We’re back from lunch and I’m happy to report that there will be no pictures of food. But the lunch was nice. Next Marko Heijnen will tell us how to create native apps with WordPress. Rumors have it that the hipster phone will be involved. Maybe Marko knows something about the bugs in the Android client as well.

14:31 CET: And Marko is done. Must have been a nightmare for the interpreters to handle that one. Not as much native focus as I’d hoped, but gave a good introduction to how you can use WordPress while thinking way out of the box.

14:52 CET: I don’t know about you, but I just had a powernap. Feeling fresh an ready for Josh Holmes, who will tell us how to run WordPress on Windows. My experience: Noooooo!

16:01 CET: Josh is done and I’m not scared of running WordPress on Windows anymore. The rest of the pack is preparing for lighting sessions, while I’m heading out to do some errands. Back at 17:00 sharp for Zé Fontainhas’ keynote.

17:01 CET: Let the keynote commence!

17:38 CET: Aaand we’re done. Zé took us through the history of WordPress and took a quick look into the future. Certainly interesting stuff, followed by a good Q& A session.

I’m coming back next year. Given that there will be a next year, of course.

Pictures after the break. Continue reading "It’s WordCamp!" →

Once upon a time I made a piece of blogging software written in PHP. Inspired by Blogger, I named it “Bugger”. Childish, but an appropriate name: It was a buggy bugger. Still, it did its job well and since I was the one responsible for everything, I had a rather intimate relationship with the code, making the software easy to extend when I needed new features. Open sourcing it was never an option, though, anyone else trying to maintain the code probably would have gone crazy – the curse of many one-man projects.

About three years ago, I called it quits, buried Bugger and switched to WordPress. To be honest, I’ve never looked back. WordPress is, like Bugger, written in PHP and has, unlike Bugger, a thriving community of developers and designers who release tons of WordPress themes and plugins. I’ve written a plugin myself, wp-days-ago and I’m hosting my own WordPress installation on vbox-host.com.

In short; I like WordPress. Now I’m going to my first WordCamp in January next year. The first ever WordCamp in Norway will be held in Oslo, more information is available on the official WordCamp Norway site. The speaker list so far includes Isaac Keyet, John James Jacoby, Zé Fontainhas (all three Automattic employees), Magnus Jepson (WooThemes) and even a guy from my employer.

Right now there are only 58 54 48 tickets left so if you are an avid WordPress user, quickly grab a ticket – they are quite cheap – and get ready for WordCamp Norway 2012!

All right, so “essential” might be a small exaggeration, but these are still plugins that every WordPress power-user should consider installing. And of course you’re a power-user, right?

1. After The Deadline

After The Deadline uses artificial intelligence to check spelling, style, and grammar in WordPress.

2. Akismet

Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback SPAM. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. I can vouch for its effectiveness, very little SPAM gets through. As of right now, Akismet has blocked 23,287 SPAM comments on my humble site.

3. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). Some features include support for Custom Post Types, automatic optimizing of titles for search engines and automatic META tags generation.

Continue reading "22 Essential WordPress Plugins." →

My WordPress plugin, wp-days-ago, has been updated to version 2.0.2.

This plugin displays the number of years, days, hours and minutes since a post or a page was published. Examples are “Just now” (less than a minute ago), “47 minutes ago” (less than an hour ago), “3 hours ago” (less than a day ago), “Yesterday”, “3 days ago”, “One week ago”, “76 days ago”, “2 years, 13 days ago” and so on. It’s also possible to make the plugin behave like the 1.x version and turn off displaying minutes and hours. The plugin will then fall back to “Today” for everything published less than 24 hours ago and not display minutes and hours. There are options for defining a prepending and appending text and change all the textual output from the plugin, for instance “minutes ago” and “One week ago”, making it easy for you to translate it to any language you want.

Installation

  1. Download the plugin.
  2. Unzip the contents of the downloaded file to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory of your WordPress installation.
  3. Log in to your WordPress dashboard and activate the wp_days_ago plugin that should now be visible in the list.
  4. You can now insert <? wp_days_ago(); ?> anywhere in The Loop in your WordPress theme.
  5. Optionally, you can use <? wp_days_ago(1); ?> instead to turn off the fine grained option (see changelog below). This will make the plugin behave like the 1.x version.

No changes to your theme or configuration are necessary when you upgrade from a previous version.

Changelog

  • New feature: Added text “Some time in the future” for scheduled posts (visible in preview mode only).
  • New feature: The plugin now by default displays minutes and hours since a post or page was created.
  • Change: The $offset parameter from the 1.x version is now replaced with a $mode parameter that enables you to prevent the plugin from displaying the minutes and hours since a post or page was published and instead fall back to “today” for everything published lest than 24 hours ago.

For detailed information on usage and available parameters, please see the plugin’s page at WordPress.org or the readme-file in the ZIP-file.

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