• 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.

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.

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!

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.

4. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. I’m using this plugin on two pages; One-liners and About and it works as advertised.

5. FancyBox for WordPress

FancyBox for WordPress Seamlessly integrates FancyBox into your blog: Upload, activate, and you’re done. No further configuration needed. However, you can customize it from the Options Page if you like. It took quite a bit of tweaking for me to get this plugin to work exactly as I wanted, but as soon as I was happy with it, I started using it in every entry with pictures, for instance España, which I posted only a few days ago.

6. Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

7. Google Authenticator

The Google Authenticator plugin for WordPress gives you two-factor authentication using the Google Authenticator app for Android/iPhone/Blackberry. If you are security aware, you may already have the Google Authenticator app installed on your smartphone, using it for two-factor authentication on your Gmail or Google Apps account. I covered the use of this plugin in June; How To Secure WordPress.

8. Google XML Sitemaps

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

9. Last.fm Recently Played Tracks

This is just for showing off my exceptional taste in music, and I’ve made some rather intrusive modifications to the original plugin. The result can be seen on the bottom of every page on this site. The original Last.fm Recently Played Tracks is still a great plugin if you want to display information from your Last.fm account on your WordPress site.

10. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with dozens of options and features. I don’t use galleries much when I post, so I tend to use WordPress’ internal image handling features and FancyBox for WordPress for visual effects, but if you’re handling lots of pictures and need to sort them into galleries, NextGEN Gallery should be right up your alley.

11. On This Day

On This Day is currently being used in the footer to display entires that has the same calendar date as today. A great way to keep your visitors clicking on your links.

12. Quotes Collection

The Quotes Collection plugin helps you collect, manage and display your favourite quotations in your WordPress site, like my One-liners collection.

13. Revision Control

WordPress comes with a revision feature, which is nice. But if you work with a post or a page for a long time you can get quite a lot of revisions and only a few of them are relevant. Tons of unnecessary revisions can make your database morbidly obese. Revision Control solves this problem by letting you configure how many revisions WordPress saves.

14. Shockingly Big IE6 Warning

Shockingly Big IE6 Warning is a plugin that shows a warning message alerting the user why it is bad to use IE6, the security risk and the bad compatibility of Web Standards. It might be time to disable this plugin soon, but about 5% of my visitors are still using IE6.

15. Similar Posts

Similar Posts displays a list of posts that are similar or related to the current posts. The list can be customized in many ways. Similarity is judged according to a post’s title, content, and tags and you can adjust the balance of factors to fit your own blog.

16. Subscribe To Comments

Subscribe To Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address. You might also consider Subscribe to Comments Reloaded, which is updated more recently.

17. Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It can both send a Twitter message when you post a new entry and display your Twitter messages on your site. I use it to display my Twitter messages in the sidebar.

18. Wordbooker

The Wordbooker allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. You can also “cross polinate” comments between Facebook and your WordPress blog.

19. wp-days-ago

Shameless plug ahead (since this is a plugin I maintain myself): wp-days-ago 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. 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.

20. WP-Syntax

WP-Syntax provides clean syntax highlighting using GeSHi — supporting a wide range of popular languages. It supports highlighting with or without line numbers and maintains formatting while copying snippets of code from the browser. This is a great plugin if you post code examples on your site.

21. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. Another popular cache plugin for WordPress is W3 Total Cache.

22. WPtouch

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

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.

That companies with millions and millions of registered users are unable to keep our information safe is rather disturbing. But a major side effect of one compromised account is that there is a good chance you’ve used the same username and password for a lot of other services as well. Someone gets their hand on your login information at Sony and they automatically gets access to your other accounts: Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox and PayPal. Crap!

One solution is to use a unique username and password on every site. But can be very inconvenient as the number of accounts increases. Another solution is to use two-factor authentication.

One way to implement two-factor authentication is to require that the user has access to a token that only the end user has access to. An example of this is a credit card with a PIN code. You need both to get money out of an ATM, with only one of them you can’t. Another way is to use a password together with a one-time code provided by a token. This is supported by WordPress, and it is a great way to secure your account. Here’s how you do it.

1. Install Google Authenticator on your phone (Android version 1.5 or later, BlackBerry OS 4.2 – 4.7, iPhone iOS 4 or later)
2. Install and activate the Google Authenticator WordPress plugin.
3. In WordPress, go to the users configuration, enable Google Authenticator login for your user and follow the instructions.

Easy as pie. Now anyone who wants to access your account need your username, your password and the one-time code. It’s very hard for them to get their hands on all three.

The flip side of things is that if you misplace your mobile phone you are screwed and will be unable to log in to your account. If you run your own WordPress installation, this can be resolved. You can dig down in the wp_usermeta table in the database, find the googleauthenticator_enabled setting and change its value to disabled. This SQL statement should enable you to log in again without using the Google Authenticator code. Replace XXX with your own user_id:

UPDATE wp_usermeta 
SET meta_value = 'disabled' 
WHERE user_id = XXX AND meta_key = 'googleauthenticator_enabled'

The Google Authenticator field will be visible during login, but you don’t have to enter anything.

Another unfortunate side effect is that you can’t use the WordPress for Android application because it doesn’t support two-factor authentication. Since this entry was written, the author has added support for the WordPress for Android application.

My WordPress plugin, wp-days-ago, has been updated to version 1.7.1.

This plugin displays the number of years and days since a post or a page was published. All calculations are based on days but it will not take into account that 24 hours are one day. If you publish a page or a post at 23:59, it will be marked with “yesterday” at 00:00 even if it’s only a minute since you published. In some cases, the plugin will display a human readable text instead of the days count. Today is “today” and not “0 days ago”. Yesterday is, well, “yesterday”, while anything published seven days ago is posted “a week ago”. If an entry is more than a year old, the plugin will display the post date as “X years, Y days”.

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.

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

Changelog

• Backwards compatible all the way back to WordPress 1.5.
• The plugin now uses the internal WordPress timezone settings.
• Added optional parameters that allows configuration of appended text, prepended text and the texts displayed by the plugin.

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.

My very first attempt on a WordPress plugin is actually just a copy/past job from my own CMS. I wanted to get functionality I could not find in any other plugins: I simply wanted to display the number of days since a post or page was published.

The plugin will only display years and days and will not take into account that 24 hours are one day. If you publish a page or a post at 23:59, it will be marked with “yesterday” at 00:00 even if it’s only a minute since you published. In some cases, the plugin will display a human readable text instead of the days count. Today is “today” and not “0 days ago”. Yesterday is, well, “yesterday”, while anything published seven days ago is posted “a week ago”. If an entry is more than a year old, the plugin will display the post date as “X year, Y days”.

If you want to use it yourself, simply follow these instructions:

1. Download here (v1.0).
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.

The wp_days_ago plugin takes one parameter; the timezone offset between your WordPress time zone settings and the server your WordPress installation is running on. In my case I write everything in Central European Time, but the server is located in Sydney, Australia. That’s a -8 hour time zone offset from the server to my local time, and to get things right, I have to use -8 as the time zone offset parameter, like this: <? wp_days_ago(-8); ?>.

This plugin is also available through the WordPress plugin directory.