wordpress category archive

WordPress XHTML Validator Plugin

WordPress is very good about supporting standards and producing valid markup, and at least when I started using it, it had a link in the standard theme to proclaim the validity of its pages and prove it to you by taking you to the W3C Markup Validation Service. A lot of people never pay this any attention and promptly produce a bunch of non-complying pages, all the while shamefully leaving the boastful link in the sidebar or footer of their site.

Being a retentive sort about many things, I’ve always worked to ensure my pages validate correctly, looking for the below highly satisfying message on each and every one of these posts that I strive mightily to create for you:

(Versus the alternative which is highlighted with red instead …

Code Format Helper for WordPress (Java Program)

Displaying code on a web page can be tricky, and even trickier if you use WordPress. You may have noticed in WordPress that straight quotes turn in to curly quotes, multiple dashes turn in to en dashes and em dashes, and so on. While this may make our posts look prettier, it does ugly things to code formatting.

(See my post from yesterday on HTML Character Entity References for a table of related characters and encodings.)

Hyphen prettification is one example of where you’ll get in to trouble when trying to show some code. Your decrement –i; may get converted to –i;, breaking your code and causing would-be users to hate you. Or String s = "oops"; will become String s = “oops”;, with similarly unhappy copy-and-paste results.

Using the <pre> tag will take care of …

HTML Character Entity References of Potential Interest to WordPress Users

character ref #ref name
curly left single quote‘&#8216;&lsquo;
curly right single quote’&#8217;&rsquo;
curly left double quote“&#8220;&ldquo;
curly right double quote”&#8221;&rdquo;
en dash–&#8211;&ndash;
em dash—&#8212;&mdash;
ellipsis…&#8230;&hellip;
left angle quote«&#0171;&laquo;
right angle quote»&#0187;&raquo;
single quote (apostrophe)'&#0039;&apos;
double quote"&#0034;&quot;
hyphen-&#0045; 
backslash\&#0092; 
forward slash/&#0047; 
period (dot).&#0046; 
space &#0032; 
non-breaking space &#0160;&nbsp;
ampersand&&#0038;&amp;
less than<&#0060;&lt;
greater than>&#0062;&gt;

I was going to include this table as part of a longer, related entry, but then I thought it might be better posted as a stand-alone reference.

The first several items are things that WordPress will create for you to make your posts prettier. For example, WP will convert normal quotes into curly quotes …

Turning off trackbacks/pingbacks…

I don’t get a lot of legitimate trackbacks, but lately I’m getting an annoying amount of spambacks, so I’m turning them off for now. If you’re one of the few kind folks who occasionally point my way (I’m looking at you, Open Source Community) :-), please consider a “manual” ping in comments.

On the other hand, I’m getting almost no comment spam, which I credit to the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin, previously mentioned in a post about my WordPress Plugin Binge last month.

Bad Behavior is another good tool and currently stops a couple of thousand access attempts per week. Akismet is super, but anything that it catches is something I then have to deal with. I’m not getting all that many spam trackbacks, but the …

YARQ! Quotes and Excerpts and Snippets, Oh My!

I like quotes and excerpts. I’m not a big fan of the signature quote in emails and forums — it becomes repetitive to see the same pearls of wit and wisdom over and over and over again — but in general I like a good quote and have collected quite a few over the years.

(Skip ahead past techie background info to read about the exciting new MovingToFreedom.org site feature…)

I’d been thinking lately about adding some kind of random quote feature here, and this weekend after writing a couple of posts I needed something to prevent me from doing other pressing tasks, so I started toying around with the idea. I considered a custom PHP feature, and although it would be a good learning exercise and fun for …

WordPress Plugin Binge

In an episode of extreme writing avoidance yesterday, I installed several new plugins for the site. I probably have too many plugins. (First we admitted we were powerless over our plugin habit, and appealed to… oh, never mind.)

I like my plugins, and love how WordPress has so many plugin writers and plugins to choose from. You can tune things endlessly to your liking. But they create additional maintenance overhead. Especially when upgrading the WordPress core. Your plugins may be supported more or less and quickly or slowly over time and new versions of WP.

In addition to things breaking in an obvious way when you upgrade, small things may not work and you might not catch them right away, giving a bad impression of your site to users who find the …