Sociable – the WordPress plug-in

Nearly all my favourite plug-ins for WordPress are the simplest.

I’d imagine most people heavily involved in the design of other people’s websites get to spend precious little time on their own – unless they’re looking for business of course.  So Joost de Valk’s Sociable plug-in is exactly the kind of thing up my street.

Enabling happy visitors to a web-page to either Digg, Facebook, Twitt or share your webpage across a myriad of socail networking websites is a great way to encourage communication, and for people to nit-pick articles around the webosphere that will be of interest to like minded friends.

The best thing about this plug-in is not only the ease of installation but the quick and easy way you can customise it to each blog/site you are involved in designing.

After installation a page exists in the Settings area of WordPress where you can select which ‘social networks’ you want to include.

Sociable wordpress plug-in

At the last version I roughly counted around 100 different selectable sites or options.

Clearly the ability to customise for each website’s target audience is a big bonus and you can further customise as to whether the plug-in is shown on all pages or posts, category pages, tag pages etc.

Simple but extremely efficient plug-ins like this one is one of the main reasons I so often favour WordPress on client sites.

WordPress 2.7 lands

WordPress 2.7 was launched to the entire blogging community this morning.

Codenamed Coltrane, the new version of WordPress features a altered backend layout which is aimed at reducing the number of clicks and reloads around the interface.

As an example you can now ‘quick-moderate’ comments, such as to correct spelling or grammar rather than  the need to reload the comment page.  WordPress also now has an automatic upgrade feature built in.  Previously a plug-in had been created but for those users who used the previous plug-in to get to WordPress 2.6.5 then it doesn’t appear compatible (yet) with an upgrade to 2.7.  You may have thought the days of a manual FTP upload were over, but for some users – not just yet!

Most sections of WordPress now have a ‘Screen Option’ tab.  If there is something on a screen you hardly ever use then you can simply turn this off and it won’t appear again – an example is if you never bother with an excerpt, or never need to change the slug on a post – you can simply remove these from the posting screen.

Another new feature is ‘Quick Post’ – which is on the main dashboard and allows you to quickly create a new post.  Ideal for short updates.

It looks like a long day of upgrading WordPress blogs for me then – at least, they promise, this will be the last time it needs to be done!

Typetester – quick CSS guide

Typetester websiteWorking on CSS stylesheets usually involves editing, checking, editing again etc until you get things such as text height, spacing, font style and even colour perfect.  Recently I’ve been using the excellent Typetester feature which enables you to set you base font size (as you usually would for the body tag) and then amending all font-values, word spacing, leading, tracking, alignment and all the rest.

This cleverly designed tool also shows a list of web safe fonts – that is those shipped with both Windows and on an Apple Mac – however you can browse the individual lists if you wanted to create more uniquely styled css files for various browsers and systems.

The browser lists 3 columns, and it is widely perceived that you shouldn’t have too many differing styles of text on.

Some people use different styles of texts to distinguish between

– website information and user comments

or

– headlines/titles and main text

At the end of it all you have the option of downloading what you have created as a simple piece of css code.  It’s a simple clever design that will save time when you’re planning the feel and aesthetics of your website.

The holding page thing

As much as I hate holding pages, and it is almost never a good idea in terms of SEO for businesses, as this is a personal site – what the heck.

I hope to publish my tips, my favourite sites and links to great tools and utilities to help you create a great online presence for whatever you want.

I’ll be back when the Christmas tree is up and the shopping is all bought.