Initially finding those plugins was often quite a challenge though. While I often sing the praises of Wordpress, the plugin area of their site is honestly an embarrassment to the platform, if only because there is no way to sort through plugins. Thus one of Wordpress’s biggest benefits – the massive community – becomes a huge problem due to the sheer number of plugins. Without a way to filter or sort, you’re left with a massive list of plugins, the vast majority of which haven’t been updated in years.

So here is a list, in no particular order, of plugins which I’ve found very useful for a variety of sites:

WP-DBManager: A wonderful backup manager, it also includes optimize and repair functions. It is relatively easy to set up, as long as you have your database paths configured correctly. It’s also very simple to setup a recurring backup and have it stored on the server and/or emailed.

Clean Options: I’ve had a few issues with some of more heavily used Wordpress installations where a multitude of plugins have created a lot of orphaned data in the wp-options table, which can also really slow down a site.

flickrRSS: An easy way to use simple PHP code to display recent images from Flickr.

All in One SEO Pack: A very popular plugin, for good reason: It’s nearly essential for decent SEO in Wordpress. Offers lots of customization, and works flawlessly.

Search Everything: I actually use this for the opposite purpose: To exclude certain pages and posts from search results.

WP-Table Reloaded: This has saved me (and my clients) hours upon hours of work by allowing easy importing of tables (from Excel and other sources) into Wordpress, and then also easily allowing users to update those tables without having to deal with messy HTML table code.

WP Page Numbers: A simple plugin which replaces the boring (and limited) “Next Page” and “Previous Page” links with a list of page numbers, with several attractive styles to choose from.

However, all of the pages were descendants of the same great-grandparent, the catalog. I needed to find a way to check if a page was a grandchild of the catalog page, and if so, display the disclaimer.

Here’s the very simple code that made that happen:

<?php $ancestors = get_post_ancestors($post);
if (in_array(4,$ancestors)) echo "4 is an ancestor of the post"; ?>

The code gets all the ancestors of the post, throws them into an array, and then checks to see if the catalog page (in this case, page ID 4) is in the array). If that’s true, we can go ahead and display the information we need to.

In writing the code to allow this to be possible, I found quite a few areas that needed improvement. Here is our old order form:

And our new one:

So what were the changes?

1. The new order form uses fieldsets to clearly seperate the various sections of the form, and help to create a natural progression when entering information.
2. The labels, field text, and fields themselves are bigger. The last thing someone should need to do is have to squint while they input their credit card number.
3. Added a confirm email field. Even though it is an important field, and people must type it several times per day, we still found we were receiving a large number of orders with mistyped email addresses. Unfortunately the order may still go through anyway, even though the subscriber will have no way to receive their order, nor be contacted about the problem.
4. There was only one line for the mailing address, even though a fair number of individuals and even larger number of companies have two lines for their mailing address.
5. The state and country fields were turned into drop-down lists. This was originally done because our database needed states as abbreviations, while people would sometimes type the whole state name. But I soon realized that people are much more used to selecting their state and country from a drop down. A small note on this: United States is at the top of the list and selected by default. I often find it frustrating on U.S. based sites when the U.S. is listed alphabetically, near the bottom.
6. I added card type as a drop down. I had initially removed this field, as it seemed to be an unnecessary hindrance since the credit card type can be determined from the first digit. However this led to two problems. First, people would add “Visa” to the beginning or end of their number, thinking they had to put it in some place. Second, by having the user choose the credit card type, it seems to increase the likelihood that they will pay attention to which credit card they are inputting, and type the number correctly.
7. I added logos for each type of credit card accepted. It was mentioned in a speech at Pubcon that including credit card logos increased conversion by 1%, as they instilled confidence in the buyer. Along those lines, I also made sure that our Better Business Bureau and McAfee Secure logos were always visible.
8. The submit button was made even larger and placed directly under the previous field.
9. Several ASP field validators were added or adjusted, including a regular expression validator to confirm the credit card, and a comparison validator to check the two email fields. This allows for more error checking to occur client side, before the user submits their form.
10. If an order is submitted and rejected by the database, a large error panel is displayed at the top of the page, which describes the error but also provides instructions on how to answer customer service.

I’ve continue to register domains there over the years, and now have about ten personal and twenty for my work. Over time, they’ve added more and more bloat, and it’s taken more and more clicks to actually purchase a domain. Their management interface is overwhelming now, and the page design itself is quite the eyesore.

Still, I didn’t have any complaints strong enough to make me want to transfer registrars. Their prices are still reasonable and their customer support is actually one of the best I’ve dealt with: My calls are answered almost immediately, and usually by a very knowledgeable person.

I had heard about their ad campaigns, mostly because they were often banned from TV and played on their website instead. GoDaddy always made a big deal of this, which I never really understood the point of.

I didn’t actually watch the Superbowl last night, but I did watch some of the ads this morning, including the GoDaddy “Shower” commercial. I won’t bother linking to it, but I would have found it offensive and stupid for a beer company – let alone a domain registration company.

So when GoDaddy reminded me of one of my domains expiring next month, I thanked them and jotted down a note to transfer the domain to another registrar before them. I can’t say a commercial for a company I currently use has ever caused me to abandon them, but that certainly was the case with GoDaddy and their Superbowl ad.

I may end up going with Namecheap, who is taking advantage of commercial and offering a discount transfer code for customers who are “not happy with their current registrat or their advertising methods.”

Screenshot of Boxee

It was really cool, and I was constantly tweaking Media Portal. A few years later, after the popularity of HTPC’s grew, I bought a sleek Shuttle HTPC. More recently, I installed new software called XBMC to replace Media Portal.

Then in the past month, I started reading about new front-end software called Boxee. It supports playback of your videos, music, and pictures just like any other piece of software like this. But it’s built with the social web in mind -  you can add friends and see what they’re watching and what they recommend. Even better, it has built in support for a multitude of online video sites, from YouTube to Hulu to TED talks.

Unfortunately, until recently, Boxee was only available in Linux and Mac OS. My HTPC runs Windows. I thought, hey, accessible Linux seems to be all the rage nowadays, so why not try setting up my HTPC to boot into Linux.

Several hours later (not including the actual installation time), I finally had Ubuntu Linux up and running on my system. I load up Boxee, play a video, and … it freezes. No errors, no way to exit out of the program – I have to hit the restart button on my computer. I restart and try a few more times before giving up.

Then this week, Boxee releases an alpha version for Windows. I install it in one minute, and it’s flawlessly working the next.

There’s been talk of Linux giving Microsoft a run for their money since the turn of the century, but I stil l have yet to see any evidence that Linux is anywhere near being able to compete in an environment where ease and accessibility are key.

The keynote that really stood out was by George Wright of Blendtec. I wasn’t all that familiar with the Blendtec ad campaign before the conference, but I still found George to be an excellent speaker who did a great job telling the story of a tiny company who increased their sales 700% all thanks to a marketing campaign started with $50.

I spent Monday morning in sessions on two great sessions about video. I want to specifically mention Robin Liss of Reviewed.com. I saw her speak last year as well. She seems genuinely enthusiastic about what she does, which always helps make a speaker more interesting. She also really knows her stuff, and I was able to come away with a lot of notes.

Another speaker I enjoyed was Wil Reynolds, who gave a talk about keyword selection and had some excellent tips, such as seeing what words people used to tag their bookmarks on delicious.

A third speaker who I want to mention is Ted Ulle, of webmasterworld.com, who absolutely knows his stuff when it comes to information architecture, and often overlooked part of web design.

I have pages of notes from this conference (which luckily are all digitized this time around), and can’t wait to start discussing and implementing some of these ideas.

The only criticisms I have about the conference are in regards to the logistical parts of it, not the speakers, so I suppose that’s a good thing. Here’s a few suggestions for Pubcon 2009:

• Better directions. Everyone I saw went to the Las Vegas Convention Center South Halls first (where the conference was last year).
• On that note, maybe consider moving back to the south halls. The session rooms in the North Halls are three times as wide as they are deep, leaving you craning your neck to see the speakers and the powerpoint.
• Include coats and gloves in the registration bag. Seriously, I think I got frostbite in some of those rooms.
• Charge $10, $25, $50 more for tickets and DO NOT RUN OUT OF COFFEE! Also, while know it’s a minor complaint, a lot of the breakfast food tasted as if it had been sitting outside for days.

Those are just some minor gripes on an overall excellent conference.

On a personal note, I had a blast in Vegas as always (Stomp Out Loud and Craps both provided a lot of entertainment), and am very glad we took Saturday to see Death Valley, which is a really amazing place.

Apparently though, there has been quite a bit of grumbling by iPhone users as well. At the moment, online activation is down, meaning purchasers of the new iPhone currently lack the ability to use it as, well, a phone. And my oh my, what a maelstrom of tweets this has caused.

I understand the frustration, but unfortunately the only real solution is to just deal with it. I used to pull my hair out after standing in line for the latest MMORPG (from Everquest to World of Warcraft) only to come home and not be able to sign on due to the huge rush of people creating accounts. There were always cries of outrage for a class action lawsuit.

Of course, a few weeks later everything would be working perfectly, and all the angst of the first few days would be forgotten. Why? Well, the company set up their servers to handle a normal load of users, which would work in all situations except one: The release.

So is it really reasonable to expect for a company to spend a huge amount of money on additional hardware which will be useless all but one or two days of the year? I think not.

And it was excellent. The event was put together by Marc Amos and Angelo Simeoni, two self-professed Salem web geeks. I originally found out about the event through the North Shore Web Geeks meetup (who, according to Angelo, is their rival gang. He explained Build Guild is better because they have a better gang sign), and while I couldn’t make it to that, I eventually stumbled on a link for Build Guild.

I chatted with people in all sorts of positions, from someone who is forced to develop solely in IE6 for a state government website, to someone who works just in Ruby on Rails. They were all friendly, intelligent people, and besides the horrible lack of air conditioning at the Beer Works, we both had a great time.

Photo by Peter Wood

The problem was that it would not only redirect to the new domain, but include the full URL. And since her old blog used a different folder structure, people who clicked this link would receive a 404 error.

The specific issue was there was a question mark in the URL, which made the URL into a query string, which is handled differently than normal forwarding requests in an .htaccess file. The solution?

Put a question mark at the end of the RewriteRule. So in this specific case, the file now looks like:

Adding that question mark to the end seems to overwrite any previous query string requests, and will send any requests from the old domain to the root of the new one.

Turns out they not only had a seminar, but it was in Boston – in two days. I sheepishly went up to my boss and asked if it was alright if I was out Monday and Tuesday to attend this, apologizing for the late notice. She said go for it, so I registered that night, and the following Monday made the nightmarish rush hour commute down to the Marriott at Copley Square.

Overall, the event was fantastic. At first I was a bit hesitant to find that this was a one-track conference, meaning you couldn’t choose which presentation to go to. However I can now see the benefits of that, as each and every speaker was talented and put a lot of work into their presentations.

The seven sessions each day were a really good mix of practicality and conceptual ideas. Striking this balance can be very difficult, but I was pleased to come away with both specific notes (down to exact lines of CSS I wanted to try) as well as general ideas I wanted to implement.

I also should mention that some of these people really, really know how to use Keynote. Ethan Marcotte did an especially good job with this on a presentation he did entitled Comps and Code: Couples’ Therapy, on how designers and developers should work with each other.

My absolute favorite speaker was Andy Budd. I have never been so engrossed in a speech on web design. He had a perfect mix of storytelling, humor, and solid advice. I literally had trouble holding my applause back until the end of his presentation.

Of course, I wasn’t as big of a fan of every one of the other presentations. One focused a bit too much on style, art, and fashion, though I’m sure those people more focused on design appreciated it. There was also a speech on standards in the enterprise that I didn’t follow closely, simply because I don’t work in anything close to an enterprise environment. It also didn’t help that the speech was right before lunch and running fifteen minutes over!

Still, I look at my notes from the conference and can see how many great ideas I came away with. I am very much looking forward to attending this again next year.