Author: noel saw

Posted on

Quick Tip: Tag pages to get better search results page

You know that search field on your WordPress site? Have you ever tried looking for certain keywords or phrases that your readers might try typing in? Chances are that quite a few common keywords aren’t showing the most relevant posts or pages that you want them to do. Sure, you can easily add tags to posts. But how about pages? Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t currently allow tags on pages, but you can use a simple plugin called “Page Tagger” to add tags to important pages. It adds a sidebar widget on the pages editor just like posts.

You can team up Page Tagger plugin with a tool like Relevanssi to fine tune your search results so you give your audience what they’re looking for!

Get it: Page Tagger

Posted on

PadPressed update and another iPad theme

A few days ago we covered PadPressed now known as “OnSwipe” raised $1 million. Now they have some competion from WPTouch Pro. We asked them why their theme didn’t work so well in protrait mode. Maybe they’re busy celebrating their round of funding, because we never heard back from them.

Well there’s new competition from WPtouchPro 2.1 by Brave New Code, adds iPad support. We’ll take a look at it in the next few days and do a mini review. Meanwhile you can download the 1.9 version for iPhone/iPod touch for free.

Posted on

PadPressed grows up – Raises $1 million

Remember our PadPressed usage update from last week? It’s a good product but we were slightly surprised to hear  through WooTheme’s Adii on Twitter, that they have raised $1 million dollars and have transformed themselves onto a new company called “OnSwipe.” With the new onslaught of tablets coming out this year, they have a solid chance to capture some tablet publishing market-share. There’s also a good article on TechCrunch with more details on the $1 million investment.

It’s encouraging to hear that a company based around the WP platform could raise a decent amount of capital.

Posted on

Offline WP editor: Mars Edit

In the past, I’ve mentioned tools like Scribefire that work within your web browser to help you quickly post WordPress content. I’ve been using it for a while and I like it minus the occasional hiccups when it doesn’t clear the previous content and I accidentally overwrite an existing post. You could probably chalk some of that up to user error/impatience.

I always think there’s ten different ways to do something and sometimes it’s good to reduce the so-called “background noise” by just focus on the writing and not have all the crazy visual distractions of the web in front of you. Enter Mars Edit 3 by Red Sweater for the Mac, an elegant off-line blog editor that works with WordPress (of course) and other blog systems. You can use it to manage multiple blog sites on multiple platforms.

Mars Edit lets you create new posts and pages while having the ability to edit existing ones too. It gives you almost the same editing capabilities as WordPress’ built in editor including creating categories and tags. You can also upload pictures and media through the Mac interface.

One neat touch is that it will auto-detect URLs in your clipboard and automatically paste them in when you insert a link.

One interesting incident during my testing that may also throw off new users. I saved a draft of this post and thought it would be uploaded to my site as a draft but instead it saved this post locally as a draft file. Not a big deal, after I found the draft but for a few moments, it was a yikes moment. It would be nice if it gave you the option of uploading a draft since some users may choose to leave their computer at home and finish the rest of the post on say an iPad on the road.

I also wish it had better media management as currently local file pictures show up only in a thumbnail view. It does have a quick search feature to drill down by file name but it’s too bad it doesn’t have a list view sortable by date. It would also be nice if Mars Edit integrated with some of the WP picture lightbox plugins so when you add a picture, the image style gets incorporated automatically.

To be entirely fair, Mars Edit wasn’t designed to be just a WordPress editor but it also works with Tumblr, Squarespace, and other blogs. Overall, it’s a well designed product and I’ll be buying Mars Edit very soon. In the meanwhile, if you’re interested there’s a trial version you can download.

Get it: Mars Edit 3

Posted on

Cheat Sheet: Anatomy of a WordPress theme

If you’re learning how to create your own WordPress theme, check out this succinct but informative cheat sheet called “Anatomy of a WordPress Theme” over at Yoast.

While this is not a tutorial or a detailed how to, this will give you a big picture overview of how WordPress works.

The only thing we think it’s missing is it doesn’t talk about page templates.

Posted on

Theme of the Week: Spectacular from Smashing Magazine

Looking for a WordPress theme that’s slightly retro and sepia or paper bag brown color ready to go out of the box? Check out Smashing Magazine’s new and best of all, free theme called “Spectacular.” There’s a large site name area above to proudly brand your site. The home page layout is interesting with a large main feature area that shockingly doesn’t have the trendy Jquery slider. Check out their live demo.

Get it: Spectacular Theme

Posted on

Time Saver: use Pixelpipe to push to 100+ networks

How would you like to have the ability to push (simple) content into WordPress, Tumblr, TypePad, etc. with one click? Or how about sending out a status update to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz with a single little click. Check out Pixelpipe.  It’s a free web app service where you can setup all your social network accounts and use one interface to write content and publish it to multiple networks.

One of my favorite features? The ability to send an update through your IM client, just open up an IM window and select their “bot” contact/buddy, then type your message and hit enter. Voilà, done!

Expect a slight delay (1-2 minutes) for your content to show up at each network but ultimately it saves a lot of time doing each one manually. Get it: Pixelpipe

Posted on

PadPressed Update

A few months ago, we bought the App Sumo Bundle which included the PadPressed theme. At the time, the plugin/theme combo seemed hard to install and the support channel wasn’t quite there.

We just came back to try it out with a new 1.5.1 release (free for existing customers) and we’re happy to report the documentation has gotten much better and there’s a now a support forum. The developers have put some thought into the features including the ability to pull your site logo as the “home” screen icon when you bookmark the site on an iPad.

The only thing we’re not happy about is that the CoverPad theme doesn’t work well in landscape mode when viewing on the iPad, by that we mean the inner page thumbnails disappear when the iPad is rotated into landscape mode. But otherwise it maybe worth $50 to get your portfolio up quickly on an iPad. Try out our test site on your iPad.

Get it: PadPressed theme

Posted on

Must have extensions for Firefox

Other than WordPress, Firefox is one our favorite open source products because it’s a fast and stable web browser. We prefer it to Internet Explorer on Windows because of the wealth of extensions aka plugins available for it.

Here’s our collection of favorite Firefox extensions aka plugins to save you a lot of time when you’re trying to collect or share information or if you happen to be the CEO and webmaster of your startup and need to fine tune and debug your WordPress site.

So these plugins can be organized into two broad categories:  On the top of the Firefox browser toolbar are information collection and sharing . The bottom of the browser (status bar area) hold the design and development tools.

On the top left is Evernote, a multi-platform cloud based note taking system. With the Firefox plugin, you can quickly clip the contents of any web page into your Evernote account. Evernote is available as a web application and also as a dedicated app for virtually every device out there so you can read your notes almost anywhere.

Then’s there’s Delicious, which is a cloud based social bookmarking service. Bookmark, tag, and write down notes for each web site you’ll want to look up later.  Note that Delicious maybe jettisoned soon by parent company Yahoo, you can still export the bookmarks at anytime for now. A possible (paid) alternative is Pinboard but it’s currently without a Firefox plugin.

You can use Goo.gl Lite toolbar add-on to quickly generate a “Goo.gl” (Google’s shortener service) URL of the current page. With one click on it save the current URL to your clipboard immediately.

Email This lets you quickly launch your email client including web based Gmail to quickly send the current page to someone.

Try the amazing Fox to Phone, which will launch the current page from your desktop Firefox onto your Andorid device web browser with minimal intervention. Install the Firefox extension and download the companion app in the Android marketplace. If you’re on an iPhone, try out Firefox Home which will sync your browsing history, local bookmarks, and tabs on your iPhone.

On the bottom are design and development tools:
From left to right, we’ll start with MeasureIt, which lets your measure the pixels by drawing rectangles on the current web page. It’s really useful if you trying to shift pixels around a page.

Want to grab the color value (RGB or Hex) of any web page object/component without snapshoting the screen and pasting it into Photoshop? Try Colorzilla.

Want to write something about the page you’re looking at without opening up WordPress admin? Try ScribeFire. Read my quick review.

If you’re constantly making changes to a single page and want to clear the web browser cache with one quick click? Try Cache Status.

Want to grab a screenshot of the entire web page even if it’s taller than your current monitor resolution? Try Screengrab.

Want to see how your page looks like at 1024×768 resolution or other monitor size without resizing your OS resolution? Try Firesizer.

And finally one of the most popular and useful Firefox extensions of all time, use Firebug to help you debug HTML, CSS, and Javascript. You can use it in a combination with Y!Slow to speed up your web pages.

Summarized list
Information collection and sharing: 
Evernote, Delicious, Goo.gl Lite, Email This, Fox to Phone, Firefox Home

Design tools: 
MeasureIt, Colorzilla, ScribeFire, Cache Status, Screengrab, Firesizer, Firebug, Y!Slow

Posted on

New WordPress.com theme showcase

Looking for more cool WordPress themes? Check out WordPress.com’s new Theme Showcase for their hosted service. While you won’t be able to download the themes directly for your self hosted WP site, you can Google it to find the download link. You may recognize a lot of the themes but there will be a few new surprises! I like that they’ve started to categorize the features and layout of each theme better. Hopefully this will also trickle down to WP.org’s theme gallery.