Any WordPress Plugin developer worth their salt knows about the get_option function, which allows options to be retrieved from the database. What I recently discovered is that this function accepts a second parameter, indicating a default value to be returned if the option doesn’t exist in the database.
Today I’m releasing a new plugin: Short Comment Filter
It automatically spams or deletes comments that are too short.
You can view more information about the plugin and download it here.
Today is CSS Naked Day, a day when web enthusiasts remove all CSS styling to show the world what CSS does for us. Everything will be back to “normal” tomorrow.
You can learn more about CSS Naked day here.
My design was selected among the top 10 Retro and Vintage designs submitted to the Best WordPress Design Award sponsored by WP Webhost. Now the polls are open, and the voting can begin.
If you like my blog design, I’d love your vote! You can see the a list of the designs that were submitted, and vote on your favorite here.
When designing Anderson Web Solutions, I decided to use Posts for both news items and Portfolio entries. There were several advantages to doing this, but one issue I found was that everything was being thrown together in the RSS feed. I decided to look into filtering the RSS feed to only show posts from the News category. Here’s how it works.
WPWebHost is a web hosting company that specializes in WordPress web sites. They are hosting a WordPress design contest with five categories: Clean&Minimalist, Retro&Vintage, Grunge, Hand-Drawing, and Modern&Elegent.
I’ve decided to enter the contest in the Retro&Vintage category. Why did I decide to enter? My design certainly isn’t the most beautiful out there, so I’m not “expecting” to win, but this might give me a chance to get some constructive critisism about design choices I’ve made. Besides, it can’t hurt, and there’s a prize 
Do you have a WordPress blog that you’ve designed? Enter it in the contest.
Good Luck!
Anyone who’s installed WordPress knows that the default theme has the “powered by WordPress” link in the footer. I’ve added a couple of other items to my footer besides just WordPress, and I’ve been noticing that other people have done the same thing. Ma.tt is powered by ramen noodles, WP Tavern is powered by Mt. Dew. I’m personally powered by Dr. Pepper. Have you added an interesting “powered by” item to your footer, or seen sites that do? What’s the most interesting or entertaining one you’ve seen?
I’ve been working for quite a while on a top secret project, namely Anderson Web Solutions. I’ve been doing various WordPress development jobs for the past year, but haven’t had a site specifically designed to profile my work or gather new clients… until now.
Who doesn’t hate email spam? Those messages telling you to how to refinance your house, please your mate, or lose unwanted weight are nothing but a waste of time. Placing your email address online can increase the number of spam emails in your inbox even higher. Email spiders, programs designed to crawl the web looking for email addresses, can find your contact information online and use it to spam you. While you could not post your email online, sometimes you might need a way for people to contact you.
Many people fight the spam bots by obfuscating their emails (for example “joe [at] example [dot] com” or “joe@REMOVETHISexample.com”). This does an OK job, but it’s also a royal pain for the visitor, who has to type in, or fix your email address if they want to send you an email. The ultimate spam fighting question arises: “How do you keep bots out while letting real users in”. GMail’s plus-addressing feature and jQuery might be able to bring us one step closer to an answer.
When creating WordPress themes, one problem I’ve faced is using template tags and other functions which aren’t implemented in older versions of WordPress. Of course the best solution is for people to upgrade their version of WordPress, but you can’t exactly force people to do this. If you want to use new functions, but want to support people with older versions of WordPress, there’s something you can do. As an example, let’s look at wp_page_menu().