My Bookmarks – A Wordpress plugin to show your valuable bookmarks on sidebar

If you are using delicious or simpy as your bookmarking tool, this plugin is for you. This will help a wordpress user to show his valuable bookmarks on sidebar. Just install this plugin and set your options in plugins settings page – you are done. When you add or update links on your bookmarking site, this section will be automatically updated.

The settings page of My Bookmarks in wordpress admin panel

Download

Click here to download the My Bookmarks Wordpress plugin (80.3 KB).

Downloaded : 754 times

To see a live demo, see the “My Bookmarks” section of sidebar of this blog.

Installation

Installation of this plugin is very easy. First, be sure that you are using latest(2.6) version of wordpress. Then follow this 3 easy steps.

1. Extract and upload the `MyBookmarks` directory to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress.
3. Go to Settings > My Bookmarks page and make it yours.

Upcoming features

I’ve planned to add some more feature in next version of this plugin. Your comment about any modification or feature request is very mush welcome.

1. Add caching to store link information in your server. So that, no need to fetch from feeds every time.
2. Allow more bookmark sites like digg, netvouz, etc.
3. Adding additional links with parsed feed.
4. Make independent about enabling blogroll.
5. ……….. and more.

For any Question/Suggestion please contact me at admin@ajaxray.com

Happy bookmarking, Happy blogging!

Windows Live Writer : Blogger’s life made easy

Windows says, "Windows Live Writer Beta is a desktop application that makes it easy to publish rich content to your blog". Really that. I have been using it recently and found it as an exclusive tool for blogging. But remember, a blogger can use windows live writer only when his blog is build on an organized blog system like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, Community Server, and many other weblog services.

Windows Live focus themselves on five feature of this writer. They are:

1. Compatible with your blog service
2. WYSIWYG editing
3. Rich media publishing
4. Powerful editing features and
5. Offline editing

Ok. Now I am going to tell you what features of this software impressed me most. First I should mention that, before using Windows Live Writer, I have been using WordPress and I was satisfied on It’s editing options. But now, I get the powerful yet easiest application for writing blog and I’m going to stay on it. Here goes my share of the praise:

1. Offline control on everything: It has powerful editor to write/edit blogs, manage my categories etc on offline. So, it’s fast and easy. Only one thing I have to do is, just tell the writer to publish it. Then it will connect to the blog over online and automatically publish it. Moreover, it lets me see the editing post in different views which helps me to visualize how it will look like at online on my installed theme.
2. Working with images is easiest than ever:  I get rid from the terrible duty of uploading and managing images to use them in a blog post by using writer. It lets me use image in a post and edit them just like MS Word. When an image containing post published, it manages everything.
3. More control on Html elements: The web’s WYSIWYG editors are simply nice. But not comparable with writer’s editing facilities. It’s more than a web editor and near about a word processor. It offers smooth and flexible visual building.  
4. Special inserting tools: Writer’s inserting tools are really rich. It can insert and smoothly manage tables, images, videos, maps(from virtual earth), colorize code snippet(need a free plug-in) etc.
5. Rich and free Plug-ins: Though Windows Live Writer is at beta version yet, it has a large number of free plug-ins. They may solve more than a blogger needs. You can get the plug-ins here:

http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?c=0&bt=9&pl=8&st=5

Moreover, who are blogging on hosted version of WordPress, Blogger etc blogging site, they have some limitations of using plug-ins there. Writer may be a great solution for them. It also provides the ping functionality which is very important for promoting a blog.

See more details here: http://get.live.com/en-us/betas/writer_betas

You can download it from here: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

“How to add archive functionality to your PHP app”

“An archive refers to a collection of records, and also refers to the location in which these records are kept. Archives are made up of records which have been created during the course of an individual or organization’s life.” – Wikipedia.

Archive is an essential feature of a well defined blog system. If you have a blog in blogger or wordpress, you’ll get built-in archive feature there. But if you are making a blog yourself or any similar application, you might need to add this function yourself. These are some ideal example of archives:

I’ve done it for one of my app and here I am telling you the time saving tip: creating an archive function in 3 easy steps.

1. Generate organized archive data: Generally, archives are created on create date of contents. Let’s say, your blogs table has a field named create_date which holds the timestamp of the post. Now, you can get your archive data in very organized format with this simple yet powerful query (it’s in MySQL):

SELECT COUNT(id) total, MONTHNAME(create_date) month, YEAR(create_date) year

FROM blogs

GROUP BY MONTH(create_date), YEAR(create_date)

ORDER BY create_date

Note that you’ll need to use where clauses if there are any condition. The output of your query should look like this:

Query to retrieve archive data	The result

2. Use the archive data: After you have retrieved the archive data, you can display them in any sidebar of your application. A sample code can be as follows:

 1: <h4>Older Entries</h4>

 2: <ul>

 3: <?php foreach ($archive as $month): ?>

 4: <li>

 5: <a href="<?php echo $month['year'] . "/" . $month['month'] ?>">

 6: <?php echo $month['month'] . " " . $month[' year'] ."(" . $month['total'] .")" ?>

 7: </a>

 8: </li>

 9: <?php endforeach; ?>

 10: </ul>

So, what’s done here? Well, it displays the archive sets with an appropriate link. Note that the link are created in “clean URL” style, i.e. yourdomain.com/2007/july – if you are using an MVC framework like CodeIgniter or CakePHP, you may find it easy to integrate. You can of course create it in the old style, by changing the above code in this way:

 1: <li>

 2: <a href="blog.php?year=<?php echo $month['year'] ?>&month=<?php echo $month['month'] ?>”>

 3: <?php echo $month[''month'] . " " . $month[' year '] ."(" . $month['total'] .")" ?>

 4: </a>

 5: </li>

3. Display related posts: And now you’ll need to handle the fetching of appropriate posts based on the passed archive information (year and month), but that’s something that only you can figure out, as I don’t know what you have in there.

Happy Blogging…Happy Archiving