The Geekorium

Previously I wrote about some plugins I love for making writing posts easier. This is a list of the little plugins I love that just do cool things around the place. They’re all useful, and most are ones I use on both sites I maintain. I would highly recommend them to anyone.

• Akismet\

  Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.Matt Mullenweg

  Akismet keeps me spam free. I’m using it conjunction with Disqus for a double layer of protection. It’s pretty accurate - think Gmail spam filters for your site. Anyone who isn’t using this is asking for trouble.

• [Author

  Exposed](http://colorlightstudio.com/2008/03/14/wordpress-plugin-author-exposed/ “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Simple and elegant way to get more information about author.Igor Penjivrag

  I used to have a plugin here that showed more details about myself using a third party service. When I started First Waves I felt like I wanted a similar tool to promote my guest authors a bit but didn’t want to have to ask them to create an account on the service. So this plugin does something similar based on the information they fill into their profile on this site. When you click the Author’s name a little hovercard shows you their gravatar and a link to their other websites.

• AddQuicktag\

  Allows you to easily add custom Quicktags to the editor. You can also export and import your Quicktags.Roel Meurders, Frank Bultge

  I can’t stand WYSIWYG editors, so I choose to use the HTML editor to write my posts. It doesn’t mean however that I don’t want to use shortcuts occasionally. The AddQuicktag plugin lets you define custom tags to wrap around your HTML while editing. For example, I have a <code><cite></cite></code> tag in addition to the normal <code><blockquote></blockquote></code> tag and a “Caption” button that wraps my image caption text in <code><figcaption></figcaption></code> (to save me writing them out every time).

• [Broken Link

  Checker](http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/08/05/broken-link-checker-for-wordpress/ “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.Janis Elsts

  This plugin creates an area on your dashboard that reports any broken links it finds - any sites that you’ve linked to that are no longer there, or resources that get 404 errors. Then you can go through and relink or ignore them as you like. Keeps your site tidy. You can also give it permission to cross out links that don’t work so your visitors know not to bother to click through.

• [Clicky for

  WordPress](http://getclicky.com/goodies/#wordpress “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Integrates Clicky on your blog!Joost de Valk

  Ultimate Google Analytics
  Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site. Check http://www.oratransplant.nl/uga/#versions for version updates*Wilfred van der Deijl*

  These two add the Clicky and Google Analytics tracking codes on my pages so I can be silly about the number of visitors my sites get. Clicky is particularly cool, as I can see people come and go in real-time and can feel a bit like Jack Bauer.

• [Organize

  Series](http://www.unfoldingneurons.com/neurotic-plugins/organize-series-wordpress-plugin/ “Visit plugin homepage”)
  This plugin adds a number of features to wordpress that enable you to easily write and organize a series of posts and display the series dynamically in your blog. You can associate “icons” or “logos” with the various series. This version of Organize Series Plugin requires at least WordPress 2.8 to work.Darren Ethier</em><

  Wordpress doesn’t come configured out-of-the-box to incorporate posts into series. This plugin makes it feel like it does. This plugin post is an example.

• [Page Links

  To](http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/page-links-to/ “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.Mark Jaquith

  A good plugin if you want pages in your menu that go to pages off-site (like First Waves and nunnone email in the menu above). Create a new “Page”, and in the new option at the bottom of the post tell WordPress where you want the item to link to.

• [YOURLS: WordPress to

  Twitter](http://planetozh.com/blog/my-projects/yourls-wordpress-to-twitter-a-short-url-plugin/ “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Create short URLs for posts with YOURLS (or other services such as tr.im) and tweet them.Ozh

  This is the best plugin I’ve found that lets me use my Bit.ly pro account (using my own domain for shortened links) to display a short link on my site for each post. I was originally using YOURLS to shrink my links, but when bit.ly offered theirs I switched over. Comes with a widget too, to display the link in the sidebar if you’d prefer.

• [Smart

  404](http://michael.tyson.id.au/smart-404 “Visit plugin homepage”)
  Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.Michael Tyson

  This is such a simple plugin, but it can make such a difference to your site. When visitors try to visit pages that don’t exist, normally your site will give them a 404 Error (telling the browser that the page doesn’t exist). What this plugin does instead is tries to match up some content with the URL they entered, so for example when you try “//the.geekorium.au/batman” (a page that does not exist) you will be automatically redirected to the page for my Batman tag (of which there are quite a number). Or if you tried //the.geekorium.au/disqus, you’d be taken to a post with “Disqus” in the title. There are a lot of queries that it won’t work with, but it’s neat when it works.

There are a few more extra-special plugins that I want to share, but they’re the sort of plugins that you dedicate whole posts to, so I’ll share them soon. In the meantime, if you like the sound of any of these features give them a whirl. The great thing about Wordpress is just how easy it is to install and try out new plugins.

The decisions Google makes don’t normally annoy me, except in small geeky ways that most people would pfft at, and you may well pfft at me now but they are seriously annoying me now.

://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/21469363/ The Google Master Plan http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/ / CC BY 2.0

On one hand we have the recent integration of Buzz into Gmail and Google Reader. The upshot being:

1. You cannot disable Buzz without disabling your carefully tended Google Profile.
2. Because you cannot disable Buzz, you end up slowly accruing followers - you could ignore them, but you start to look like an ass.
3. So you follow back and this breaks Google Reader.
4. So the choice is between using Google Reader OR Google Buzz to read content from others. Google Buzz is so tightly integrated with Google Reader that I can only choose one or the other. There is no way I can see to effectively and simply use both at the same time.

But then on the other hand:

1. Nothing looks the same as anything else - the interfaces of some products have similar elements, but there’s no universally consistent theme to the products.
2. Google Translate (which is so nicely integrated into Google Reader) is not integrated into Buzz, so all the non-english-speaking people I follow are just so much noise to me.
3. Google Bookmarks (which I used to use a great deal) now houses the annotations you make to Google results (starring results and so on) but
4. Google Chrome doesn’t use Google Bookmarks to store your bookmarks (!?) it uses Google Docs.
5. On top of that, I am yet to be able to actually produce a two-way sync across Chrome at home and at work.

So riddle me this Google: why are some products tightly integrated - inextricably so - while others barely work in ways that would make absolute sense to the user? Normally I can see where you’re going with things - heck, I write a site just about Google Wave - but in these couple of cases, it seems you’re making decisions not based on what’s best for the user, but forging ahead with integration only when it will push a product that you deem worth your time. No one was clamoring for Buzz. They thought it would be nice if Google entered the Social Networking space, but not at the expense of your other products. But users have been asking for years for tighter integration of products that matter to them - translate, bookmarks, the defunct notebook, docs and calendar.

I realise these are all different teams of people. I realise they’re all working as hard as they can on what they’re doing. But Google the Company needs to stop occasionally and say “Maybe we need to focus on fixing and integrating what we already offer before we introduce this new shiny toy”.

Google, you have a lot of excellent products - please pay them some attention occasionally and get them talking to each other.

I don’t want a separate app where I have to gather all my friends and influencers in one place all over again - I have that in Twitter.

What I want from you is a way to flag a user (secretly) as someone whose opinion has aligned with mine in the past, so that when they say “I love this new movie”, I’ll be reasonably certain that I will too. And if I could flag someone’s opinion as wrong¹ most of the time, then I will know that when they say “I love this song”, not to bother clicking through to it. It might mean that some of the users in my stream have slightly darker or lighter updates so I can tell at a glance which ones I’ve flagged as trustworthy or mostly wrong.

Heck, just being able to easily see that someone is in a “trusted” private Twitter list with a glance at my main stream would be double handy. Do that.

Thank you for listening. If you do this, you will win the world.

PS. to all the people I follow: I’m not talking about any of you. I think all of you have fantastic taste. It’s those oter people I worry about…

A month and a half ago I was contacted by a Martin Vrabel, who sent me this:

email from Martin Vrabel of Taskee.comHi Joshua,

I found out you are writing about webdesign on your blog. I though you may be interested in writing about the new URL related task management tool for web designers - Taskee.

Taskee is a hosted website task management tool for small and medium size webdesign companies. Taskee simplifies website task management communication process and makes it easier and cheaper to collaborate during website testing process.

You can find more info and demo at www.taskee.com [website no longer working]

Sorry for this email if its not worth your attention or was interrupting you.

Kind Regards,

Martin Vrabel

This was my first ever request for comment about any product, so I dutifully starred it in Gmail and promised myself I’d look at it when I could. Well, the wait is over. I thought I’d set it up today and give it a go. This post is part review, but mostly feedback at the moment as the product is only at version 0.3 and not ready for prime time.

First up, I’ll just explain what I think Taskee is, having used it a tiny bit and finding Martin’s marketing speech a little overcomplicated. Taskee is a simple way for people to leave notes (or to-dos) about specific webpages with the people who are actually making the website. I might make a website for a client, and as they browse the site and pick up changes that need to be made, they can put them straight into Taskee instead of writing them down or emailing them to me. For sites with a lot of collaborators (or even just two) it could be enormously helpful.

Taskee is really quite easy to use. You sign up and paste a tiny bit of code into your website. The next time you load a page, you’re greeted with a big blue ‘Open’ button that helpfully stays put, even when you scroll around the page. Clicking the big blue button allows you to log in, and you can start to ‘Taskee’. The button is actually quite large (maybe a little too large). Taskee was designed I think with pre-production sites in mind. With a less obtrusive button it might be just as useful for live sites.

The software takes note of what page you are on automatically, and you can start leaving notes about changes that need to be made, information that needs to be included and ideas you’d like to explore. What makes Taskee helpful here is that you can set up multiple users and assign your message to specific people. John can tell Tony to fix the fonts, and tell Sue to spruce up the copy. Then when Tony visits the page, he can check the tasks he has to do. And it’s all done from your own site.

There is also a neat feature to set a version of Taskee for visitor feedback. Instead of the ‘Open’ button, visitors are greeted with an unobtrusive (although colour options might be useful in future releases) ‘Feedback’ button that pops up a box where people can tell you stuff like “There’s spam on this page” or “Change your colour scheme for heavens sake!”.

It’s such a simple concept that it almost doesn’t need review - either you’ll find it useful or you won’t. It’ll fit into your way of doing things or it won’t. This version does demand some feedback though, so I’ll share my initial reactions. Please don’t think it’s a comment on the idea - only on the current stage of execution.

I had a few buggy problems. The control panel gives you an option to move the ‘Open’ button somewhere else (on NunnOne it gets in the way of my title). It doesn’t seem to want to move without a cache/cookie clearout though, which could cause some confusion.

Turning on the Feedback option and clearing my cache/cookies had the adverse affect of removing my ‘Open’ button completely. If I hadn’t turned on Feedback I might still be able to see the ‘Open’ button, but I can’t find any documentation on their site that can tell me how to get it back.

Unfortunately I did this before going much further, or having the buttons for longer than a day, so I can’t really even tell you yet how useful it has been long-term. I’m sure they can tell me how to get it back, or make it easier to find out, but you might want to know that these two bugs alone have made just setting it all up a little more complicated than necessary.

There are also a few options that aren’t clearly explained (in my opinion). I just can’t get back into the admin panel to tell you what they are. I can’t even really show you any proper screenshots.

The only real non-bug downside is a bi-product of its simplicity - all the data you create gets stored at taskee.com. Perhaps a future version will have a local installation option.

Currently Taskee is in beta - everything is subject to change before the product is finished - so take my opinions with a grain of salt. Their latest blog post also seems to say that they will have both free and paid options and a new interface very soon, so it could be very different next version.

Update: 2007-11-20 The blog post on the Taskee site that first mentions the Feedback feature mentions how to get the ‘Open’ button back. It should be clearer though.

This post was my response to a question asked by Ronnie Swafford on Newsvine: Why was he, a Windows Programmer with no obvious need for a Mac so drawn to get an Apple computer?

I answered (and am yet to see if he responds), but noticed what a huge comment I’d written and thought it could be a blog entry in itself. So here is why you want a Mac.

You want a Mac because Apple seems to have a philosophy that says, “do what must be done to make this a positive, well rounded experience”.

It’s an interesting idea, and it got people (myself included) to realise that PC’s are holding advances in tech back. Consider this, Apple ditched numerous PC staples that people relied on, and are only now realising they don’t need:

1. Out dated peripheral ports (parallel, serial, ps2) choosing USB and Firewire alone to connect peripherals - and how much simpler is that?

2. Ditched floppies too. I would rather tech support a Mac than a PC for this reason alone…

3. Said goodbye to System 9. They supported it for a reasonable time, but made it clear all along that their system would not be bogged down trying to make everyone happy

4. Have sort of shown that they will use stable, or new and emerging technologies (with their own spin on it) instead of insisting that people keep using ‘updated’ (feature-tacked-on) versions of their old proprietary technology. Again - System 9 was ditched in favour of a nix backbone. They include apache and php with the OS. Compare Microsoft who keep loading pile after pile of re-worked re-hashed proprietary stuff on the public, locking more and more people into ‘their’ system.

Sure these things annoyed some people, but it’s clear that Mac’s are ‘moving forward’ while PC’s are stuck catering to people stuck in the past.

All in all, I feel like I’m taking charge when I buy a Mac - no one will tell me what to I have to use. Of course this isn’t always true and I prefer Firefox because Apple decided I couldn’t use the latest version of Safari without purchasing Tiger. But more often than not, if I see it coming to a PC in the future, Apple is already doing it.

If Apple pioneers something new (this is hypothetical) I can imagine that they will use existing standards to make it work securely and easily, and start to phase out whatever it replaces. If Microsoft or Dell were to make this hypothetical Doohicky™ it would use their own proprietary software/hardware combo, communicate in a completely new and patentable way, be full of bugs, and contain a bunch of bits and bobs that make it (theoretically) usable with technology I hated ten years ago when it was in it’s prime, and now isn’t used by anyone but my Gran.

You want a Mac because it speaks to you of future world that doesn’t need endless configuration, doesn’t rely on and adhere to old tech, and will move and change easily with the advances of our field.

OK, that’s a bit misleading, as I don’t in fact love opera as entertainment. I don’t even love it as a web browser. I am however giving it a shot as my default browser. I had been using Firefox, and whilst I appreciated the ability to customise it to the n^th^ degree I was finding it slower and slower for my usual browsing.

So I switched. I may go back, but I like the speed.

I must have the best and latest of everything. This holds true for me as long as my budget holds up. In fact, its less ‘latest and greatest’ and more ‘what people are willing to give me’ most of the time. Not that I’m cheep, just that I’m poor.

Not that it would make much difference I suppose, who wants to pay for stuff you can probably get for free. Take software for example. I’ve found free versions of almost every app I’ve wanted to use. When I first got my computer I spent hours searching online for free software to make the tiniest of jobs simpler or quicker. Because I could.

For about a year I used Safari on my Mac. It was free, it came with Apple’s design and endorsement, and could therefore be trusted to integrate itself into the operating system without hassle. I started subscribing to rss feeds at about the same time that Apple released Tiger, and with it the new improved Safari 2.0. Safari 2.0 had lots of cool stuff I was sure I needed, but couldn’t afford the upgrade to Tiger. Then Safari started crashing. A lot. I tried to fix it but to no avail. I had already tired of Internet Explorer at my all PC workplace and switched to Firefox. I thought, why not do the same at home?

I haven’t looked back (except maybe the once I’ve started Safari by accident using Quicksilver, and I felt a wave of nostalgia for its beautiful brushed metal). Firefox gives me a clean consistant experience between work and home, and allows me to do amazing things like keep my bookmarks in sync (now even easier with Foxmarks). But it got me thinking… How many things can I keep in sync between work and home?

Then I ‘discovered’ Web 2.0… what a find! I can create documents, keep a calendar, write to-do lists, even write screenplays, all from my browser, allowing me to access these things from anywhere. I’ve gone-a-hunting for as many useful sites as I can find. My next post I’ll be listing the best ones I’ve found so far, and the ways I’m using them.