Author Archives: Stephen Cronin

About Stephen Cronin

Stephen Cronin has worked in the software industry in Australia, UK and USA for 13 years. He has held senior positions including General Manager, Business Manager, International Product Manager and has also worked as web developer, project manager, trainer and support technician.

Shorter Shortlinks – If You Have WWW In Your Domain

| Created: September 17th, 2010
WordPress Hacks 3 Comments

Earlier today, I read a post by Stephanie Leary about the shortlink functionality introduced in WordPress 3.0. Afterwards, I felt I should share the code snippet that I use to make my shortlinks even shorter.

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WordPress Caching Plugins For Shared Hosting: W3 Total Cache vs WP Super Cache vs Hyper Cache

| Created: August 30th, 2010
WordPress Reviews 20 Comments

I recently was faced with a decision: which WordPress caching plugin to use on my shared hosting account. The choice was between WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache and Hyper Cache. This article documents my admittedly limited testing of these plugins and the decision I made as a result.

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Practical Theme Support For WordPress 3.0 Menus

| Created: June 21st, 2010
WordPress Development 7 Comments

I’ve read quite a few articles on theme support for the new Menu functionality introduced in WordPress 3.0. However, these have all been theoretical rather than practical. I wanted a real life, working example, including support for users on older versions of WordPress. In the end, I wrote it myself.

WordPress Theme developers, listen up! When updating your themes to work with the new menu functionality, you need to make sure that it still works with older versions of WordPress.

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markItUp! For Greasemonkey

| Created: February 24th, 2010
Scripts 6 Comments

The other day a great comment was left on this site. When I went to answer, I realized that I wanted to be able to select part of what the commentator said and automatically turn it into a quote in my comment.

Copy and paste are too mundane for me, so I wrote a Greasemonkey script that adds the markItUp! Editor to any textarea on a page. I then extended markItUp! by adding a ‘quote’ button that wraps the currently selected text (from anywhere on the page) in blockquote tags.

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The Solution To The Lack Of WordPress Beta Testing

| Created: February 11th, 2010
WordPress Opinion 30 Comments

While catching up on some old podcasts, specifically Episode 82 of WordPress Weekly, I came across a discussion about WordPress beta testing. The discussion centers around the problem of bugs not being caught during beta testing because there just aren’t enough beta testers.

To me, the solution seems straightforward – but that may be because I worked in the software industry for 10 years and have experience in software release management, so I’ll take the long path and set the scene properly.

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Advanced WordPress Admin Tip: Posts By Category

| Created: January 7th, 2010
WordPress Hacks 10 Comments

Go to Posts -> Edit in the WordPress Admin area and you’ll see a list of all the posts you have. There is a dropdown list called View all categories, which allows you to select a single category to view posts from. But…

What if you want to view posts from more than one category, or better yet, want to exclude posts from certain categories? Can’t do it right? Well not through the WordPress interface, but you can do it through URL parameters.

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2009 On More Than Scratch The Surface

About 6 Comments

Happy New Year to all! A year ago, after looking at my Google Analytics stats for the year, I wrote a post reviewing 2008. I figure I may as well do it again for 2009 and also take the opportunity to explain the direction of this site.

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Sharepoint As A CMS – Microsoft Tech.Ed Australia 2009

| Created: October 21st, 2009
Content Management Systems 5 Comments

It’s been over a month since I published my notes on the Thursday session of Microsoft Tech.Ed Australia 2009. In that post, I promised to write up the SharePoint discussion session separately. Finally, here it is.

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A Web Host With Great Customer Service

| Created: September 28th, 2009
Web Hosting 15 Comments

There are a bucketload of blog posts out there about web hosting. The vast majority of these are either praising their current hosts (along with a nice little affiliate link for you to click) or berating them for poor service.

Today, I’m going to do something different: I’m going to praise a web host that I no longer use and for which I don’t have an affiliate link. Continue reading

Microsoft Tech.Ed Australia 2009 (Thursday)

| Created: September 18th, 2009
Web Development 1 Comment

I was fortunate to attend Microsoft Tech.Ed Australia 2009 last week. I made copious notes during the day, so I thought I’d share them. Continue reading