Tag Archives: hacks

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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Google Reader Update Breaks Google Reader Print Button Script

| Created: December 5th, 2008
Greasemonkey Hacks 36 Comments
Editorial Note

Okay, Julien has released the official fix only three hours after this post! So ignore my solution below (in fact I will remove the full code) and get over to the script’s home page for the fix.

As you may know from my Google Reader Print Button hack, I’m a big fan of the Google Reader Print Button greasemonkey script. I use it quite often to print feed entries to a format I can use on my PDA (which has no connectivity).

Now, an update to Google Reader has broken the script. I reported this at the script’s home page, but rather than waiting for the fix, I went ahead and fixed it myself. I need that Print Button! Here’s my fix. Continue reading

SearchWiki Breaks Numbered Google Results – Easy Fix

| Created: November 22nd, 2008
Greasemonkey Hacks 29 Comments

On 20 November 2008, Google introduced SearchWiki, allowing users to customize their search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding and commenting on them. I’m not going to cover how SearchWiki works, nor am I going to examine whether the impact of SearchWiki is positive or negative.

I was going to moan about how SearchWiki broke the Numbered Google Results script for Greasemonkey. Instead, I just worked out how to fix it. Here’s a simple hack to the Numbered Google Results script which allows it to work with SearchWiki.

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How To Display Ads Only To Search Visitors

| Created: September 19th, 2008
Adsense Smart Pricing 96 Comments

In the past, I’ve written about only showing Google Adsense to search engine visitors, so as to decrease the chance of being smart priced. In this post, you’ll see how to improve the technique outlined previously, so that you can make more money.

Note: Although this post is about showing Adsense to search engine visitors, it’s really about determining whether a user came from a search engine or not. The technique can be used to show search engine visitors whatever you choose, not just Adsense. Continue reading

Shylock Adsense Plugin – Hack To Avoid Smart Pricing

| Created: January 24th, 2008
Adsense Smart Pricing 43 Comments

In my last post, I talked about Adsense Smart Pricing and how blogs can avoid it by only showing ads to search engine visitors.

One option for WordPress is the Who Sees Ads plugin, which has the ability to do this. I prefer the Shylock Adsense plugin for the reasons given in my last post: automatic placement of ads; no need to enter placeholder in each post; easy to move ads from, say, top right to top left, etc.

The problem with Shylock Adsense is that although it can show ads on old posts only (mostly search engine traffic), there is no option to show ads only to search engine traffic. I really wanted this functionality, so I added a few lines of code to the plugin to enable it. In this post I explain how to do it. Continue reading

WordPress Plugin – Simple Spam Filter Hack Available

| Created: November 23rd, 2007
WordPress Plugin News 17 Comments

Recently RT from Untwisted Vortex (site no longer there) threw down a WordPress Plugin Rewrite Challenge, asking whether I’d rewrite the Simple Spam Filter plugin from Joe Tan (from TanTanNoodles). RT is a fan of Simple Spam Filter but felt that some additional checks would result in more spam being caught. Continue reading

WordPress 2.3 Breaks Articles Plugin – Solution

| Created: November 20th, 2007
WordPress Hacks 17 Comments

After my recent upgrade to WordPress 2.3.1, the Articles plugin by Alex King started showing my Articles under the wrong Categories. Fortunately, there is a solution posted on the WordPress Support site. Continue reading

Google Reader – Printing Full Text For All Items

| Created: October 9th, 2007
Greasemonkey Hacks 27 Comments
EDIT: There is no longer any need for this hack – simply get the latest version (2.0) of the Google Reader Print Button script.

I normally use a desktop feed reader, but I’ve recently been trying out web based feed readers. Google Reader seems to be the best, but it lacks the ability to print more than one full text item in the Expanded View. A simple hack to the Google Reader Print Button script for Greasemonkey fixes this.

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WordPress – Most Viewed – Sidebar Widget

| Created: August 20th, 2007
WordPress Hacks 17 Comments

I use Lester Chan’s WP-PostViews plugin to count how many views each post gets. I recently added a Most Viewed section to my Sidebar. The problem? I use WordPress Widgets and there is no widget for the plugin. Continue reading

Getting BuyMeABeer To Show Only On Selected Posts

| Created: August 18th, 2007
WordPress Hacks 1 Comment

I have now adopted the Buy Me A Beer plugin, but there was one thing I didn’t like: it is not possible to make it appear on the sidebar for selected posts only. I wanted it on my plugin pages, but not my other posts (I don’t believe in donations for posts). Here I explain how to do this. Continue reading