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.

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 →

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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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FeedEntryHeader Featured On WordPress Weekly

| Created: November 14th, 2008
WordPress Plugin News 18 Comments

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my FeedEntryHeader plugin was featured on Episode 28 of the WordPress Weekly podcast. The mention was fairly brief,  but it’s nice to be noticed by such an influential podcast.

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Amazing Results – Optimising Image Size Using Smush.it

| Created: October 30th, 2008
Web Page Optimisation 57 Comments

There are dozens of new web based applications being launched every day. Most are moderately useful, but it’s rare that I actually need to use one. After playing with them for a while, I normally abandon them and go back to the core tools I use to get things done.

Well, I found one that’s going right into my toolset: smush.it, the image optimisation web application.

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Centered Fixed Width Layout And Scrollbar Problem

| Created: October 25th, 2008
CSS 24 Comments

I recently ran into a CSS problem with a centered fixed width layout. It’s probably been written about before and experienced web developers may already know this, but it caught me out. I’m reasonably experienced, so I thought it worth mentioning here. Continue reading →

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Password Protecting The Wp-admin Folder

| Created: October 3rd, 2008
WordPress Hacks 64 Comments

I recently listened to the WordPress Podcast – Episode 44. Although it’s a couple of months old now, it was quite interesting and one issue really caught my eye ear: the security related question for Matt Mullenweg at around 1:13:30 of the podcast.

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Setting Cookies In WordPress – Trap For Beginners

| Created: September 26th, 2008
WordPress Development 52 Comments

I recently wrote about displaying ads only to search visitors in WordPress. A key part of the technique described is to set a cookie, identifying the visitor as having come from a search engine. It should have been simple, but my PHP setcookie command didn’t appear to work. Continue reading →

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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 →

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Exciting New Look For More Than Scratch The Surface

About 30 Comments

This post marks an exciting new theme for More Than Scratch The Surface. Regular readers won’t recognise the site! I’ve extensively overhauled the theme and in this post I explain the changes, the choices I made and why I made them. Continue reading →

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WPVote Needs To Improve Published News Section

| Created: August 27th, 2008
WordPress Opinion 20 Comments

For those of you who don’t know, there’s a new social news site for WordPress, called WPVote. I’ve been using the site for a couple of days and while the concept is great, the quality of entries are poor at this early stage. Continue reading →

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