Google Image Search vs Iconlet

Iconlet is a search engine for you guessed it, icons. The front page of iconlet looks as simple as the Google homepage and seems to be just as functional. Iconlet appears to have a large database of icon images but I was disappointed when I only discovered 11 search results for the term RSS. However, other searches for ARROWS and HOME provided me with hundreds of results.

If you are looking for something in particular, Iconlet provides an advanced search which gives you the options of typing in an icon name, specified image resolution, .gif or .png extension, and various licensing types. I guess no one uses .JPG as a file extension for icons as it was missing from the advanced search file extension choices.

One of the biggest issues I can see with iconlet is the fact that it has Google Image search as competition. I’ve used Google Image search in the past to locate icon files and it’s proven to be a useful resource for this sort of thing. It also appears as though iconlet has it’s own home grown database of icon files, whereas Google Image search has the entire Internet at it’s disposal. If iconlet can increase it’s database selection while adding additional search features, they may eventually be a compelling reason to switch from using Google Imagesearch. Until then, I’ll stick with Google first,

Zeusbox Releases Version 2 Feedicons

Zeusbox studio has released it’s second set of feedicons. The first set which I wrote about here ( Zeusbox Releases Free FeedIcon Set ) ended up becoming a big hit as according to Zeusbox Studio, the pack was downloaded thousands of times. Version 2 contains more than 10 new icons and is filed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Work By the way, they are also free.

Click here to download version two of these professional looking icons.

Highlight Blog Author Comments

For a long time, I’ve been looking for a plugin that would change the commenting area for the blog author so that regular commenter’s or visitors would be able to tell at a glance when the author of a post or blog replied to a comment. Thank goodness the search is over. Thanks to the recent mention on the WeblogToolsCollection blog, I have found Highlight Author Comments.

Highlight Author comments was exceptionally easy to install. Once you download the plugin, unzip the contents to your desktop or a folder of your choosing. Upload the highlight-author.php file into your plugins directory and activate the plugin.

The plugin options were located on my install by clicking on the OPTIONS link and then HIGHLIGHT COMMENTS. There is only one configurable option for this plugin and that is the CSS styling. This is where knowing CSS helps. All I wanted to do was change the background color of my comments. Here is a screenshot showing how I did it.

My Highlight Author Options

The plugin homepage actually contains a few examples of CSS code that you can edit, copy and paste into this box. One thing worth noting is that you don’t need to place a { or } at the beginning and end of your CSS. The plugin does this automatically.

I have this plugin installed and running. You’ll notice my comments now have a shade or two darker grey when compared to everyone else’s comments. I think it’s a good plugin for every blog to have. It’s nice to browse through a post that may have 100 comments and being able to pick which ones were from the article author at a glance. It also let’s visitors do a quick Who’s Who.

I suppose I can set my unreplied forum topic requesting this plugin to RESOLVED. Thanks goes out to Rob Marsh for creating this plugin. I and many others really appreciate it.

WordPress 2.3.1 Now In Fantastico

I just received word today that the latest version of Fantastico has been shipped out. The good news is, Fantastico now supports WordPress 2.3.1. Originally, WordPress 2.3 was the version everyone has been looking for and I wondered if Netenberg was going to hold off on the update because of 2.3.1. That doesn’t seem to be the case.

Now all you need is for your webhosting provider to upgrade their Cpanel/Fantastico scripts and then you should be able to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

List Of WordPress Plugins I Use

Wordpress Plugins Over the past few weeks, I have had a number of individuals ask me questions regarding the plugins I use on this site. I thought I would take the time today to tell you every plugin installed and in use on this blog. This article took 2 hours to write and I hope it answers most of your questions. If not, ask away within the commenting section of the article. At the end of this list, let us know which plugins you suggest to use. Enjoy!

Plugin//Version//Description

AddThis Sidebar Widget 1.2 – AddThis is an awesome plugin that gives users the ability to bookmark a specific page to one of any number of bookmarking services such as Digg, Delicious, Technorati, ect. Instead of having a ton of icons or badges for each service, I can use one image which makes it easy to implement and use. You can see this plugin in action by clicking on

Akismet 2.02 – I don’t think enough can be said about Akismet. Akismet was created by Automattic as an anti spam application. It’s one of the best around and without it, I would of had to manually delete 2,500 entries which have been detected as spam. If you are running WordPress, make sure this plugin is activated.

AskApache Google 404 2.2 – This plugin has turned my WordPress 404 Page into something useful. I wrote a detailed review of this plugin here ( Add Google Ajax To Your WP 404 Page ) and it has become the second most viewed article on this blog. Google 404 adds an Ajax powered search into your 404 page. When someone ends up on a 404 page, the terms that generated the error are automatically plugged into the search bar which generates a Google search amongst your own blog, the internet, images ect. To see it in action, visit https://jeffc.me/blabla

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator 3.1.2 – This is one of two sitemap generator plugins that I use. This plugin is highly customizable and gives me the options of how I would like to display my sitemap to the public. When you visit https://jeffc.me/my-sitemap/ the output comes from this plugin. Works seamlessly in combination with my Google XML Sitemap generator.

Digg This 1.0.2 – There are many WordPress plugins that center around Digg but this one is still one of my favorites. When anyone submits one of my blog posts to Digg.com, I am notified by email and a Digg button is automatically placed on the right side of the post. The plugin works by detecting a referral url from Digg. You can customize where the digg button shows up within your post as well as a few other options. To see the plugin in action, visit ( Migratr – Backup And Migrate Your Online Photos )

Dofollow 2.1 – I covered this plugin more in depth here ( You Comment I Follow ) Essentially, this plugin strips the “REL=NoFollow” attribute from a commenter’s URL. This is good for Google juice to be applied to those that comment on your blog. It’s also a good showing of appreciation to those that engage in the conversation through comments.

FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3 – This plugin finds all the ways to subscribe to your blog and consolidates them into one feed using FeedBurner. This ensures accurate feed reader statistics. It’s one of the first plugins you should install when you begin a WordPress blog so that it’s as accurate as possible.

Get Recent Comments 2.0.2 – This displays the most recent comments/trackbacks on the sidebar. I have implemented this plugin near the top center of the page called MOST RECENT COMMENTs by adding the hook into it’s own div container. There are a number of different formatting options to display this plugin which make it highly customizable for your situation.

Google XML Sitemaps 3.0 – This is purely a Google only sitemap plugin. What I like most about this plugin is that it creates sitemap.org compatible sitemaps which are supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN and Yahoo. This plugin combined with my other sitemap plugin covers my blog at all angles.

JS Toggle Boxes 1.4 – Js Toggle Boxes provides a means to add a plus symbol or a minus symbol to a div element that contains an unordered list. Using a combination of Javascript, CSS and cookies, readers of this site can now show or hide at least 6 different content blocks.

Live 0.4.1 – Wrote about here ( WordPress Real Time Browsing Stats ) Live gives WordPress admins the chance to see who is browsing what in real-time. The plugin provides information such as IP address, whether the user is on a page, comment, or a hit from an RSS aggregator, and referral URL. This is probably one of the most used plugins I have installed to monitor what’s going on. I’ve been anxiously awaiting a new version which promises additional functionality.

Live Comment Preview 1.7 – I came across this plugin while reading a blog post on how to make your WordPress blog Web 2.0ish. Powered by Ajax, this plugin gives readers a chance to preview their comment in real-time before it’s published. You can use the provided preview function to add a PREVIEW area anywhere on your site. It’s nice to know what your comment will look like before it’s published.

Most Viewed Widget 1.0 – This is an addon for another plugin called WP-Postviews which I’ll get to later. This widget will take the posts with the most number of views and display them as a widget or wherever you place the hook. You can modify the plugin code to determine how many articles are shown in the widget.

MyAvatars 0.2b – I covered MyAvatars here ( MyBlogLog And Gravatar Support ) in light of the recent Gravatar acquisition. MyAvatars displays avatars from both MyBlogLog and Gravatar. The best of both worlds it would seem.

MyBlogLog Widget 2.0 – In order to use a MyBlogLog widget, you first have to visit MyBlogLog.com and create one. Once you get the code for the widget, paste it into a TEXT based widget. This is essentially how you add any 3rd party widget to your site.

Optimal Title 3.0 – One of the first plugins I’ve ever installed, Optimal Title mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. This is what enables me to have links within the title bar of your browser that look like this

Notice how the name of the post comes before the actual title of my page. I read this was supposed to help with SEO but I’m not sure if it has or not.

Related Posts 2.04 – This plugin returns a list of related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. The relation happens automatically and so far, it has worked out pretty well. This plugin becomes more accurate as you publish more posts. Not a good plugin to use if you have under 30-50 posts.

SezWho WP1.2 – SezWho is a comment rating/reputation based service. Users rate on comments for a given post which can in turn, leverage ratings of a commenter on other blogs. Replace the concepts of Gravatar with comment rating and user reputation and you should get the idea behind the service.

Share This 1.4 – Another awesome plugin that consolidates what would be a number of different images or badges into one easy to access control panel. ShareThis gives your users the oppurtunity to share a post with others through social bookmarking or by email. This is one of my favorite plugins as it provides so much functionality in such a tidy, neat package.

Subscribe To Comments 2.1.1 – This plugin adds a check box to a comment form which gives users the chance to subscribe to a particular page and it’s comments. After you subscribe to a post, each time a user comments on that blog entry, an email will be sent to your account letting you know someone has carried on the conversation. In my opinion, this is a function that should be supported out of the box.

What Would Seth Godin Do 1.3 – This plugin gives me the chance to configure a default welcome message to brand new visitors of the site. It uses cookies so that after a configured amount of times, the welcome message disappears. The welcome message contains the text “Welcome to my blog, if you enjoyed reading this, perhaps you would like to subscribe for more RSSLINK” Not sure if this has contributed to my RSS subscriber count but I haven’t had any complaints.

wp-cache 2.1.2 – The oh so infamous Wp-Cache. You almost have to use this plugin if your using WordPress. Wp-Cache is a very fast caching module that is actually modules within modules. This plugin has been known to withstand the Digg effect as well as the Slashdot effect. How’s that for noteworthy. I have quite a few issues with WP-Cache that I can’t seem to figure out but I’ll post about those some other day.

WP-PageNavi 2.20 – If you scroll to the bottom of this blog’s home page, you should see the numbers 1, 2, 3, ect in little squares. That is actually the PageNavi plugin in action. This plugin is just an advanced version of pagination which gives users more control over the navigation of the blog.

WP-Polls 2.21 – What good is a blog or website without a poll? This plugin is pretty much the defacto standard for polls within WordPress based sites. The poll is powered by Ajax, can be customized to match your template, supports multiple selections for answers, and the ability to use more than one poll at a time. There is also a Poll Archive page that be added to your site if you so choose.

WP-Polls Widget 2.21 – This widget works along side WP-Polls and displays the actual polls as a widget within your WordPress Template.

WP-PostViews 1.20 – This plugin provides a way for you to see how many views a particular blog post has. You can configure this plugin to show guest views, registered member views or both. I use this plugin just to provide me with “at a glance” statistics for posts. It’s a good feeling to be reassured that people are reading what I write.

WP-Print 2.20 – WP-Print adds the ability for users to print specific articles. The plugin contains options to allow users to print comments, posts, pages, or a combination of everything. I’ve added this functionality to my blog just in case someone feels to the need to print out a tutorial or something.

WP-Stats 2.20 – Displays your WordPress blog statistics. This plugin ranges from general blog statistics to plugin statistics. The plugin statistics are actually stats from a number of other plugins created by Lester Chan that you may have installed on your blog.

WP-UserOnline 2.20 – This plugin gives you and your user’s a chance to see who is currently browsing your blog. The plugin shows which registered members, guests and search engine bots are on your site and which URL they are currently browsing. It also provides a referral url to see where that user came from.

WP AJAX Edit Comments 1.1.1.4 – Reviewed here ( Digg Like Comment Editor For WordPress ) is a plugin written by Ronald Huereca of the Readers Appreciation Project. This plugin gives administrators and regular users the ability to edit their own comments within a given time frame. The plugin pretty much works in the same way that the Digg commenting system works. As I have always said, every blog should provide some sort of way for a user to edit their comments. This plugin is a nice solution to that problem.

WP_EasyReply 1.0 – It becomes tiring typing out something like @whoever each time you want to reply to someones comment. This plugin does that task for you, albeit with a little bit of help. Out of the box, EasyReply provides a link which automatically puts each user account name that has commented since your last reply into the comment box. With a little bit of hacking, I was able to get this plugin to perform the mundane task of typing out @username which is a time saver and a blessing for my fingers. To read how I hacked this plugin for my own purpose, please read ( WordPress Comment Reply Plugin )

Conclusion:

Wow. Can’t believe I’m finally finished with this article, 2 hours later. At any rate, I hope this article answers everyone’s questions as to which plugins I’m using. Installing and configuring the plugin is one thing, how you implement the plugin into your template is a different ballgame. I’ve used a bit of creativity on my blog but it shouldn’t be too hard to discover which content blocks are using which plugin.

Please share your experiences and or implementations of the plugins above if you use them. If not, please tell us which plugins you use and why.

Jeffro2pt0 Forum Update

I’ve spent the last 5-6 hours putting what I hope will be the finishing touches on the forum. Special thanks to Foomandoonian, Simply-Basic, Mike and SierraK for signing up to the forum and helping me iron out some issues that were discovered.

I’ve tidied up the design so it looks the same in both FireFox and IE 7. I’ve added an entirely new icon set to help distinguish between new posts, sticky posts, ect. I also modified some link colors as well as some background colors. As per Sierra’s suggestion, I have turned the forum header/logo image into a link which will take you to the blog homepage when clicked on.

About syndication. Unfortunately, PHPBB RC7 does not come with any syndication out of the box and will not be shipping with any in the final version. Instead, I will have to rely on a mod author to create a syndication mod once PHPBB has been finalized which should be any month now. Until then, I suggest making sure that the check box to be notified upon a reply to a thread or topic you have posted on is checked. This should send you an email anytime someone replies to a thread you have posted in.

We already have some conversations ongoing within the forum so don’t be shy. Register an account and get in on the action. Click here to view the forums.

On the topic of updates, I wanted to let you know that I have finally fixed the “text highlight” bug which was apparent in FireFox. It had something to do with using a white image as a background. When a user viewing this blog in FireFox would drag their cursor over some text to perform a copy and paste, the highlight would blend in with the background causing confusion as to whether the text you wanted selected was their or not. This issue has been fixed.

I also tried to replicate the Internet Explorer Stack Overflow errors as I wanted to fix those as well. However, no matter how many times I refreshed the site, I could not get those errors to appear. Mike, if they happen again, the first thing I would advise you to do is to install IE7. If that doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll continue to investigate.

Now that most of the hard work concerning the forum has been taken cared of, expect to see some content added to the blog this week.

Forum Is Now Open For Business

Well, I have finally buckled and have gone ahead and installed the opensource forum software, PHPBB. I’ve been a fan of PHPBB for a very long time and I decided to give RC7 a try as well as checking out all of the cool new stuff that’s made it into the newest version. The forum software was incredibly easy to install and so far, I am pretty impressed.

I spent my entire weekend working on my own Forum theme and it’s really a work in progress. However, the forum is now ready for user registrations. Within this forum, users can chat about anything from blogging to computer hardware.

I enjoy having conversations with the readers of this blog and I feel that by having a forum, the conversation can be started by you or me and gives me even more of a chance to discuss various topics of interest that don’t necessarily equate into blog posts.

I highly encourage you to head on over to the forums right now and create yourself an account and begin to engage yourself within the community this site has started to build. You can check out the forums by clicking here or click on the FORUM link at the top of this website. Please provide me with your feedback.

WordPress 2.3.1 Ready For Download

WordPress Logo WordPress 2.3.1 has been released for download. The latest version contains bug and security fixes. According to WordPress.org, 2.3.1 contains over twenty bug fixes. Some of the fixes that are highlighted in this release are as follows: Tagging support for Windows Live Writer , Fixes for a login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than their WordPress Address, Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries and Link importer fixes.

Unfortunately, some security issues were found in 2.3. Janek Vind found an XSS problem that can be exploited if your php setup has register_globals enabled. For this reason, upgrading to 2.3.1 is advised.

The full set of changes between 2.3 and 2.3.1 is available for viewing on trac.

Get 2.3.1 from the download page and enjoy.

I’ll be upgrading this site later tonight and will let you know how it went. If you upgrade this evening, let us know how it goes.

Interview With Steve Spalding

I had a chance to interview Steve Spalding, author behind the blog How To Split An Atom but more specifically, the author of the article entitled Web 3.0 Defined. Web 3.0 Defined goes into specific details as to what the concepts of Web 3.0 will be, how it will be used, and the sites and services that are already making headway towards Web 3.0, a term that is synonymous with the semantic web. This post sparked my interest and Steve was kind enough to answer 7 questions I had regarding the article. Enjoy.

1. Jeff – Why did you decide to use the term Web 3.0? Let’s be honest here, the Internet doesn’t have any version numbers associated with it, why continue the trend?

Steve – The nice thing about a phrase as cliche as Web 3.0 is that everyone in the digerati immediately has an idea of where you are going with the article that mentions it. I could have used a title like, “Future Trends In The World Wide Wide,” but with a title like that, there were just too many ways to interpret the direction of the article. We live in a popcorn and soda kind of world — I wanted something that would get an immediate, visceral reaction out of people.

Does the web have version numbers? I certainly hope not. We just need better language to describe the major milestones in its progression.

2. Jeff – Do you think services such as people search will promote better online behavior considering their past time and reputation will be searchable via the public?

Steve – No. I think that normal people will know absolutely nothing about People Search until it shows up at their front door. I recently read an article in a semi-local newspaper about parents who are being fired, demoted and otherwise harassed because of things that their children are writing about them on social networks. The point is that almost everyone’s kids have been at this for years and it’s only in the last week that anyone has cared enough to point out the dangers.

As for the Web crowd, I think we are so used to our information being out there for all to see that a few new algorithms won’t be enough to raise eyebrows. It might stop a few part time Trolls with full time jobs who aren’t clever enough to find a way around it, but don’t expect a revolution in social mores.

3. Jeff – In this article, you define web 3.0 but, how would you define web 2.0? Bill Snyder believes Web 2.0 is a series of concepts that are different depending on who you ask. Do you agree?

Steve – Web 2.0 is the microcosm that people like us live in. It’s a lot more than just “Social Media” or Facebook. It’s the culture surrounding it. It’s the weekend blogosphere dust ups. It’s Mark Zuckerberg, the $5 Billion Kid. It’s all the inside jokes, memes and investor hubris that fuels our little sub-culture.

No movement has ever been about the technology, and I don’t see Web 2.0 as any different. Just like you can’t describe Post Modernism by looking only at Art or Architecture, you can’t understand “Web 2.0” without seeing all the little cultural nuances surrounding it.

4. Jeff – Most of what you describe in your article relies on an algorithm. Will these algorithms ever fully replace a human being?

Steve – Algorithms never live in a vacuum. In my day job, a lot of what I deal with is machine intelligence. If there is anything that this has taught me it is that it will be quite a while before any algorithm is able to replace a human being in anything more than niche applications.

Will we have better search agents and expert systems? Yea, certainly. A system doesn’t need a terribly large amount of “real” intelligence to do that sort of thing. If you are looking for “general purpose” intelligence, I say give it a few more years.

5. Jeff – Do you believe that web 3.0 will be the death of editorial blogging? That is, long written articles. If so, will it be because people will seemingly have no time to read an in depth post due to the massive amount of other information streaming into them?

Steve – I think that even though attention spans are decreasing, people will always want the news.

Journalists and citizen journalists alike will just need to learn how to present it in such a way that it caters to our Mocha Latte culture.

6. Jeff – It has taken some time to reach web 2.0 status. Where are we now in regards to web 2.0 and how far away are we from seeing Web 3.0 turning into a reality?

Steve – Where are we? I can’t really tell you. That’s up to O’Reilly to decide, isn’t it? Seriously though, when Web 3.0 or whatever you want to call it hits, it will be about half a year before the punditry realizes it.

What I can say is that it won’t be for now. Almost all the innovations these days are along the same vectors. Everyone is just adding features. There isn’t any real, paradigm shifting innovation. More than that — all the important, meaty computer science problems are being left on the table and being replaced by Smarty templates and AJAX libraries.

I know Powerset is doing some things with search, and I am sure Google has a few widgets hidden in a lab somewhere but until we seeing some innovative, commercially viable applications start hitting the market, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

7. Jeff – Last question Steve. Because of RSS and essentially everything containing an RSS stream, how do you think people will cope with managing such a large stream of data? Quite a few people already suffer from information overload. Will this be a barrier worth considering or will a new or existing market emerge which focuses on information organization?

Steve – I think everything these days is about organizing data.

Web .5 was about communication. All that terminal stuff we did before the web got pictures.

Web 1.0 was static information, content that was manageable not because it was arranged in a coherent data model but because there wasn’t a lot of it to deal with.

Web 2.0 is about communication again. This time we added AJAX, created a bunch of buzz words and injected a few billion dollars worth of investor capital. The more important thing is that we are now trying to add some structure to all that information we collected back in 1.0

Web 3.0 will be about data as a commodity, data as a utility. It will be a web where everyone has easy, personalized access to a store of information orders of magnitude larger than what we use today. Things like RSS will give way to personalized information streams that are managed in part by software. It will be about using technology to make massive data-sets palatable again.

If you need anything else, drop me a line. Thanks for the opportunity!

No Steve, THANK YOU! If you haven’t already, add Steve’s blog to your feedreader. Like his Web 3.0 Defined article, the rest of the content featured on his site really makes you think.

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

Author: Jeffro