It is Andy’s tasks to make the website significantly faster and exploit more features of wordpress and social networking to raise the profile of Speckyboy and thus the SEO, PageRank and Alexa rank.

Quoting Andy: “I’m really very happy with this opportunity to make an already successful website in the way of content more successful in the way of technology. I will be pushing to put SpeckyBoy in to the top 250 websites of the world”

We should be going live with the new version of the SpeckyBoy theme this weekend, so do watch for the first round of speed changes.

This time it was the was the turn of WP Email Login that we translated in to dutch after first making the plugin localized. Many thanks to Beau of Automattic/Wordpress fame for including us on the list of developers.

As ever I’ve put it out through speckyboy.com as I like the way that their articles are aimed at the common man and not at the designer elite in a self back scratching kinda way. Here take a read http://speckyboy.com/2011/01/13/do-we-do-enough-to-support-wordpress-plugin-developers/

Hopefully it will raise the issue with Automattic the makers of wordpress as the support needs are really outweighing the benefits of creating a product to go in their plugins set, if that plugin becomes popular in any way.

So we have created an iFrame loader so that it will stay. Not only that we have created it so that it loads the iFrame using Javascript using the window.onload function. This means that the iFrame will not load at all until the complete page has downloaded. This is better because often an external iFrame will be the cause of a page failing to load quickly.

After tesing on Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE, Flock and Opera, we released the plugin via wordpress. See the easy iframe loader plugin page for more information

People love how easy it is to setup and use, along with how it helps them to get what they want done. Along with the fact that I am willing to support people in their plight to get it all working even on the strangest of configured sites.

Back at the beginning of  November we released the CDN version with now 26 different icon sets to choose from.

This has proved to be very popular and selling many copies every day.  It’s such a pleasure to come to work in the morning and find out that we  have made money over night

However it is onwards and upwards for the plugin by being ported to Drupal and Joomla!.

To make it a little more difficult I need to only move a sub-directory to the new server and not the whole domain….  this meant that I was moving
Source: http://phat-reaction.com/share-and-follow/   (and all sub-directory contents)
to
Destination: http://share-and-follow.com/wordpress-plugin/

At the source there were many pages below the /share-and-follow/  subdirectory, all delivered via WordPress on Apache.  In fact the pages used up to 3 levels of sub-directory below this point.

So I tried to use the Apache Redirect command inside both <Directory> and <VirtualServer> tags but to no avail. In fact when I contacted my hosting company they told me point blank that it could not be done with their server and that 301 Redirect’s could not work when going to an external server.  Not sure I believe that, but no matter what I tried I could not make the standard Apache method work.

To make it work I chose to use PHP and header() commands along with a few extra little bits. Here is the process I took to move it all

1. Changed the URL inside the WordPress settings to the new URL
2. Made a back up of the Database
3. Placed the new .htaccess in the sub-directory
4. Placed the new index.php in  the sub-directory
5. Deleted all traces of WordPress from the directory and sub-directories

In essence what it does is use Mod-ReWrite to tell the server that all access to the server below the /share-and-follow/ directory should actually load /share-and-follow/index.php.  So it did not matter if it was /share-and-follow/documentation/working-with-themes/  or /share-and-follow/my-stats.html  it would always load the same index.php.  this is all controlled by the .htaccess file.

example .htaccess

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /share-and-follow
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /share-and-follow/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

remember to change the settings to be as you need for your server. For me I was working in the share-and-follow sub-directory. The only lines that need to be changed for your purpose is RewriteBase and RewriteRule. RewriteBase should point at the sub-directory that you want to move, RewriteRule should point at the file you want to automatically load to deal with the redirection.

Once the URL rewrite is in place, all that is left is to configure the php side of things.

example index.php

<?php
/*
 * This file simply redirects with a 301 to a new page with the same name when used in conjunction with a .htaccess
 *
 * @param $stubOld = the Stub URI that will be replaced with the new URL
 * @param $stubNew = the new URI location for the files.
 */

$stubOld = 'http://phat-reaction.com/share-and-follow/';
$stubNew = 'http://share-and-follow.com/wordpress-plugin/';
function curPageURL() {
 $pageURL = 'http';
 if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == "on") {$pageURL .= "s";}
 $pageURL .= "://";
 if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80") {
  $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].":".$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
 } else {
  $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
 }
 return $pageURL;
}
$url = curPageURL();
$url = str_ireplace($stubOld ,'' , $url);

header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location: '.$stubNew.$url);
flush();
?>

In this one you only need to change two things. The $stubOld = Old Source URL and $stubNew= New Destination URL. By changing these two items a URL such as http://phat-reaction.com/share-and-follow/documentation becomes http://share-and-follow.com/wordpress-plugin/documentation

And the great part is that Google loves it when you do things this way with a 301 error (Moved Permanently).

Enjoy and share it with your webmaster buddies. Here are the files if you want to download them

1. Links often went via javascript to a 3rd party like AddThis
2. No control over if things are in a new window or in the same one
3. pagerank give away
4. javascript needed to use the systems on screen from AddThis and others
5. limited display setup
6. Only share links and no follow links
7. all or nothing approach from the majors, all pages or posts or nothing
8. No widget control, no theme tags, no shortcode

• Bookmark on Delicious
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• Share via MySpace
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• Tweet this
• Follow this posts comments

Basically it’s got most things going….. and is currently being re-developed with more functions and features for version 2.

take a good look at the share and follow plugin for wordpress

• T-shirt builder
• Share links
• Social networking
• Sales order processing
• A change in direction on design and layout

We’re looking forward to all the challenges she can throw at us.

By using wordpress external site I am able to remove a bunch of my standard work like adding content , setting up the head section or configuring my layout areas.  They are now all pre-configured inside my own hand made made theme, and from there on in I just change the CSS and made wordpress theme changes as needed by the client.  Most likely it saves me 5 hours on each install.

And to be honest, I hope the ease of wordpress to use will enable a site to grow quickly, even if it is just a 1 page advert. Possibly the most sucessful wordpress install that I have made so far would be The Commonwealth Conversation external site.  This site has had over 30,000 visitors and 1000 comments anf got to page rank 7 in about 4 months, not many sites can say that.