I have been working on the Updated Today Plugin and adding features. I decided to give you all a little preview of the progress. I have added a ‘Settings’ page for the plugin which can allow additional features. Some of them that you see already are the ability to move the image to the left or right of the page, the ability to turn off the pngfix javascript, and an image choosing feature that allows you to choose any image in the plugin directory. The next features will be the ability to upload your own image as well as a few other small things I think you will all like.
This is still in a rough development state and isn’t ready just yet for public use. Keep your eyes open for the public release very soon though! Leave some comments if you have feedback. So without further delay…screenshots!
The ability to choose some settings
The plugin now allows you to put the banner on the left or right.
The biggest complaint I hear from people who use MySQL driven sites on inexpensive shared hosting services is a decrease in performance over time. Most of the time this decrease is no fault of your hosting provider, but the cluttering of your database.
Like any computer storage device, a database is simply a collection of data that through time, use, and abuse can grow unorganized and cluttered. I uncovered a few scripts people had written in this article at noupe.com. Not only did I want to have my databases optimized, I also wanted the backups to be created. So what I have in for your enjoyment is a script that will optimize your database, backup the database to a file including the timestamp (to avoid overwriting), and it will also email you upon warnings and errors.
To install this script you place it in a folder that you can call something like ’supersecretfoldername’ and put a password on this folder. When the script is run it places a backup in a folder named ‘_db_backups’ in the directory parent to the ’supersecretfoldername’ folder.
As a bonus, if you use this in conjunction with GoDaddy hosting services, you can use this as a Cron Script to be run without your interaction and the backups will be in GoDaddy’s default database backup folder. GoDaddy’s Hosting Control Center will also email you the script results as part of their Cron Manager interface.
Download the script.
If you are using GoDaddy you will want to set the file permissions to ‘Executable’ through their ‘File Manager’ (Help Article). You can then use the ‘Cron Manager’ from within the ‘Content’ section of your Hosting Control Center. Here you can set the email address they will send your results to, your scripts, and their frequency
The Updated Today plugin has been updated to version 1.6. In this version I have corrected the error that drafts would invoke the ‘Updated Today’ banner and now only posts or pages with the ‘publish’ status will cause the banner to be displayed.
You can download directly from my site at the plugin page or from Wordpress.org.
The plugin has been updated to version 1.6.1 to fix a Z-Index issue with some themes. Should be live soon at Wordpress.org
