Chris K Designs

I’ve pushed an update to the Better AdSense Targeting plugin for WordPress. Version 1.1 has been pushed to the WordPress Plugin Repository. This is a maintenance update to help improve your experience and results. As noted below, I did remove the option to target or ignore the ‘comments section’ due to the ability to accurately identify the comments loop 100% of the time. I hope to have a better way of doing this in the future. In this update are the following:

• Corrected issue when the loop is entered in the sidebar
• Now using the Shortcode API for the and tags in posts
• Removed option for Comments as there is not valid way to know the start/end of comments loop yet
• Added check for W3 Total Cache and warn to allow comments when minifying

The ‘draft’ status is a feature in WordPress that I use heavily. When I get an idea for a topic, I will typically just write up a title to remind me I have something I want to write about. I went looking for a way to quickly access my drafts and stumbled upon ‘Quick Drafts Access‘.

This plugin adds a menu item under the ‘Pages’ and ‘Posts’ sidebar menu of the WordPress Admin interface, with a count of the number of drafts you currently have. As expected, clicking on this will bring you to your list of drafts. Quick, Simple, and meets my needs. I figured, it could probably help some of yours too.

A few things I think I’d like to see out of this useful plugin would be the ability show this menu to only a specified WordPress role(s), making posts and pages a separate option (would allow the roles option to be more useful), and for WordPress 3.2+ I’d like to see this in the Admin Bar list so I can quickly get to the drafts from anywhere on my site.

I think these three options would make the plugin even more useful to me than it already is. Go install it today if you are having to manage a number of drafts on your WordPress site.

Recently I’ve been seeing a trend in some WordPress sites that I happen to come upon, and it’s one that concerns me. People are giving a list of plugins they have installed on their WordPress sites. Even stating how many are active. A quick search over at WordPress.org/extend show there are plenty of plugins available to create a page on your WordPress site that shows a list of Active and Installed plugins you have. I understand the warm fuzzy feeling of giving credit where credit is due. The open source community is all about attribution, however there is one obvious security flaw in this practice. You are providing a list of possible attack surfaces a malicious user can exploit.
Continue reading “WordPress Security: Why you should not list what plugins you are using” »

I’ve put together a small update to the Updated Today Plugin. This updated includes the following:

• Added an option to link the banner to the most recently published post
• Cleaned up entries in options table to be one serialized array instead of separate entries for each option
• Added import of old settings into new version of options table

The update has been pushed to WordPress.org and should be available in your Updates section shortly.

In the age of Professional Blogging, there are many ways to make money with your words. The most common is through advertisements. Some of the easiest way to make money are through targeted ad networks such as Google’s AdSense and Adbrite. You can guess, with the advent of advertising, came WordPress advertising plugins. I’ve got a winning combination of plugins and networks that you can use to help fund your blogging habits.
Continue reading “Pro Blogging Tip: Advertising with WordPress” »