Ever since this blog started picking up momentum, I get a lot of email from companies launching new products or features. Most of them aren’t very interesting to me (like iPhone apps when I don’t have an iPhone), solve problems I don’t have or are simply hoping to be the next Twitter. I discard most of them. But sometimes one of these projects actually looks like it’s going to fix an important issue, like with HostMonk.
More HostMonk: hosting reviews without the monkey business

Justin Tadlock just released a brilliant WordPress plugin that lets you call template tags (the stuff theme developers use to display things) inside posts and pages as shortcodes. This allows you to do things like displaying your blogroll on a page instead of the sidebar. Or add a list of authors inside that post you just wrote to thank them. By installing this plugin you get 40 new shortcodes that should keep you occupied for a long time .

This blog isn’t about making money. I have no problogger ambitions, and I don’t really like ads on blogs. But what I do find interesting is how ad networks work, what their benefits are, and which work best for a blog like mine. That’s why I’ve added a few AdSense units, and signed up with BuySellAds. Adsense has paid for the hosting of the movie review blog I run with a bunch of other people since day one, but I never really experimented with placement and such because the layout on that site is far from optimized for ads.
More Experimenting with advertising

My father-in-law just stopped by because his new computer was giving him trouble. He was about to return his brand new Vista laptop because he found himself unable to configure his email accounts. The problem? He couldn’t type an ‘@’. It turned out he was running into the same issue that kept my own dad from succesfully typing in his WPA key when he bought a new notebook. The same issue that my wife’s laptop unboxing a frustrating one too. Windows was expecting a Dutch keyboard.
More Windows Dutch keyboard trouble

I’d been meaning to do a proper redesign of this blog for some time. The content part was reshuffled a couple of months ago, and I was pretty pleased with how that turned out. But the header was a watered down version of the old Papertrail theme and far too boring. That’s why I asked Blondmonster to help me out.

Suzanne‘s a former colleague, and a fabulous designer. I really like the stuff she does, and ‘boring’ is simply not in her vocabulary. She came up with the underwater theme, did all the drawing and all I had to do was put it all together. Hope you like the result. The theme was tailor-made for this blog, so don’t expect it to become available for download any time soon.

Talk about picking a poor name for this project. I first considered giving it a catchy name, but decided to simply call it ‘Flickr widget’ becaused that best describes what it does. But then I found that Flickr itself has a Flash widget too. And now I’ve made it support Picasa feeds too, so the name doesn’t make any sense anymore.

The upside is of course that Picasa users can now use the widget to show off their favorite albums on their websites. It accepts the feeds from your ‘My Photos’ page and album pages. If you, like me, have only a couple of albums under ‘My Photos’, the feed from that page will only show the album covers, so it makes more sense to use an album feed (on the left is a trip to the zoo with my daughter in 2007). Like with Flickr, the total number of thumbs shown is limited to 20.

Fortunately, Google uses a very similar feed format to Flickr, so I was able to put support for both into one Flash movie. Please feel free to try it, and let me know if you run into anything.

Get the widget here

Every once in a while a user asks me how to change something in WP-Cumulus that fits his or her specific needs. If enough people ask for the same thing (*), it’ll probably be in the next release, but sometimes the modification is so specific to a certain website or project that it makes sense to simply hack it in. Here are the five most common of those, in no particular order.
More The top 5 WP-Cumulus hacks

Flash sucks. There, I’ve said it. Or to be more precise, using Flash in a web page sucks. Just about everyone has the plugin, but actually embedding a movie into a web page isn’t quite as easy as it could be. There are a number of options, all of which have pros and cons. And in most cases you’ll need to pass parameters to your little RIA and/or have it communicate with the outside world too, adding to the complexity.

About 90% of the email I get about WP-Cumulus is from people where the movie isn’t displaying as it should. In most cases, this is caused by relatively minor markup errors in their blog. I find it hard to explain why Flash can sometimes break if you forget to close a single tag.
More About WP-Cumulus 1.20′s compatibility mode

Contrary to what I originally thought when I released WP-Cumulus, it seems most people prefer to use it on their blog’s sidebar. I estimate that at least 80% of users use the widget. But the plugin still has two other ways to embed the movie into your blog, and version 1.20 greatly improves the most important of those. Shortcodes can be incredibly useful, and version 1.20 of my plugin now properly supports them.
More How to use WP-Cumulus shortcodes

For those of you who are not familiar with it, Radar.net is a sort of picture (and video) based, private Twitter. The basic principle is that a picture says more than 140 characters, making it more fun to show your friends what you’re doing than to just tell them. It’s a mix of elements from Twitter, Qik and Flickr, all of which unfortunately pretty much dwarf it. Which is why the new Flickr Integration is probably a really smart move.
More Radar.net expands range to include Flickr