The previous two years, I’ve helped put together a WordPress meetup in Amersfoort. While this was fun to do, it didn’t really make sense, because I do not live in (or even really near) Amersfoort. As a result know very little about essential things like venues there. It looks like this year, local WordPress people will take over “their” meetup, and I’ve been thinking about setting up a brand new one in “my” 035 area of The Netherlands.

Ideally, I’d like to do something that’s a little more informal than the Amersfoort ones were, and probably also more frequent. If there’s anyone who’d like to help organize, speak at, or simply attend such a meetup, please let me know in the comments. Oh, and despite the little joke I pulled with the logo, I’m hoping to keep it as low-key and relaxed as possible. Suit and tie entirely optional, perhaps even frowned upon .

One of the biggest, and most useful additions to WordPress in recent years has been the introduction of Custom Post Types. Before CPTs, all the content in your site needed to either be in pages or in blog posts. If your site needed a lot of different types of data, you’d typically use categories (or even tags) to tell them apart. I’ve seen (and probably built) examples where “products” and “news” were post categories, and the site’s front-end would continuously filter out one of the two. In hindsight: madness.

Since the introduction of Custom Post Types, it makes sense to declare separate types for different types of data. When doing so, there’s a crucial argument (passed to the register_post_type function) called “supports”. This argument tells WordPress which post features should be available for the new post type. This allows you to mix and match various features. No need for an excerpt? Require a “featured image”? Need custom fields? No problem. But there’s a catch.

Built-in features only

There’s a fixed list of features you can enable or disable. They correspond to the features present in WordPress’s two built-in types, post and pages. Nothing else. And as far as I know, there’s no (easy, developer-friendly) way to add new features. As nice as CPTs are, I think this seriously limits their potential.

Imagine being able to do something like this to create a CPT for a travel video blog.

'supports' => array( 'title', 'editor', 'author', 'thumbnail', 'subtitle' 'video', 'geo-coords', 'event-time' )

The first four features come standard, but the real fun is in the other (fictitious) ones. Being able to add a video to a post in a manner similar to how featured images work could have many potential advantages over simply adding it into the post’s content. And although there are plugins that’ll let you geo-tag and add timestamps, not all of those support CPTs, and they do not all store data in the same way. They’re all adding data to posts, but they’re all doing it in their own way.

Plugin territory

I’m not saying all these features should be in WordPress’s lean and mean core. Most of the ones I can come up with are arguably plugin territory. But it would be nice to be able to define custom post features once, and then be able to add them to any (custom) post type. WordPress could offer a coherent, standardized way for them to present themselves and store their data. A Widget API of sorts, for the backend.

One might argue that you can do all these things using meta boxes, post meta (or extra database tables) and such, but I feel there’s a certain elegance to opening up “post features” as an API. For one thing, there are plugins that let end users define CPTs without any coding, and this would give them more things to mix and match. And perhaps, something like the functionality of those plugins could eventually make it into core…?

Noel Tock, who’s at WP On Tour with me, just released a brand new WordPress plugin that lets you accept Stripe payments. Stripe is a new, highly developer-friendly payment solution. They have low rates for processing and a great API. Right now, you can only use Stripe to accept payments if you’re in the US, but if you are, you can accept money from all over the world.

WP-Stripe keeps track of recent payments (without storing the more sensitive bits), and has a widget that shows recent incoming transactions, with gravatars. If you’re running a charity, this can be a great way to thank your sponsors. Donors who’d prefer to remain anonymous can of course opt-out of this.

The donation form is inserted into any post or page on your blog using a simple shortcode. Here’s how it looks (screenshot, not an actual donations form).

Noel needs people to test the plugin, and fortunately, there’s a test setting in the API that lets you make payments without them actually getting processed. This is fully supported in version 1.0 of the plugin, and from what I’ve seen it works perfectly. Recommended.

This week, some of the brightest minds in WordPress – and me – are co-working in Sitges, Spain. As I wrote before, I’m part of the first WP On Tour, organized by Karim Osman of Automattic. We’re in a very nice villa and, compared to back home, the weather is excellent here. But more importantly, it’s really nice to be surrounded by fellow WordPress users and devs for a change.

We’ve set up a Flickr group, but at this time there’s very little in there. On Twitter, we’re using the #wpontour hashtag.

Last week saw the kick-off of the first completely unofficial Dutch Wordfeud tournament. I’m competing, and so far, things are going great. I have no illusions about making it to the next round though. Even though I’m winning most of the round one games, my scores are mediocre at best, and the accumulated total scores decide which sixteen players will compete in round two. But there’s a catch…

But although I wouldn’t really mind losing, I’d hate to lose to cheaters. There are a lot of cheat apps out there that can suggest the absolute best word to put on the board. Some are so advanced that they interpret screenshots from the game, or even interface directly with the Wordfeud server. In order to see if there was any way to spot when these apps were at work, my wife and I decided to play a game of Wordfeud using the best cheat apps on our respective phone platforms and see what would happen.

Scrabulizer for iOS

Scrabulizer takes a screenshot of the current game, recognizes all the words currently on the board, and then finds the best move. It uses the same dictionary as Wordfeud does, and offers a list of suggestions sorted by potential score. In our test, we used the top suggestion for each turn. Taking screenshots all the time is a bit of a pain, but aside from that the app is really easy to work with.

Wordfeud Helper plugin beta

Wordfeud Helper uses a different approach. It connects directly to your Wordfeud account, lets you select all current games, and then does the same thing Scrabulizer does. It too offers a list suggestions sorted by score, but there’s a nasty bug that affects Dutch language games.

It appears that the app continues to use the English letter values with the Dutch dictionary. This means that the predicted score can be off by as much as 20 points. You could probably get around this by manually calculate the scores for the top ten suggestions, but in our test we also used the top one. If this bug gets fixed, chances are that “Helper” will perform identical to it’s iOS competitor.

Fight!

The movie above shows the game from the iPhone end. The final score was iPhone: 573, Android: 361. However, the Android “player” was continually getting worse letters than the iPhone, and the language bug probably also affected its performance. I’ll try and do an English game and update this post, but the main conclusion has to be that playing with these apps is no fun at all, although it does sometimes result in monster scores.

Tightly packed

As you can see, these apps tend to clutter words together. Human players tend to look for open spaces, but it makes sense that packing words tightly together, thereby extending or creating “collateral words”, yields higher scores. I’m not sure whether there’s enough of a difference to spot cheaters, but this pattern may provide an excellent clue.

UPDATE

Here’s another video of both apps playing against each other. This time the game is English, and I’m happy to report that “Helper” did predict the correct scores. Again, there’s a similar pattern in the way words are connected.

Unfortunately, this particular game unearthed another shortcoming in the Android app. It does not use blank tiles at all. The Android player got one early on in the game, and the app only used the other six letters from there on in. This caused the app to lose the game, and by quite a large margin (340 vs. 501).

Now that I have a speedy internet connection at home, I’ve been looking for ways to properly use all that speed. Previously, I’d been using Bittorrent to download movies Linux distributions, but brute-force as that protocol is, it never really maxed out my 120 mbps line. So I moved to Usenet instead. I’ve been trying out premium Usenet provider Binverse, and the results are very promising. They contacted me about possibly doing a giveaway, so I thought I’d offer you a chance at winning a free account.

Unlike with Bittorrent, files offered on Usenet aren’t scattered around the web, they’re hosted by your Usenet provider. If that provider has a speedy setup, the results can be mind-boggling. I hooked up my laptop directly to my router, and downloaded an 8 gigabyte file. 13 minutes and 40 seconds later it was here. That comes down to a whopping 80 mbps. In fact, the CAT-5 ethernet cable I was using may have been the bottleneck. Amazing.

The Binverse application

Binverse offers its own free “news reader” application. I’m using quotes there because the program clearly focuses on finding files (binaries), not on reading the news . It’s very easy to set up, although it could use some design love. This tool will help beginners get into Usenet downloading in minutes, but if you prefer to use an application of your choice, you can.

Here’s you chance to win!

Binverse is letting me give away five 200GB trial accounts. These will let you download 200 gigabytes at full, uncapped speed. There’s no time limit, so you can take your time getting familiar with Usenet. The only downside I can see is a serious risk of addiction.

To enter, please leave a comment below. Tell me why you need 200GB of super-fast downloads. The winners will be chosen completely at random from all comments on this post. If you leave more than one comment, only the first one will count. I’ll close the comments one week from now, on September 1st, and announce the winners soon after that.

UPDATE: Winners!

Using the truly excellent Pick Giveaway Winner plugin by Jennette Fulda, I’ve randomly selected five winners, and here they are:

1. Eric
2. Christophe
3. Omar Matos
4. Mike
5. Xandrios

Congratulation to all five of you. I’ve passed on your email addresses to the people at Binverse, and they’ll contact you with the necessary setup info. Happy downloading!

WordPress has recently been described as “the dark matter of the web”. It’s absolutely everywhere. The WordPress ecosystem is probably bigger than Facebook. But at the same time, most of the WordPress people I know are “flying solo”. There are a lot of freelancers out there who work with a small team, or none at all.

That’s why things like WordCamps and meetups are important. They offer the WordPress community a way to share experiences, exchange ideas and get inspired. Thinking along those same lines, Dutch Automattic “Happiness Engineer” Karim Osman is organizing a “WordPress Coworking Trip” called “WP On Tour”. Or as Karim puts it:

“The idea is to step out of your daily (office) environment and work at a challenging location somewhere in the world. Like a holiday, but then with WordPress geeks Everybody is welcome: bloggers, designers, programmers, entrepreneurs, etc.”

Sounds like fun, right? So much so in fact that the first trip, which takes place in Spain early next year, is now fully booked. And one of the lucky people who “got in” is me . In January, I’ll be working from a luxurious villa in Sitges for 7 days. The villa only accommodates twelve people, so about 99.999% of the WordPress community won’t fit. Fortunately, there’s a form on Karim’s site in case you’d like to be kept up to date about future tours.

There’s a Twitter list of attendees too.

Because WP-Cumulus is open source software, the source files are available online. I didn’t package them with the regular plugin download, but you can download the Flash files from wordpress.org and my blog. Included in those downloads is a file called “tagcloud.xml”, which is mainly used to test the Flash movie locally, within Flash’s IDE. Unfortunately, that file sometimes ends up online. And, in most cases, it shouldn’t.

This is not the cloud you’re looking for…

To properly (or rather: easily) develop and test the Flash movie that’s the heart of WP-Cumulus, it needs content. Without a set of tags, there’s nothing to see. So I created a file called “tagcloud.xml”. It’s loaded into the movie only if no tags are supplied through the regular route (flashvars). The tagcloud.xml bundled with the source code download is an older, outdated “dump” of my blog’s tags. That’s okay for testing, as long as its contents don’t get indexed by search engines.

Until recently, Google wasn’t very good at looking into swf (Flash) files, but it appears that this has changed. From what I can tell, Google now processes the actionscript inside, at least well enough to detect calls to external files. Unfortunately, Google’s bot isn’t quite smart enough to realize this particular file is only loaded as a fallback mechanism. And as a result, it tries to index the tag cloud xml file. This results in three possible scenarios.

Option 1: No tagcloud.xml file: 404 errors

If you’re running the stock WordPress implementation of WP-Cumulus, there should be no tagcloud.xml on your server. It’s not in the standard plugin distribution. Yet, Google will try to access it because it is potentially called from the Flash movie, resulting in a 404 “not found” error.

If you’re using something like Google’s Webmaster Tools to keep track of 404′s, you might have seen this error pop up. Rest assured, it’s not a missing file. The flash movie won’t actually call it. Since the plugin provides the tag cloud through flashvars, there’s no need to fall back to the static file.

Option 2: You’re using tagcloud.xml to provide the tags

If your website is “homebrew”, you may be using the tagcloud.xml to actually provide the Flash movie with its data. In this case, there’s nothing wrong with it getting indexed. At least not from a technological standpoint, SEO experts may disagree.

Option 3: A tagcloud.xml exists in error, and is getting indexed

If you’re using one of WP-Cumulus’s many ports to other platforms, you may have a tagcloud.xml in place. Chances are it’s not actually used, and it still has “my” data in it. In this case you really should remove the file from your web server. My website’s statistic indicate that a lot of websites have this scenario in place, and it’s causing a lot of unintended links from those sites to mine.

So, please check if your site has a tagcloud.xml, and whether it’s used. If not, please remove the file. If you’re the author of a port, please see if the file is needed in your distribution, and remove it if not. Thanks!

(image by Gurato)

Last night’s WordPress meetup in Amersfoort was, at least as far as I’m concerned, a resounding success. Around 70 people attended, and we had a lot of interesting speakers. Most of the presentations were captured on video, and will be placed online later. For now, I’ve put the snapshots I managed to take on Flickr for you. Enjoy!

I’ve also created a Flickr pool for Dutch meetup images. Please feel free to add you pics there. I’m still pretty new to Flickr, but I think I allowed everyone to contribute…

It’s spring again. Temperatures are on the rise, trees are blossoming and birds are tweeting. Time for another WordPress meetup. Just like last year, Kaj Rietberg and I will be putting together a meetup in Amersfoort. If you’re a WordPress fan and you’re not too far from the geographical center of The Netherlands, please join us on the 10th of May.

This year, Paul van Heel and Amersfoort Creatieve Stad are helping us organize things (see their Dutch language post here).

(image from last year’s meetup, courtesy of Enrise)

We’re still working out the details, but here’s what’s been decided so far.

• The meetup will be on the 10th of May.
• Location will be De Observant in Amersfoort.
• We’ll be kicking off at 19.30, doors will open at 19.00.
• We’re working on a format that’s more interactive than last year.
• They’ll be kicking us out at around 22.00.
• The meetup is aimed at beginners and experts alike.
• Official Twitter hashtag is #wpm033 .
• Please register here.
• Karim Osman of Automattic will be joining us for the latest news straight from the source!

I’ll be posting more info here as it becomes available.