Microkid

After reading this article on the Official Google Webmaster Blog, I was trying to find a way for WordPress to automatically create effective meta descriptions following Google’s directions.

So I wrote this plugin that generates meta descriptions in this structure:

<meta name=”description” content=”Author: (author) | Categories: (categories) | Posted: (postdate) | Tags: (tags) | Comments (number of comments)” />

In the option panel you can choose which properties of the article you would like to include: author, categories, post date, number of comments and tags. You can also choose the devider you wish to use betwen the properties.

Tags is especially one you might want to consider leaving out because they might be already in you meta keywords.

This plugin is still in BETA and I don’t know wether it actually is an improvement on the attractiveness of your snippets. So please let me know what your ideas and experiences are!

Download the plugin here.

Installation: just drop it in your /wp-content/plugins folder and activate through the admin plugin interface. You can configure it through Options > Impr. Meta Descr. Snippets.

I have so far tested this plugin for compatibility with these other plugins:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior – If you are using WP 2.3+ with native tag support my plugin will use those tags, if you have a lower version and UTW installed it will use those.
• All in One SEO Pack – Make sure you switch of the “Autogenerate descriptions” option for this plugin or you will have two meta descriptions in your page, which can’t be good!
• TDO Mini Forms – My plugin will grab the author of the article when it’s been submitted through this plugin.

Ideas for future versions:

• Meta descriptions for pages
• Perhaps meta descriptions for the homepage and archive pages as well
• Better language support

Parallels and VMWare have always been pretty good ways to get the job done. The bad thing about them though is that you have to install and boot an entire OS for just 1 application.

A much better solution is ie4osx. This is a very very nifty solution by Mike Kronenberg that allows you to run multiple versions of IE as standalones on an intel based mac using Darwine. A couple of huge benefits of ie4osx over the usual emulators:

• Less memory usage – Since you don’t have to run an entire OS, you need a lot less resources.
• Faster workflow – Obviously instead of having to boot an entire OS and make several commands within your emulator, it’s a lot more fun to just startup IE like any other application.
• Conditional Comments work like a charm – This is nothing Parallels or VMWare can help, but more a problem on Windows itself. You can run multiple versions of IE, but testing Conditional Comments is difficult. All versions will identify themselves as the highest version installed. Since Conditional Comments are usually one of the main reasons you are testing anyways, this is a very good thing.
• Easier to test through a local webserver - Since it runs locally on OS X, IE will use whatever hostname configuration you’ve setup on OS X. This means that if you use the webserver capabilities on OS X as a local development environment, you can access your websites through the hostnames you use in your other browsers. This can’t be done as easily on Parallels or VMWare.

Don’t expect it to work as snappy as your other OS X apps, but if you’re a developer that wants to fit IE testing smoothly into his workflow, ie4osx is exactly what you need.

It may be a little early, but hey it’s close enough to the new year. So here’s my 2008 gadget wishlist.

1. The ultimate portable computer. A combination of this, this and this. It seems so obvious, take a good smartphone, equip it with a tiny projector on the back and a virtual laser keyboard on the front, and you have yourself a beyond laptop mobile computer. No more screwing around with mini keys and tiny monitors. Music, communication and your complete workstation, all in one.
2. The Wii ’3D’. Basically a combo of Nintendo’s Wii and this. So not only will you be watching a 3D projection instead of your 2D TV, but the controller will also be carrying a small projector to visualize whatever tool your using in the game. Think lightsaber people, woohoo!
3. The Nokia 888. I mean, it’s been 2 years now people, come one! Give us the phone that will make the iPhone look silly!
4. Portable locks based on iris recognition. This might not be of much interest to most Americans, but there’s big market for this where I’m from. In general, I would like to see iris recognition implemented in a lot more technology; why carry keys if you have one in your default setup? There’s no reason why this shouldn’ be implemented in cars, homes, etc. the coming year.
5. A laser indicator for lost items. A what? Well, imagine losing your keys in the house, and having a device that would draw a path on the floor using lasers to point you in the direction of its location? Should be feasible, the location could be determined using GPS. Sorta like a mini in-house navigation system. Nifty stuff!
6. A combination of a drum machine and a guitar. Oh no wait, somebody already came up with that…

Check out the mysterious Sony Rolly. It’s a mediaplayer with a little extra. Supposedly it has no screen and only one knob to control it. Nobody’s really sure what it does as of yet, but it looks like a lot of fun. Click the picture to get a larger view.

Sony comes up with this totally new kind of product, that brings us entertainment in the shape of music in a totally new way. So what does this tell us? — Read on

Since everyone is now talking about how revolutionary the iPhone is, and how it has revived the mobile phone market in terms of quality products, bloggers, reviewers and so called ‘analists’ have to find a new way to stand out of the crowd. Suddenly it’s hip to hate the iPhone.

But how do you come up with arguments to bash a product that even your mom recognizes as being superior? — Read on

OpenMoko is cool; it’s an open source mobile (smart)phone operating system based on Linux.

Phone manufacturers seem to be having a lot of trouble creating good operating systems. I’ve actually never seen one that came up with a decent ‘usable’ interface, let alone one that looked good as well. Well, apart from the iPhone of course, but as always Apple is playing solo in a whole different league.

So the OpenMoko project seems a prophecy for a better world. After more then 15 years of worldwide mobile telecomunication, phone companies are finally forced into focusing more on the quality of their product instead of just their marketing strategies. — Read on

If you just migrated your WordPress blog from one permalink structure to another, and you don’t want to lose the traffic that accesses your blog through the old permalinks, this is for you.

Right before the old permalink generates a 404, this simple plugin grabs the slug from the end of the request and checks if there’s a post with this slug living somewhere else on your blog. If so, it will generate a “301 Moved Permanently” error, and forward your user to the new location of your post. It’s simple, but effective. — Read on

It seems like I finally found someone who takes the concept of usability further then “your HTML has to be valid”. I’ve been looking for a book that studies interface design from a more visual scientific angle instead of the super obvious way pretty much all self appointed “usability experts” tell me to. Really, I’m getting more and more bored by all these “guru’s” who think they’re special because they know what HTML is and all the international €3000 conventions and work-shops about whether you should underline your links or not. — Read on

Note: this is for OSX 10.4 Tiger, if you are on Leopard: tutorial for installing GD support on 10.5 Leopard.

I’m sure the people at Apple had a good reason not to include the GD library in the default apache/PHP installation that comes with OS X. Too bad though, because sooner or later you’ll need it when using OS X as a web development platform. Getting it running is not much like the 1.2.3 installing procedures you are used to on a mac, but here’s how to do it. — Read on

I am currently working on a WordPress MU based platform for several professional weblogs, and one of the things I’m goofing around with is the phenomenon of tags, plugged into WordPress in the shape of Ultimate Tag Warrior.

One of the coolest features in this nifty little program is the usage of Yahoo’s term extraction API, which gives the editor tag suggestions when writing a new item. Unfortunately, this tool seems to be very much English oriented. When jamming Dutch texts into it, it does come up with results but most of them are far from usable.

To overcome this problem I figured that if I would be able to translate the Dutch text to English, then send it to the term extraction tool, translate whatever comes out back to Dutch and present those terms to the editor as tag suggestions. So I have edited Ultimate Tag Warrior to use Babel Fish to do just that. And I have to say, even though there is still some jibberish among the results, my plan turned out to work.

The only problem now is that the Dutch language uses a lot of English words, most of the time specific terms in business or science. And since these terms are so specific, they are probably words you want to have included in your tag suggestions. So right now I’m looking for a way to combine the original results with the results generated through Babel Fish. Any suggestions of course are welcome!