I am upgrading this site to Wordpress 2.0. It’s been a long time since it’s come out, and it’s time to get all the spiffy new features (specifically, the akismet spam-filtering service).
That means, as of the next version of wp-quotes, anything below 2.0 in the wordpress series is unsupported. wp-quotes 1.3 support will end soon too, because I’m working on wp-quotes 2.0.
Sorry if this affects anyone, but since I don’t spend a lot of time on this, I feel like cut-and-run is the best idea. Besides, wp-quotes 2.0 will be so awesome that everyone will want it. I won’t try to break 1.5.x support, but no guarantees.
A few people have pointed out an inefficiency in the wp-quotes plugin. My plugin grabs every quote in your database, sticks in a PHP array, and then chooses a random member of that array. It’s slow, but it works. Some people have pointed out that mysql supports an “order by rand()” clause that will automagically choose a random element from the result set. This is true, but the version of MySQL I have in this server doesn’t support the rand option properly. To use it, you need mysql 3.23.56 or above.
Yes, I should be on MySQL 5.0, but I don’t control this server, so I work with what I’m given. An option in the plugin will be available in the next version if you know your version of MySQL supports it. I’ll be starting a refactoring/redesign soon, and it will include proper wordpress 2.0 support, proper admin support (via the options panel instead of the manage panel), and probably a widget version. Thanks to everyone who uses the plugin!
I’m currently working in a job where I’ve been asked to be the tech resource for our SEO efforts. Doing a bunch of reading, I’ve pretty much painted a picture of the future. I’m just waiting for it to become true. I’m just magic like that. Here’s my 7 predictions for search engines in the next decade or two:
- Engines will know the proper context of what you’re searching for. If you say “Afghan,” they’ll know if you mean the dog, rug, or are referring to the people. Maybe because you tell them, or because they can divine it from your other search keywords.
- Engines will reach a level where they’re nearly as good as a human-edited directory.
- Being as nearly good as a human-edited directory, if all you do is sell goods or services, your site will not be in the organic search results. Why? It doesn’t provide any new or unique information, and you’re making money on it. By giving a link to your site for free, they make no money. They’ll demand a cut of your money for being your advertising agent. Given the choice between paying a nominal fee to be listed in the ads, or not be shown ever, you’ll pay the nominal fee.
- The only way to reach customers via SERPs will be to buy advertising. Context-sensitive ads, adsense, banner ads, whatever. You will no longer get free advertising from search engines.
- The job of SEO “Experts” will be to get your site classified as non-commercial, even if it makes money, so you show up in organic results
- There will be a huge gray area surrounding mixed commercial/informational sources. For example, Amazon.com has extra product pictures, editorial reviews, track and chapter listings, exerpts, user reviews, etc. Why some sites like this get classified as informational and some as purely commercial will be a big point of contention.
- It could happen that instead of forcing you to maintain an ad bank of thousands of keywords to index all your products, engines will charge commercial sites a listing fee — much like the way you pay to get in a phone book or direct mailer. They’ll guarantee your site shows up in the organic SERPs for a price, but not guarantee where it shows up. The price will be high enough that spammers can’t register en masse to flood the market and still make a profit, but low enough that it doesn’t prohibit startups. The price will depend on what products or services are being offered
Version 1.3 is available for download. Just head to the WP Quotes page.
What kind of features do you guys want in the future?
Hey Guys –
I know everyone’s clamoring for the latest release of wp-quotes. It’s coming soon. It’s going to be a mostly xhtml-related fix. I’m just swamped with a few things right now and can’t get the time to patch, test, package, and release, but it’ll be here by Friday!
Welp, I totally screwed up the CSS stuff in the 1.1 release, and it was found by griff. I recommend everyone use version 1.2. This doesn’t affect you if you have 1.0, that’ll still work fine. wp-quotes page.
I’ve taken a bunch of feedback, and made a new version of the plugin. I’m at almost 1,000 downloads (but I don’t have good tracking, so I don’t know for sure), which has far exceeded my expectations for this plugin. As such, I’ve got a lot of feedback. Here’s some of the new things:
- There’s a tag you can add to pages or posts that will spew all the quotes out onto one page. Check out the upper-right corner of this screen. See that little quotes link? Click on it to see what I’m talkin about. That’s all of them, right there.
- When you initialize the table by going to the management page, it will now add a few quotes so it’ll work right away
- Clearer (hopefully) installation instructions.
There are no database changes, so if you want to upgrade to 1.1 you can just overwrite the files with the latest version.
Marc at Full Throttle had an issue with the wp-quotes plugin. Something along the way in his config is setting the height of the div.top css element to 0, and by doing so, it hides the add/edit form for the quotes. This makes it so.. well.. you can’t add or edit quotes. To fix it, open up your /wp-admin/wp-admin.css and add the following lines at the bottom:
div.top
{
height: 350px;
}
This should fix your issues. Thanks, Marc, for letting me play on your setup!
Fortunately, in my current job, I know a little bit about this subject: what to measure, correct terminology, and formulas. With this project, however, I am in total control of every aspect. It’s a little intimidating. So this is a braindump as much for me as everyone else. I hope it’s on a low-enough level that everyone can understand it, even without my experience.
read more…
I have created a new “random quotes” plugin. It stores the quotes in the database, and lets you put them anywhere you want. You can then go and style the quotes any way you want using CSS. Go to the wp-quotes page.
