I stumbled on this the other day looking over a web forum and thought it was a pretty neat ‘gadget’. I don’t know how useful it is but I’m all for cool.

Using snap.com’s Snap Preview feature and the wordpress plug-in snap preview anywhere.

You’ll see a little icon:

If you mouse over the link or the icon next to one of my links a little popup thumbnail of the website linked to will come up, then of course you can click on the link or the thumbnail to redirect to the website.

Useful? you ask.  I don’t know.  But cool, oh yeah!

Do you know how to write blog articles in Japanese? I do!

Do you know how to write blog articles in Chinese? I do!

How about Arabic? Can you write in Arabic? I can!

Okay so maybe I don’t really know how to write in all these different language. In fact, if you’ve read my blog at all you know I can hardly write in english. Last night while doing the great blog makeover of 2007, I stumbled upon a translation script, that’s free.  Previously I contemplated purchasing one that did this slightly better, but you can’t beat FREE! FREE! FREE!

Translate is a wordpress widget plugin written by 18 yr old Trevor Creech of Canada.  Canada, eh?

To add this tool. I simply uploaded the widgets, activated the plugin and dragged and dropped the translate option to the widget sidebar. Done deal! 

You now have a cool little graphics array of flags:

and you just click on the country flag to change languages.  I have to say this is fantastic. I often find plugins or source code for projects where the authors native language is not english and his english is actually worse than mine (though you have to give them credit, they speak more languages than me).  Sure these automatic translation tools are hit or miss sometimes replacing words like hoster with waiter and such but still it gets the general idea across a little better usually.

This wordpress plugin is well worth taking the time to check it out.

The blog needed a little love and was time for a makeover. I wanted to change up the theme and add a few features. I found a great article on building link love through creating “ultimate lists of …..” and one of the examples was a smashingmagazine.com article on 83 wordpress themes you probably never seen. #1 on the themes list was this theme, redoable. I have to say, it’s a pretty nice theme.

What’s so cool about the new theme?

I like the extended live article plug-in in wordpress. it gives the uber-cool google suggest style live updating search results (example do a search for virtuozzo and watch the articles start to show up).

I also added probably the plug-in with the absolute coolest administration panel of all time. It’s called gregarious and manages the digg and social bookmark links in a very clean manner.

Next I added the “popularity” plugin.  This plugin shows what posts are most popular.

Why the change?

Well, I didn’t like how the old blog theme handled H tags that was really it. It was a very clean and professional theme. The mean reason I changed was that it’s nice to change up the design from time to time and it keeps the blog exciting and new for both me and you

Using Wordpress, I like to tag my posts in multiple categories to help with SEO exposure. However, after upgrading to 2.1 I found that my posts were showing up multiple times on the index, once for each category they were in.

Turns out the reason for this was that I was using Category Visibility-RH. This plugin alters the visibility settings for different categories. I have my delicious bookmarks posted to my blog and have these in a invisible category so they don’t junk up the primary index page. Turns out this plug-in wasn’t 2.1 ready.  Fortunately Rich Hamilton, the author released a beta patch that is working perfectly for me.  If you’re having this same problem definitely try out the beta patch. If you’re not into betas then you’ll want to disable this plug-in until it’s released RTM.

I recently installed the Wordpress Category Visibility Plug-in which allows you to select categories you don’t want to show up in different places on your blog. I have delicious set to upload my delicious links every day to a special category and I removed it from the frontpage to keep it from junking up my blog.  I also set the default category so that all of these entries would be entered in their own category and this is the category I don’t display on the homepage.  Well, shortly after this change I updated my blog template and when I went to update my Windows Live Writer so it would show new posts using the new template it failed, and failed and failed. I really couldn’t figure it out.

Well today I went to check my delicious links and found all the temp posts that WLW uses when it’s trying to determine your blog’s style (very cool actually). Turns out the problem was that these posts weren’t displaying on the homepage but instead in my delicious category and also weren’t getting deleted (I have like 50 temp posts in there). I turned the default category back to “Uncategorized” and set it to display on the homepage and presto! WLW works again. I suspect I’m not the only one having this issue so I hope this helps someone else.