Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Monthly Archives: August 2009

W3 Total Cache Plugin

There’s a new WordPress cache plugin in town, and it’s called W3 Total Cache. This plugin is one of the contestants in the 2009 Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition. The W3 Total Cache plugin (W3TC for short) is an advanced cache plugin, and you can only have one of those on your site at once. So if you’re currently using WP Super Cache, you’ll have to disable that first before enabling W3TC. [side note: I … Continue reading

Retheme: Stage 1

I’ve pulled the trigger on the first stage of my site re-theme. Right now, it’s still a pretty clean slate. I’ve switched over to the Thematic theme (actually a child theme using Thematic as its template), and done just a few quick stylesheet fixes and personal plugin tweaks. Currently, there are still a few warts which I need to iron out (some sidebar styles on sub-pages that need fixing, and such). More major style/branding changes … Continue reading

Jumping Into WordPress Plugin Programming

In a few weeks, I will be a presenter at WordCamp Birmingham 2009 (that’s Birmingham, Alabama, not England, by the way). Last year, I did a presentation on “The Future of WordPress“, shortly before the release of version 2.7. I briefly considered doing the same thing this year, updated with speculation about the upcoming versions 2.9 and 3.0, but that seemed like a cop-out. I wanted to do something a little deeper. One of the … Continue reading

Analytics Observations

Over the years, I’ve variously either obsessed over or ignored my site stats. I’ve always found website analytics interesting, but since I’m not selling anything here, I don’t have a lot of motivation to really dig in and try to make sweeping changes for the sake of increasing clicks or search engine rankings. Oh, I have dabbled with things here and there — related posts links, the SEO Super Comments plugin, etc. — but my … Continue reading

WordPress Webhooks Plugin

Check out this demo video of a new plugin by mitcho, called HookPress. HookPress adds the ability to use webhooks as WordPress actions and filters. Since webhooks run from a web server (not directly inside WordPress), this means that you could, for example, use scripts in python, perl, ruby, or whatever to extend WordPress. How’s that for nifty? And what’s extra nice is that the user interface for it on the WordPress side looks super … Continue reading

Time for Redesign

I’ve been threatening to do it for years, but I think it’s really time — time to redesign this site, for real. If what I have now (or will accomplish in the end) can be called ‘design’. Maybe it would be better to say ‘re-theme‘, so as to avoid ridicule from actual designers. And speaking of which, I’ll happily accept any design advice along the way! So. Time to start over. I’m really going to … Continue reading