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YARPP now also allows you to edit directly on your theme’s CSS file to customize the styling. The HTML output of the plugin now comes wrapped in distinct classes that would make it easier to narrow down to which element you want to tweak via CSS. The interface of the settings page is also sleeker and simpler to use and by default only displays the most basic of options which would be enough for most users. The more advanced users can easily enable the other options by choosing which panels you want to display as you normally would via the Screen Options button in the WordPress backend. There are more changes outlined in this release but most of these can be seen on the Changelog of the plugin’s download page.

I’ve been using YARPP on older versions of Archon Digital and on other websites that I run but decided to ditch it along with dozens of other plugins when I last revamped my site back in October 2011. Reasons for that were not really related to YARPP, but was more on trying out new things and starting afresh. Then fast forward to November 2012, I installed YARPP 3.6 beta 5 and tested it for a few days on a local installation and then forgot about it until this weekend. At present, after two days of having Yet Another Related Post Plugin‘s latest version back on my site, I can immediately notice the increased amount of traffic and some improvement on my blog’s bounce rates.

Goodbye Timthumb.

You no longer need to use Timthumb to generate thumbnails which was the case in my previous YARPP post, and which also proved quite difficult to install for some users. I experienced this first hand when I received a lot of queries and comments asking for assistance in getting Timthumb to work on their WordPress installations after publishing that post on using Timthumb on YARPP. Calls for support on issues such as write permissions, typos and other Timthumb-related problems, most of which were unique to each person’s hosting environment, kept pouring in to my inbox and comments section for more than a year after published the article.

Also, based on my experience on several sites, using Timthumb together with YARPP consumes quite a lot of resources. This may not be optimal for the average blogger that relies on entry-level shared hosting. And don’t get me started on the Timthumb exploit that had me suddenly patch several dozens of websites in the past. The exploit has since been fixed, and I continue to use it on other websites, but since WordPress introduced post_thumbnails, and also now when employing a device-agnostic design workflow, I gradually moved away from using Timthumb altogether.

Custom YARPP templates.

What I really like about YARPP is that it allows me to develop my own template should I chose to do so. Version 4 of the plugin allows for a wide range customizations that can range from a few simple lines of CSS, to custom functions that you can further extend as you develop your WordPress website. Right now, I’m going through the plugin’s code and documentation to help me come up with other ways that I can implement YARPP on other websites that I run.

YARPP is old school, the awesome kind of old school.

This plugin has been around long enough that most WordPress users already know about the benefits that comes with having it around.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bells and whistles that we’re discussing here, YARPP, like other WordPress plugins if not properly setup, can consume quite a lot of RAM and CPU cycles which is most noticeable when deployed on a shared hosting environment. But that doesn’t mean you cannot run it on cheap shared hosting with a server stack that’s overloaded with websites aside from not being properly optimized. You can always install WP-Supercache or any other caching solution for a quick fix. Fortunately, I have a good setup on my host that doesn’t suck (my host uses a combination of NGINX and Apache), so I barely notice anything and can let the plugin run with minimal amount of tweaking.

To date, I still find it to be the best related posts plugin for WordPress. YARPP is so useful to me that I consider it as a “fire-and-forget” plugin that I can deploy on a website and literally forget about for a long period of time. There were several instances where I would only check on YARPP’s settings once after an install and would come back to it only after a year or two, or even after three years. Now how’s that for a reliable plugin?

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Their farewell cover artwork highlights the stark contrast between traditional printing portrayed as a classic, black and white New York city skyline photo with Newsweek’s office building in the foreground and the modern, web-centric hashtag headline, #lastprintissue.

COVER: Newsweek’s last print issue before we go all-digital features a hashtag on the cover: #LastPrintIssue! twitter.com/Newsweek/statu…

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) December 23, 2012

I’m was one of those who kept Newsweek issues for a lot of weird reasons. There was a time when I had a collection of Newsweek issues all way back from the Six-Day War in 1967 to the American invasion of Grenada, and various other cold war era issues, which I collected from my grandfather when I was helping him clean up in his study back when I was still a teen.

Newsweek says goodbye to print. #lastprintissue. Image courtesy of @Newsweek

For Newsweek, it will be business as usual as they will be concentrating their efforts on their online edition, to be called Newsweek Global, which as they published previously as what would be “a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context”. It makes perfect sense though to scrap the print edition as online appears to be more profitable mainly due to the worldwide trend of dwindling print advertising sales on major publications in the west. Newsweek’s online presence, which merged with The Daily Beast back in November 2010, now averages more than 15 million unique visitors month. You can just imagine the profitability of not having to think about production, circulation, archiving and physical storage requirements, all costs associated with running a print edition. Good for business, but definitely a sad day for print.

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Twenty thirteen is going to be a very, very busy one and I can’t wait for it to start. This year, I plan to get Archon Digital registered locally and will start marketing both online and offline. I’m also looking at hiring an assistant and one or two developers to keep up with the load of work as they come in.

I promised myself a few months ago that I wouldn’t drink as much as I did in last year’s holiday season. Just to make things clear, I’m no alcoholic. I only drink occasionally, but I’m also no triathlete or health buff. That brings me to the idea of further cutting down on what little amount that I do drink and start to get more exercise, and diet, lose weight, and all that eat-only-organic-stuff-healthy-living, thingamajig. This 2012, my actual fitness plan was to get grandma’s exercise machine from her place to my house. That was it, that was the plan. This 2013 though, I better start using the thing.

Seems everything is going as planned, though I’d still look forward to enjoying a glass of scotch or maybe some cold beer while I look back at 2012 and plan for what’s coming ahead.

Beer. Image courtesy of http://sxc.hu

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Faithless Muhammad Ali 12″ vinyl album cover

I’ve always said that I started out in print, and though I may have my feet firmly planted in web design, tech and other digital media, printing will always remain special to me. I scoured the net looking for information on who designed the artwork and the printer who ran the job but couldn’t find that information. If you happen to know, please inform me so I could give the proper credit.

Offset lithography was probably one of the best innovations to come out of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some say that print is a dying industry, but I still refuse to accept that. It’s possible that traditional offset lithography and the letterpress will turn out like vinyl records which, even in the age of iTunes and digital formats, are still being collected and adored by a lot of enthusiasts.

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This post is not a how-to article, I merely want to find out what is the best way to convert a WordPress install to a static HTML website. I was about to write an aside which turned out to be pretty long for an aside so it evolved into an actual post.

When I redesigned my site two years ago, I decided to archive my old WordPress installation as a way to clean up all the bloat it accumulated from years of installing plugins, themes and custom scripts. The most logical decision for me was to just start with a fresh WordPress install  and retire my old installation under a subfolder. Archiving my site also required me to manually put dozens of 301 redirects to allow search engines and old backlinks to still find their way into my blog.

Fast forward two years, and I now have this chore of updating both my the current Archon Digital and its old version. This setup was also the main culprit of an error after a Jetpack upgrade, which cost me a week and a half of lost stats.

I Google’d up and tried Really Static and WP Static HTML Output Plugin and still ran into a problem of not  having all my content from being converted automatically, scripts like timthumb wouldn’t work, stylesheets missing, etc…

I want to change that by converting everything to a clean, static HTML or PHP version without the WordPress CMS part.

Any ideas, anyone?

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Warning: Missing argument 2 for wpdb::prepare(), called in /<path>/wp-content/plugins/sharebar/sharebar.php on line 112 and defined in /<path>/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 990

This got me scrambling for whatever quick fix I could find because I use this plugin on a number of sites and I fear that having them display an error message with the path of my WordPress installation exposed would be a security risk.

Disabling the plugin while waiting for an update was not an option for me because some of the sites I run rely on this plugin a lot and I can’t afford to have it deactivated even for a brief period. Besides that, I’m the sort who’s always looking forward to getting my hands dirty fixing stuff on my own. After running a quick search on Google, I found this in the WordPress.org forums and one of the users, e3mobile, contributed a fix which worked for all my sites using Sharebar.

e3mobile, suggested editing the file sharebar.php located in the Sharebar folder inside wp-plugins.

On Line 112 look for;

$results =$wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare("SELECT * FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."sharebar WHERE enabled=1 ORDER BY position, id ASC")); $str .= "\n";</a>

and replace it with this;

$results =$wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare("SELECT * FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."sharebar WHERE enabled=1 ORDER BY position, id ASC", null)); $str .= "\n";

Then on line 124, look for this;

$results = $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare("SELECT * FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."sharebar WHERE enabled=1 ORDER BY position, id ASC")); $str .= "\n";

and replace it with this;

$results = $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare("SELECT * FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."sharebar WHERE enabled=1 ORDER BY position, id ASC", null)); $str .= "\n";

Hope this helps, I’m no PHP expert, but I just want to share this now because this is what worked for me which you might want to implement while waiting for the plugin author to release an update.

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