Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?Edit

The Solution: Wrap the likebox in an extra div (with a border color set to your pages background color, and position the wrapper to overlap the likebox). Code below.

The HTML

<div id="likebox-frame">
     <iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=XXXXXX&amp;width=900&amp;connections=16&amp;stream=false&amp;header=false&amp;height=190" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="z-index:9;border:none !important; overflow:hidden; width:900px; height:190px;" allowtransparency="false"></iframe>
    </div>

The CSS

#likebox-frame{
 border:2px solid #F0F9F4;
 width:894px;
 z-index:10;
 height: 156px;
 overflow: hidden;
 position:relative;
 top:-1px;
 left:-2px;
}
#likebox-frame iframe{
  left:-5px;
  overflow:hidden;
  position:relative;
  top:-1px;
}

Sometimes you don’t want to broadcast to the world that your site is running on wordpress. Here are some steps to take to remove some of the “traces” of wordpress in your code.

Step 1: Update .htaccess

To mask the paths of your wp-content and theme directories in you will need to make some modifications to your .htaccess file. Place the following code at the top of your .htaccess at the root of your site.

# BEGIN REWRITES
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^images/(.*)$ wp-content/themes/THEMNAME/images/$1 [PT]
RewriteRule ^css/(.*)$ wp-content/themes/THEMNAME/css/$1 [PT]
RewriteRule ^js/(.*)$ wp-content/themes/THEMNAME/js/$1 [PT]
RewriteRule ^uploads/(.*)$ wp-content/uploads/$1 [PT]
RewriteRule ^plugins/(.*)$ wp-content/plugins/$1 [PT]
</IfModule>
# END REWRITES

In your wp-config.php, add the following line to customize your plugin directory url.

define( 'WP_PLUGIN_URL', 'http://www.yoururlhere.com/plugins' );

Step 2: Modify functions.php

Get rid of pesky meta-data that wordpress leaves in your header with the following actions added to your theme’s functions.php.

  remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');
  remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');
  remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link');

Step 3: Remove html comments from plugins you use.

Some wordpress plugins leave behind html comments such as “powered by such-and-such”. It is generally assumed that you will leave in those comments as free advertising for the plugin author, but you are allowed to remove them if you like in almost every case.

Step 4: Modify wp-admin path

Add the following to your .htaccess file. Fully documented here

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} wp-admin/
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !YOURSECRETWORDHERE
RewriteRule .*\.php [F,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !YOURSECRETWORDHERE
RewriteRule ^ADMINFOLDER/(.*) wp-admin/$1?%{QUERY_STRING}&YOURSECRETWORDHERE [L]

//Add a feed link back to category level page
function feed_link($content) { global $post;

foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {

if ($category->category_parent == 0) {
$cat_name = $category->name;
$cat_ID = $category->cat_ID;
$link = get_category_link( $cat_ID );

break;
}
}
$content = $content.'<br /><a href="'.$link.'">More '.$cat_name.'  posts</a>';

return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss','feed_link');
add_filter('the_content_rss','feed_link');

You can paste the following code into you’re browser toolbar after clicking through an ad to you’re site to see if (any) referrer was passed. If it’s empty than Google Analytics will count it towards direct traffic if you don’t pass any campaign tracking parameters.

javascript:alert(document.referrer)

How do I fix this?

1. Realize that a chunk of the traffic that shows up in your “direct” bucket ~(10-15%) could be attributed to some other source e.g (ppc,display,link). This could be from click-through traffic or type-in traffic (where people see you’re ad and type in you’re url instead of clicking on it.) The latter case is essentially free advertising and while hard to measure directly should be considered into the ROI calculation for advertising. This is why it’s always important to display a url in you’re advertisement.

2. Always use tracking parameters in your urls when possible. http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics

Note: Some of these methods will work on a shared host without root access, but ssh is required for some methods, like installing memcached.

Step 1: Offload Images to Amazon S3

Images generally make up a large percentage of the total page load (up to 50%, see below). By using Amazon S3 as a CDN, you can save on bandwidth costs with your host and speed up your page load times significantly.

Graph taken from the YSlow firefox plugin, a great tool to help diagnose page load performance issues.

Costs for S3 are reasonable, but can add up if you are hosting large files. Below is a report of costs for the first 10 hours of a blog that I run. Most requests are for a single image (2k in size) loaded externally.

Tantan S3 is a great plugin for wordpress that links your Amazon S3 account to your wordpress blog. You can configure it such that your media uploads are sent to your S3 “bucket” on upload.

Another useful tool is S3Fox, a plugin for firefox that you can use to manage and sync files in your S3 account through your browser. You will need your S3 security credentials to set it up.

Step 2: Apache Tuning

Edit your .htaccess file to set expire headers on static files

#Expire Header
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 hours"
FileETag none
</FilesMatch>

Step 3: Configure some kind of caching

For many smaller wordpress blogs WP Super Cache and other MySQL performance tuning measures will suffice, but if you still aren’t seeing much improvement, you may want to consider a more heavy duty option.

Installing Memcached on a MediaTemple DV (3.5) (requires root access)

In conjunction with Batcache Manager, you should see a real boost in performance.

Step 4: Sit back, relax and enjoy your speedy new blog

Further Reading:

• Using Amazon S3 for image hosting with a WordPress blog
• 4+1 Ways To Speed Up WordPress With Caching
• High Traffic Tips For WordPress

The PHP

<?php 
// set headers
header('Content-Type: text/xml');
header('Cache-Control: no-store');
// get database results to output xml
$query = "SELECT content FROM wp_table ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 10";
$terms = $wpdb->get_results($query, OBJECT); 
$xml .= "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n";
$xml .= "<data>Your Data Goes Here</data>";
// save your xml file in your theme directory
$path = 'wp-content/themes/themename/output.xml';
$file= fopen("$path", "w");
fwrite($file, $xml);
fclose($file);
?>

The HTML & Javascript

<div align="top" style="margin-left:-10px;"id="flashcontent">
 <a href="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/triggerpages_mmcom/flash.html"><img src="noFlash.jpg" width="600" height="270" border="0" alt="Flash Not Detected" /></a>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
 // <![CDATA[
 var so = new SWFObject('<?php bloginfo ( 'template_directory' );?>/flashobject.swf', 'website', '600', '270', '9');
 so.useExpressInstall('<?php bloginfo ( 'template_directory' );?>/expressinstall.swf');
 so.addParam('menu', 'false');
 so.addParam('wmode', 'transparent');
 so.addVariable("xmlVar", '<?php bloginfo ( 'template_directory' );?>/output.xml');
 so.write('flashcontent');
 // ]]>
</script>

Step 1:

Add the language attributes wp function to your header(s). The plugin will add the following lanuage attribute for you “xmlns:fb=”http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml”.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
<?php language_attributes(); ?>> 

Step 2:

Call wp_head in your header(s)

<?php wp_head(); ?>

Step 3:

Call wp_footer in your footer.php

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

Step 4:

Call the login function from your comments.php. Use the ‘do_action’ hook so that if you disable the plugin, it is not called.

<?php do_action('fbc_display_login_button')  ?>

Step 5 (optional):

Call the following code in your comments.php if it doesn’t already exist. It will display the facebook commenter’s profile pic or an empty gravatar/avatar if left by a regular user, ‘32′ is the size of the avatar you would like to display.

<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 32 ); ?>

Step 6 (optional):

Call this function if you are using WP-Supercache or another caching plugin. You need to make sure that the “YOURAPIKEY_user” cookie isn’t cached. Replace YOURAPIKEY with your unique developer api key.

<?php
function fbc_supercache($cachestr){

if(isset($_COOKIE["YOURAPIKEY_user"]) )
$cachestr .= $_COOKIE["YOURAPIKEY_user"];

return $cachestr;
}

add_cacheaction('wp_cache_get_cookies_values', 'fbc_supercache');
?>

Step 7 (optional):

Some versions of wordpress will need a bit of a hack to fbconnect.js. Change the following on line 93.

if (comment_text.trim().length === 0) {

to:

if (comment_text.length === 0) {

Note:I am not the developer of this plugin. Full credit goes to Adam Hupp for creating it.

What is PhoneGap?

PhoneGap is a development tool that allows web developers to take advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry SDK using JavaScript.

iui

Based on Joe Hewitt’s iPhone navigation work, iui has the following features:

* Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML

* Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages

* Ability to handle phone orientation changes

* Provide a more “iPhone-like” experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

While the ‘apps’ that you craft with these tools won’t be quite as fully featured as those that are native to the phone’s OS…they are certainly a great time saver and are relatively simple to update and maintain.