Category Archives: Wordpress

Efficient Method of Adding YouTube Videos to Your Blog

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I recently upgraded my hosting provide (more on that later) and also made some modifications to my blog including a caching plugin, WP Super Cache, as well as a CSS minifier, WP Minify, in order to speed up website loading.

One thing that I noticed that took the longest on my site to load was the Flash, CSS, and javascript related to embedding a YouTube using the standard IFRAME tags, essentially what you do when you get the embedding code from the YouTube video page. This adds around ~400KB to the website size, not much but it adds up. A great work around is to load a thumbnail of the video with a play icon overlaid. The background data only loads when the play button is actually clicked.

The code can be found here: Labnol.org: A More Efficient Embedding Method for YouTube Videos

Upgraded to WordPress 2.5

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I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 using WordPress Automatic Upgrade. It worked perfectly. I had been using Fantastico in the past, but this plugin works much better. Externally, you won’t see any change. The major changes were under the hood. Watch a short video showing some of the features.

Image Headline Plugin for WordPress

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Like the new titles? It is the result of a sweet plugin made over at Coldforged. I’m having some problems with the anti-aliased soft shadows, but that seems to be more of a problem with my hosting than the plugin. Integration with WordPress 1.5 is outstanding. Should I want to switch fonts I would just upload the new font, select it in the headline admin menu, and, voila, the titles are now displayed with the new font.

The owner of Coldforged actually helped me set it up and was very nice. The support that he provided was top-notch.

This is the page with the comments for the Image Headline Plugin
Download and Setup Instructions

Spam Karma

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Even though the new WordPress 1.5 has excellent builtin spam protection I was starting to see some some spam getting past. The problem was that the current spam moderation relies on keywords in the comment body and some recent spammers were getting through by putting random text in the body but then putting their name has the url to their site (mostly poker sites).

So, I’ve installed Spam Karma to stop the spam. The setup was extremely easy and I’m hopeful that any spam will be stopped.

WordPress 1.5

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I just upgraded to WordPress 1.5. One of the most outstanding upgrades, IMO, is the new theme manager. With the click of a button I can switch between themes. The default theme is now Kubrick…the theme that I’m using can be found at the bottom of the page. I still have some tweaking to do (such has making the javascript menu on the left work correctly), but all-in-all I really like the look of this theme. It does seem a little washed out to me so I might enlarge the fonts a little bit and bolden the colors…

Back to biomolecular chemistry studying. 😉

New Blog!

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I’ve successfully switched over from Blogger (which I still use for my photo blog through flickr) to WordPress. I initially had some trouble getting the permalinks to work right but I think it’s all good now. As soon as I get some more time I’ll update the template to something a bit more flashy. But now, back to bacteriology studying.