Two of the highlights from the BBQ we had at our place last night (besides the pleasure of having our awesome friends over)…
Ryan made the most awesome Krispy Kreme s’mores made with donuts, marshmallows and peanut butter cups (full instructions on how to make them yourself here...)
After stuffing ourselves with those, we then played the awesome Cards Against Humanity for 4 hours, which is an epic game for horrible people.
Currently there’s about 130 of you guys following the Facebook page “PaulOFlahertyOnline” and many of you who are following that page are also friends with me on my personal Facebook profile.
The advent of the “subscribe” button on Facebook has made the public page obsolete and frankly just a pain to update, as everything that ends up there is already being posted publicly on my personal page (so if you’re subscribed you can see it), and… let’s be honest, I don’t update that page a lot but I do pump a lot of good shares through my personal Facebook.
So, here’s the deal, in a week or so I’m going to kill off the PaulOFlahertyOnline page and simply stop posting to it, but, in order to stay up to date and still get all of the content I find around the web, you can just pop along to my personal profile and hit the subscribe button.
I’ll even add a button here (this may not show up in an RSS reader so you’ll have to click through to the post) so you can subscribe easily.
One of the things that’s difficult with blogs where you pump out a lot of content is having an overview of how many shares your posts are getting on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and other networks without visiting each post individually to check out the share buttons.
Sure this can be accomplished via analytics but depending on the analytics platform you use the results can be anywhere up to 24 hours behind.
Earlier today I knocked up this little piece of code that can either be used as plugin or dropped into your functions.php which will add share buttons in a column on the post management screen so that you can see how your posts are doing and share directly from management screen if you want to.
I’m sure there are more elegant ways to do this, possibly using wp_enque_script but as the script only runs on edit.php and Facebook and other networks have a nasty habit of changing their code without much warning, I thought this would be simpler.
Comments, suggestions and improvements welcome.
<?php
add_action( 'admin_head-edit.php', 'add_socialm_head_script' );
function add_socialm_head_script() { ?>
<script type="text/javascript">
(function() {
var li = document.createElement('script'); li.type = 'text/javascript'; li.async = true;
li.src = window.location.protocol + '//platform.stumbleupon.com/1/widgets.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(li, s);
})();
</script>
<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=FBAPPID";
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>
<link href="https://plus.google.com/PUBLISHERID" rel="publisher" /><script type="text/javascript">
window.___gcfg = {lang: 'en'};
(function()
{var po = document.createElement("script");
po.type = "text/javascript"; po.async = true;po.src = "https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js";
var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);
})();</script>
<?php }
if ( !function_exists('AddShareColumn')) {
function AddShareColumn($cols) {
$cols['sharebuttons'] = __('Share');
return $cols;
}
function AddShareLink($column_name, $post_id) {
if ( 'sharebuttons' == $column_name ) {
echo '<su:badge layout="1" location="'.get_permalink($post_id).'"></su:badge><br />';
echo '<iframe src="//www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href='.get_permalink().'&send=false&layout=button_count&width=90&
amp;amp;show_faces=false&action=like&colorscheme=light&font
&height=21&appId=APPID" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden;
width:90px; height:21px;" allowTransparency="true" ></iframe><br />';
echo '<a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button"
data-url="'.get_permalink($post_id).'" data-text="'.get_the_title().'"
data-via="UtterlyCute">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"
;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");</script><br />';
echo '<g:plusone size="small" href="'.get_permalink($post_id).'"></g:plusone>';
}
}
// for posts
add_filter( 'manage_posts_columns', 'AddShareColumn' );
add_action( 'manage_posts_custom_column', 'AddShareLink', 10, 2 );
// for pages
add_filter( 'manage_pages_columns', 'AddShareColumn' );
add_action( 'manage_pages_custom_column', 'AddShareLink, 10, 2 );
}
?>
Things have been massively hectic lately mostly because of our own grandiose plans to slowly but surely dominate the internet (don’t laugh it might happen someday) with our little network of sites.
As some of you may, or may not have noticed we’ve been rolling out a new design to all of the sites lately, which is a precursor to the even bigger job of bringing them all in together under the one banner. The goal is to have all the sites running as one integrated sited but with each section still maintaining it’s own personality and domain, but being closely integrated beyond what something like WordPress multisite offers. It’s going to be a challenge, and it’s one that is already testing my patience as well as proving that no matter how well you plan something, you can still overlook the obvious.
Take the new design for example. I’ve been slowly rolling it out to each new site with a couple of days in between each for tweaking etc. Even after testing the design in emulators, and actually poking around it using a friends iPad, I still managed to miss a fundamental flaw which was that the main share buttons are off the side of the screen on tablets with low resolutions (1024 or less). I didn’t notice this until today, in excess of 100,000 mobile pageviews later!
Needless to say there was a panic to get extra share buttons worked into the design today so that it would work well on tablets, but not be obtrusive on desktops and laptops.
Our mobile theme is another thing that needs addressing, but don’t even get me started on that. Although if anybody has any recommendations (we’re currently using WP-Touch) feel free to drop them in the comments.
Still, the past few weeks haven’t been all back the wall work. We’ve had some brilliant times and made some awesome memories with friends as we’ve been entertaining quite a bit and making the most of the space offered by our new home. I’m sure nobody will forget the St. Patrick’s Day party anytime soon 
Anyway, once the theme roll-out is done I’ll get started on the big integration and then life can get back to being a touch more relaxing.
In the meantime I’m going to try to spend a bit more time with my beautiful wife and maybe a few moments with David Tennant here and there as well.
Disclosure – Sponsored Post
The first time I wrote about Internet Explorer on this particular blog was back in 2004. In a post titled “IE gets Fired”, I slamed IE for it’s failings when compared to Firebird 0.8 beta (Firebird for those who aren’t old enough to remeber was an earlier name for what we now know as Firefox.
“Firebird is still in Beta at version 0.8 but is already very stable and has replaced IE as my browser of choice. Why? Options, size, and speed. Firebird positively trashes IE in all these departments, not to mention a few others.”
That post was written in May of 2004, which maks it nearly 8 years old and the browser landscape has seriously changed since those days. Firebird has become the much beloved and jack of all trades browser for the internet Firefox, which while it can do almost anything has seen it lose it’s edge in terms of speed, stabilility and size. Chrome is now the darling of the Google brigade, of which I count myself a member, is fast, has some cool features and an endless amount of extensions, but it’s also becoming increasingly unstable on my system (even as I reduce the number of extensions that I use, and that’s not good for someone who lives 8 hours of everyday almost exclusively within his browser.
Yes, there are other browsers I could (and do) try on my Windows 7 laptop. Opera, Safari and a number of other smaller browsers which have essentially been religated to the realms of “also rans” in the windows world.
Recently I’ve found myself slowly but surely creeping back into using IE9 more and more everyday, because there is one important thing that Internet Explorer 9 not been doing that other browsers have been – crashing. Not crashing is critcal for me given the previously mentioned 8 hours of daily use.
Another thing that is making the return to IE9 awesome for me, is the ability to pin websites to taskbar and have them open as individual sandboxed apps. Most of the other browsers on the market allow you to run apps inside them, but none of them allow you pin them to the taskbar and this ability gives you a unique experience whereby opening your gmail is almost like opening a dedicated desktop application.
Plus, being developed by Microsoft, IE9 has a unique advantage in terms of hardware acceleration which makes browser based applications, particularly those written in HTML5, have native hardware acceleration for graphics, and gaemeplay. In other words it’s fast. HTML5 rendering tests are amazingly fast and my real world use certainly demonstrates that it is at the very least “as fast as” if not faster than other browsers.
As a developer the thing I’m appreciating most is the amount of screen real estate that IE9 gives me. If you have IE9 installed open it up beside other browsers and compare it. The streamlined interface, most notably due to the positioning of the address bar, gives you more visible “web site” than any other browser I’ve tried. Neither Firefox or Chrome come close unless you put thm in fullscreen mode, but hey, IE can do that too.
I’ve been undertaking this journey almost completely unaware. It’s been one of those things that has ”just happened” as I’ve been using and experimenting with different browsers and tools to streamline my work. I suppose I should have seen it sooner, especially when we talked about IE and other browsers for so long on the WinExtra podcast, but I guess sometimes we spend so much time looking at and disecting things that I didn’t see the larger picture and how things could apply to my online life and work.
You can learn more about Internet Explorer 9 by visiting BeautyOfTheWeb.com and downloading it for yourself. Don’t just take my word for it, and do yourself a favor, try to remeber that Internet Explorer 9 is not IE6 and go in with an open mind. You may be very pleasantly surprised.