Looking back at 2009, I must say that it has been a rather successful year for me on all fronts. While I may not have achieved most of the goals I set for Techtites, it was definitely a lot better than 2008.

I have refrained from setting any goals for this blog, primarily because it serves as a personal blog.

At this time of the year, I normally make a very detailed post about my activities during the year. This year, I’ll refrain from a very detailed post and just make a short and sweet summary.

I began the year knowing that I had a good job in hand. I spent the first three months of the year completing my MBA. I joined the bank in early April and have slogged patiently and diligently over the last nine successful months.

I have also ensured that I continued making regular posts both at this blog and at Techtites during this duration. It’s a hobby that I have ensured that I have not given up, despite the long work hours.

On the coding front, I took over the development of Ajax Edit Comments in March from Ronald. Honestly, I didn’t make much progress on that front and a few months later, Ronald returned to continue the development of the best comment editing plugin for WordPress!

In December, Ajax Edit Comments became a premium plugin available to all users on a paid subscription basis. And, for a limited period you can get the basic subscription for only $10/year.

The downloads of my other plugins have also increased over the last year. I have released several updates to my plugins and my theme. I also plan on quite a few updates on both these fronts. I have had a few themes that I hoped to develop just lying around, so am hoping to finalise and release some of these.

And, lastly, the highlight of year 2009 without doubt was my engagement to Marise.

Looking forward, I hope and pray that 2010 turns out to be an even more successful year than 2009!

Visit: Techtites - Your Daily dose of all things tech!

For some strange reason, your theme needs to have the necessary code to “enable” this feature.

So, I decided to put together a version of Connections Reloaded that adds supports for the new post thumbnail features of WordPress.

If you’re using this theme, you’ll notice a new section in your New Post screen that allows you to designate an image as a post thumbnail.

By default, the posts do not display the post thumbnails, since each display requires two database queries. You can turn this on by visiting the Connections Reloaded settings page.

If you are running this theme on your blog, do consider a donation.

Read more and download Connections Reloaded

Visit: Techtites - Your Daily dose of all things tech!

The biggest feature addition to this version of the theme is the inbuilt options page that allows for easy customisation from within WP-Admin itself.

The screenshots above give you an idea of what options are available. I plan on adding more options. Comment and let me know what you would like to control from the options page.

Besides this, I’ve also worked on increasing the security of the theme. If you notice an vulnerability, please bring it to my notice before making it public.

There has been slight cleaning up of the code and I’ve also added the .sticky class to the stylesheet for sticky posts. While the theme always supported this, it wasn’t obvious.

So, go ahead give the theme a try. Current users, remember to upgrade. And, if you’re using the theme, do consider a donation.

Visit: Techtites - Your Daily dose of all things tech!

I mentioned earlier that I moved this blog to Media Temple yesterday. However, on monitoring the same, I have realized that I am still not at optimum levels. I’m not really sure what the reason for the super high resource usage is, but it is usually the themes and the plugins. So, as a test, I have decided to change the theme in an attempt to find a really light one.

One of my most read blogs is Weblog Tools Collection, and in a recent post, I stumbled upon Swift. This is a three column theme from Sadish. Sadish has known to churn out really good themes and I decided to use Swift.

As you can see, it still needs a crazy amount of work. For starters, the header needs to be fixed, as does the footer. I still need to replicate some of my old menu system. However, most of all I’m going to monitor the load on the server to see if switching the theme actually helped!

As usual, I’m throwing open this post to suggestions from you. I’m looking to improve this theme. What would you like to see?

Visit: Techtites - Your Daily dose of all things tech!

Anyway, since I moved most of my plugins to the repository, I decided to do away with the script and link to the download file directly. This required editing of a huge number of posts and pages to point to the new link.

I have updated the links on almost all of these. You will continue to notice this error on a few plugins that don’t have their repository page, but I intend to get these fixed by the end of this week.

If you do notice download links not working, please drop in a comment or email, so that I can get it fixed ASAP.

However, since I host all the plugins and my theme on the WordPress repository everything is safe and sound. So, for those interested right now, you can access all the plugin pages from my plugin profile and the theme from my theme profile.

I have several posts and pages right now to go through before everything will work correctly. I’ll update this post or make a new one once things are back in order.

Add to Footer is a simple plugin that allows you to automatically add text or HTML to you theme’s footer. The plugin provides you with a simple text box into which you can copy your the HTML into.

As an additional feature, Add to Footer also comes inbuilt with support for Google Analytics, StatCounter, Reinvigorate and Apture. If you use any of these services, you can fill in the relevant details in the plugins options page and the plugin will add the necessary code for the same on your blog.

These are currently, the services I use which is why I included the same into the plugin. If you are aware of any other services that you would like integrated, do let me know and I’m sure I’ll be able to program the same in.

Why use this plugin?

• If you allow users to switch themes on your blog, then you’ll need to edit the footer of every single theme to ensure they contain the same code.
• If you change your theme, you need to add in the code again.
• You’re lazy like me!

Read more or download "Add to Footer"

Overview
Requirements
Features
Installing
ChangeLog
To Do
Download
Support the Development
License
Questions or Bugs

More Plugins

Overview:

Add absolutely anything to the footer for your WordPress theme. This ensures that you don’t need to keep adding the same code in case you change your theme.
Simply enter the settings once and you’re good to go!

Comes inbuilt with support for Google Analytics, Statcounter, Reinvigorate and Apture. Request support for new services.

Features:

• Add any code you want in the text box provided
• Support for Google Analytics, StatCounter, Reinvigorate and Apture

Requirements:

• WordPress 2.5 or above

Installing

1. Download Add to Footer.
2. Extract the contents of add-to-footer.zip to wp-content/plugins/ folder. You should get a folder called add-to-footer.
3. Activate the Plugin in WP-Admin.
4. Goto Settings > Add to Footer and set the options there

ChangeLog:

• 1.0.1 – Minor fixes for Statcounter and Google Analytics
• 1.0 – Release

To Do:

• Automatic detection of wp_footer hook and correction of same
• Comment below and tell me what you would like to see

Downloads

Current Version is 1.0.1

• Download Add to Footer

Support the Development

Writing and testing plugins takes a good amount of time. If you like the plugin and find it useful and would like to donate something for my work please do click the Paypal Donate button below. The payment is secure. I haven’t filled in any amount. Feel free to donate what you please. Any amount is welcome. Thank you

License

All files and their contents are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Questions or Bugs

If you have any questions or would like to report any bugs then please use the support forum.

Download Add to Footer v1.0.1

On further analysis was pleased to find out that my WordPress theme Connections Reloaded has been featured in Mashable’s 20 Great Free WordPress 2.7 Themes. Mashable is one of the top blogs on the internet with over 168K subscribers and 35K Twitter followers.

Many of you may be aware that I updated Connections Reloaded recently for WordPress 2.7. It includes complete support for WordPress 2.7 including paged and threaded comments, gravatars, tags etc. As well as complete backward compatibility with versions of WordPress as early as v1.5.

So, if you’re running and earlier version of WordPress, you don’t need to worry about upgrading.

If you’re not running Connections Reloaded, why aren’t you?

Download Connections Reloaded or view the Demo.

The changes in this version are:

• Complete support for WordPress 2.7
• Threaded comments and paged comments are now supported
• Custom Header. Now you can change the image header from within WP-Admin itself
• Support for all versions up to WordPress 2.7. So, even if you haven’t upgraded to 2.7, you can use the theme without modifications.

Download Connections Reloaded or view the Demo.