Beantin Beta Blog

Exclude categories from home page and RSS in Pagelines

For The Beantin Index that I launched earlier this week, there are posts that contain ratings and then there are blog posts. The main focus of the site are the ratings, so I didn’t want blog posts appearing on the home page, and I wanted two separate RSS feeds.

Solutions for embedding EmoVotes on any website

EmoVotes are where you “rate” content by selecting your emotional response – such as happy, angry, curious and indifferent. This way of voting and rating content in my experience gives a more honest response than such mechanisms as star ratings and thumbs up/down.

How to stop WordPress comment spam when using Disqus

I’ve had Disqus installed since day one on this blog. No spam whatsoever in Disqus. Lovely and Quiet. To my surprise, comments posted via bots and scripts kept on coming in.

Embedding externally hosted audio

Jon Buscall of Jontus Media had a problem embedding his externally hosted podcasts on his WordPress blog. My curiosity took over as usual, so I did some digging.

I initially thought this was something that WordPress could do straight out of the box. But, I’d made the classic mistake of mixing up wordpress.com functionality with that of the self-hosted wordpress.org version.

Resources used to create a WordPress plugin

I was curious about how you go about tweaking sites in WordPress, and within minutes that curiosity had led me to investigating how you go about writing a WordPress plugin. This is a summary of the various resources I used to create my Measuring Viewport Size WordPress plugin.

Script-based backup of WordPress

Last week Jesper Åström had his WordPress website infected by the adsttnmq1 hosting provider exploit. It’s similar to the gumblar exploit and takes advantage of holes in the hosting provider’s management platform – such as cPanel or H-Sphere. I’d say that if this affects you at your hosting provider, change host as soon as you can.