Category Archives: WordPress

wordpress, plug-ins, and other blogging software and tools

Audio Player WordPress Plugin

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Last week was not a good week for me. Many times when I tried to save a post, I would get a server error message. The ISP eventually fixed the problem, but it was a very frustrating experience and resulted in a very unproductive week (I have six sites hosted with them and they were all having the same problem). However, I did find a mp3 player plugin for WordPress. It works really nice. This is how the player looks like (feel free to click on the play arrow):

[plugin has been disabled]
(lyrics here)

You can customize the colors of the player, pre/post appended clips (ie – "a word from our sponsor"), and configure it for podcasting. There are also options to determine what is included in the RSS feed. The plugin isn't suppose to place a player instance in the feed. Instead, you are suppose to choose what the plugin inserts into the feed. However, I noticed that even though the plugin defaults to "nothing" (meaning the feed shouldn't contain any reference to the audio file), there's a working player in both Bloglines and the new Google Reader. In Newsgator, there's no player but it does show a link to the mp3 file at the bottom of the post. Google Reader also has a link to the mp3 file. I like having the player in the feed, I'm just not sure how that is happening.

I did encounter two problems during the installation. First, after extracting the plugin, there's an audio-player folder and a file (audio-player.php) that sits outside of the audio-player folder. The first time I tried installing the plugin, I didn't see the file outside of the audio-player folder so I didn't ftp it over to the plugin directory. So, if you don't see the audio player in your plugin menu, you need to ftp "audio-player.php" to your plugin directory.

The second problem had to do with the code syntax (I left out the brackets):

audio:reasonforliving.mp3

Even though the mp3 file is located in the default "audio" directory, the file would not play. However, when I used the URL instead, the file plays (I left out the brackets):

audio:http://izachy.com/audio/reasonforliving.mp3

I'm happy with the plugin and would recommend it to anyone who wants to embed some audio files into their posts.

Feedvertising vs phpAdsNew Ad Server

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TLA rolled out their new Feedvertising service today. Feedvertising enables publishers to run text link ads in their RSS feed. Feedvertising can display ads from TLA, publishers' in-house ads, or affiliate links. They even have a WordPress 2.0 plugin to make setup relatively easy. An extra bonus is that TLA can even sell RSS text link ads for you. Which is great because Google RSS ads are still in beta (the last I heard) and Yahoo RSS ads don't seem to work with WordPress/FeedBurner-powered sites.

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Unfancy Quote Plugin for WordPress

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The "fancy quotes" WordPress uses has been driving me crazy. First, the fancy quote looks weird when WordPress uses two right quotes instead of one left and one right. WordPress doesn't use the wrong quote all of the time, but it happens enough to annoy me.

The other problem I have with the fancy quotes is that some of the WordPress plugins choke on the fancy quotes. This usually happens when you are on a site (like this one) that explains how to do something by copying and pasting some code from their site. If the code involves quotes, WordPress turns them into fancy quotes. So, when you copy a quote from a WordPress site and paste it into a text editor like Homesite, you don't actually get a quote. Instead, you get a special character that looks like a quote, but doesn't behave like one. As a result, a plugin like the Landing Sites Plugin crashes.

I finally got around to installing the Unfancy Quote Plugin for WordPress. The plugin replaces the fancy quotes inserted by WordPress with simple quotes. I've been testing the plugin on my test site and it works as advertised. The plugin was simple to install and you don't have to insert any special code into your templates. All you have to do is activate the plugin in the admin menu.