First, thank you for the bug reports. Without them, new & enhanced versions simply won’t come out.
The plugin now has better video detection capabilities, and a serious bug regarding the auto thumbnailing feature is fixed.
You can download the new version at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/youtube-thumbnailer/
Any bug reports, feature requests or comments are welcomed in the comments section below.
I’ve received many emails complaining that the plugin does not recognize YouTube videos. Because of lack of time, I delayed the update until now.
I just released an update to the plugin which should solve most of the issues that I was contacted about.
Go ahead and download the new version:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/youtube-thumbnailer/
Last month I participated in two amazing events. The first one is The Big Geek and is considerably similar to the second event called Startup Weekend. They both took place in Israel.
The Big Geek II
Startupseeds
This event was organized by StartupSeeds, a non-profit organisation encouraging teen Israeli entrepreneurs to make their first steps in the entrepreneurship world. Whether it’s by giving them a place to talk about technology, or by conducting monthly meetings with the most interesting lectures (for free!). StartupSeeds even assists young innovative kids with starting their own startups by providing them financial help and the best mentors available. The online forum and meetings created a large and friendly community for the Israeli teenager who breaths technology and internet.
What’s the event about?
Sixteen kids (Ages 14-18), divided into four “teams”, worked 24 hours non-stop on their unique idea for a startup. Each team raised a fully working service within those 24 hours (!). While the projects are not breath-taking nor unbelievable, they are still awesome considering the time spent working on them. Actually, they’re awesome not matter what.
The project that my team and I developed is FixedInch. It’s a free online service for displaying objects in their real size over any screen in the world. We have discussed the possibility to continue working on it, and we most likely will, in the near future.
What else can I say? It was an awesome experience that I will never forget. It was 24 hours of fun and jokes, some of could not be told anywhere else like (via @TalDromi):
“Let’s use JSON for this”
“Who’s this Jason you are talking about?”
“XML’s brother!”
Startup Weekend Israel 2009
This is a world-wide known event, which started in 2007. Since then it took place in over 50 cities and growing (!). This is kind of a grown-up version of the Big Geek.
During the first day, 140 Israeli entrepreneurs pitched 50 unique ideas which turned into thirteen motivated teams. Each team consisted of about 4-8 people who designed and developed their idea for three days. The second day was all about work and food (lots of it!). On the third day of the event, the teams finished their work and presented their project.
My team and I worked on Frayer Meter – an online free service that suggests the most economical cellular plan according to one’s needs. While it’s not fully functional, we plan to continue working on it as we believe in it’s potential.
NOTE: If you don’t know Hebrew, feel free to use Google Translate when visiting links from this post.
I have received a request from someone that wants even more from my WordPress Custom Fields Plugin. He has a category called “videos” which has posts with YouTube videos embedded with some plugin. He wants to put the videos thumbnail as the post’s thumbnail.
First, how is the video embedded in the post? It uses the following syntax:
[youtube $video_key]
Now you can embed it like you would normally do.
Second, how do we get the thumbnail itself after we extracted the video key? We build the image’s URL with the following syntax:
http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/$video_key/default.jpg
Now, how do we put all of this together into a plugin that inserts the thumbnails?
You don’t have to because I have already done it for you.
- Visit the plugin page of YouTube Thumbnailer
- Download the plugin here
- Unzip it’s contents
- Upload the folder you unzipped to
/wp-content/plugins/using your favorite FTP client. - Go to your admin panel and activate the plugin called “Youtube Thumbnailer”
This plugin runs through the posts in your blog and if it finds a YouTube video embedded in a post it sets the thumbnail to be the video’s thumbnail.
That’s it, have fun playing with the configuration.
If you encounter any issues please comment/contact me.
As you can see in the plugin’s stats page, It currently has 1050 downloads!
Although the number may be not as big as other plugins (All in On SEO got over 2.5 million downloads), it means a lot to me. Every time you see numbers on the internet you don’t really think about them as you would outside the monitor. When viewing YouTube videos, if I see a video that has less then 5k views most of the times I won’t enter it and try to find another one with millions of views.
But when you think about the actual numbers it’s a huge amount of people sitting on their chair at home or at work, entering YouTube and watching the video. The same goes to plugin downloads, It’s really cool to know that my plugin helped over 300 (?) other people around the world that have their own website.
Update: It how has over 3000 downloads!
I want to thank everyone who sent feedback and feature requests for the post editor buttons plugin.
Because of you I have released 3 more version of mainly bug fixes to the plugin.
The feedback was send through comments on the blog and email messages to me, if you have something on your mind, do not hesitate.
Now you can download and use version 1.3 that works perfect.
By the way if you have an idea for a brand new plugin – contact me :)
Post Editor Buttons?
This plugins allows you to add your own buttons to the post edtor’s toolbar.
I’m talking about the buttons that you see above your content text area when editing posts (b,i,link,img,ul,li).
For example you can add a “h3″ button to make subheaders in your post.
There are virtually endless buttons you can add.
Screenshots
Here is the plugins interface:
This is the output of the above settings:
Download
You can visit the plugin’s WordPress.org page, download the plugin right away and upload it into your plugins directory.
Feedback
Comment whatever is on your mind.
The new version of Mass Custom Fields Manager is out!
Why do you need it? For example if you have custom fields that old plugins left of your posts and you want to get rid of them you can now do it with a click of a mouse. There are virtually endless occasions where this plugin can save you valuable time and effort.
I added new features that you asked for, fixed some minor bugs and did some code optimization.
If you encounter any bugs or have an idea on how to improve the plugin then I would love to hear it from you.
WordPress is a great search engine optimized system even right out of the box but there is a lot more to do if you want to improve it.
If you have a blog or a website, you probably want people to come and read what you have there and this is where the SEO comes into place.
About eighty percent of a website’s traffic (traffic = visitors) comes from search engines like Google. If you want to increase the traffic coming from search engines you need to rank higher in the results, in order to do so you need to search engine optimize your website.
The most important things you need to do with your WordPress website are:
- Use Pretty Permalinks.
What does this mean? If you take a look at the address bar when viewing this post (not through the homepage or archive pages) you will see that the address is not something likehttp://orenyomtov.com/?p=123(the default in WordPress), instead it’shttp://orenyomtov.com/wordpress-seo-tips.html. This way you have the keywords of your title also in the URL and that helps a lot. - Use All In One SEO Pack plugin and change the post title tag from
%post_title% - %blog_title%to%post_title% - %blog_title%.
Why? This swaps the blog’s name and the post’s name in the<title></title>tag. The first words in the title tag are more important from the last words so putting the post’s name first makes the page title more relevant to it’s content. e.g. beforeOren Yomtov’s Website - WordPress SEO Tips, afterWordPress SEO Tips - Oren Yomtov’s Website. - Use tags and categories wisely. They can contribute a lot to your search engine ranking as well as do nothing/hurt your ranking.
Don’t use too many tags (I say use about 4-8 tags per post), and when you do use them, try to use the same tags over and over again. WordPress Simple Tags plugin may help you with that. Try not to create more then 2 new tags for each post (of course when writing the first posts of the blog, almost all of the tags will be new). The same goes for categories, there is no need for lots empty/one post categories. When creating categories think what will help the user to navigate through your site and that will be the best for SEO most of the time. - Use Google Sitemap Generator plugin in order to auto generate the sitemap of your website each time you add a post/page. This helps Google to reach pages that they might not reach otherwise. After you install this plugin and make sure it works (check your sitemap.xml file), add & verify your website at Google Webmaster Tools and then submit the sitemap.
Remember, at the end of the day, your website is not for Google’s crawlers. It’s for humans, average users like you and me. So you need to keep the balance between what’s good for search engine optimizing, and what’s good for your readers.
My Mass Custom Fields Manager WordPress plugin just got his WordPress.org page at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mass-custom-fields-manager/
I’m still collecting feedback and notes so at the next version all the known bugs & issues will be taken care of.
