Ok so the only person that I know of to be “long awaiting” this plugin is myself. I’ve had it on the drawing board for over a year now.

I worked on a commercial project a few years back that built and utilized a database of events throughout history to display “Today in History” results. That venture slowly went belly-up so here I was with this database of Tens of Thousands of events that had been so painstakingly added to this database, so what could I do with them.

Well today is the answer and fulfillment of that question. I give you the Today In History Widget so that you can display interesting facts and figures for your readers. So I hope you will enjoy this plugin, and if you do feel free to send us your questions or comments, and if it is working well for you I hope you would consider donating to help further the development.

I know, I know the last three or four posts have been about updates to our Social Crowd wordpress plugin… Don’t worry there will be more of them as we have been pretty active in it’s development over the last several days/weeks.

This release fixes a minor bug in the plugin’s admin UI as well as providing some additional functionality to address some confusion. The confusion being caused because the Profile ID fields for each social network were built to receive the actual Profile ID or Unique Identifier for the given social network. The example under each field showed an example url from each social network that had the ID you should enter bolded. But after receiving some feedback from users, it became apparent that some if not many users were inserting the whole URL rather than just the ID. So some code was added to accept either the ID or the full URL.

I hope this makes the plugin easier to use.

On the heels of a major Social Crowd plugin update last week we have a new release to increase the capabilities of this remarkable little plugin.

One of the most frequently requested networks for addition to Social Crowd, was the Linked In Business Social Network. And after reviewing copious amounts of documentation we found an easy way to add support for that network.

So that’s about it folks, you can now show off the number of Connections that you have made with the Linked In Network right on your WordPress homepage or sidebar. But we should note that the nature of this addition (like the Google+ integration) is in a BETA state, and should perform for you, but if you have any problems please feel free to Contact Us and let us know so we can address the issue.

On the heels of the maintanance release of our Browser Blocker Plugin, we announce the major and long awaited update to our Social Crowd plugin.

After many months and numerous requests from Social Crowd users, we have worked hard to make this amazing plugin even easier to use for everyone out there.

When we initially designed this plugin it was aimed at theme designers or advanced developers that would integrate the social crowd stats into their designs, so it came with no default styling or graphics. But after several emails from clients it was apparent that there were many users that wanted to use the stats, but not have to worry about learning how to integrate the php functions with their theme/site.

Additionally there have been many requests for additional social networks, and although we have not thus far been able to fulfill all of the requested social network integrations, this release is our first effort at expanding the initial set of social networks available with this plugin.

Social Crowd 0.5 enter stage right.

New Features:

Google+ Stats (Beta Support) – This will allow you to display the number of people that you have in your circles, as well as the number of people that have you in their circles. It is beta support because Google doesn’t officially provide a way to capture this data, so if they decide to change the main page layout it could break this feature.

Social Crowd Stats Widget – Lots of questions have come in asking why the stats and icons didn’t show up once the plugin was installed. Well as noted above the plugin was initially for theme developers that could utilize the plugins php functions directly. But it became increasingly evident that this was not the core group that wanted to use this plugin.

So with this release there are included two separate plugins, a basic and an advanced plugin, the basic plugin is straight forward, with very few options to configure. The advanced plugin gives the user a much deeper level of control over the content of the widget.

Short Code Support – Yes a shortcode has been created that will allow the user to display the stats they want anywhere on any post or page that they create inside wordpress. Anywhere that you can use a Short Code you can use this code to simplify your life.

Well there you have it, the major changes to the Social Crowd Plugin. Get it today to start growing your Social Crowd.

Additionally some comments and FAQ’s were added to the Readme file that should help with the usage of the Browser Blocker Plugin.

Have fun, and enjoy blocking browsers.

Download Browser Blocker

Get Additional Info

Punctuality, one of the most often praised qualities in individuals, is also one of those that most of us lack. But when trying to give a good impression and make things happen, it is probably best to be on ones best behavior, put the best foot forward, and not miss your appointment with your dream client, or that great job interview. Anyway you slice it, it’s better to be on time for things, than apologizing because you showed up late.

Well Pester is a nice little Mac Utility that attempts to help you make the best first impression possible. This app has a single purpose, to remind you about a single event (what ever that event may be) and then it is left up to you to make the most of that information.

Once you have entered in the event and when you want to be reminded about it Pester sits nicely in your dock, but always has a reminder of how long you have remaining until the anticipated time.

Then when the appointed moment arrives Pester can do a number of assorted actions to GET YOUR ATTENTION and make sure you don’t blow this.

It can jump in the dock, notify you with Growl, play an alert sound, display an alert dialog box, or speak a message using OS X’s built in text to speech engine.

Needless to say Pester takes away your excuses for your lateness. So download it today and arrive on time.

Download Pester

I know what you’re thinking, why should I care about Regular Expressions? I failed in math and don’t like Simple or Advance expressions, so why would I care about regular ones? Well now is your chance to learn something, and it doesn’t really have anything that you will recognize that deals with math… well maybe.

Anyhoo, Regular Expressions or Regex for short, are snippets of symbols that represent the type of content you would like to find within a given body of text or string. They can be very handy, and are extremely useful for developers that are trying to parse content out of a mass of other content. But while they are useful (at least for me) they could be a pain to try and figure out what expression will get to your specific content so you can get on with conquering the world. I’ve used a myriad of online tools to help me with this process, but it is always a seeming inconvienience to have to remember where “that” website is to work out my regex statement.

But no more, a great little app is available called Reggy, this little app gives you the ability to insert a segment of content and then play with your regular expression until you get it to grab exactly what you are looking for. Brilliant if you ask me, I just don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. hehe. So take a look at this very simple but powerful tool that should speed up your development workflow.

Reggy Project Homepage

Download Reggy

When I say Lightbox the word may conjour up many different images in your mind, possibly a white highly lit background to photograph objects on, perhaps even a literal box with a light in it like those pictured to the left (Gus Modern Lightbox), or as in the context of this post, a website feature that brings the chosen content front and center before the user.

Lightboxes are all the rage, and most web designers find some use for them on their websites so that they can make effective usage of available pixels, get clients to interact more effectively, or just plain make their site pop with some engaging effects. Whatever your usage may be, lightboxes are definitely a ubiquitous part of the Web 2.0 experience.

With that in mind there are also a myriad of different options out there, and it can be very difficult to find the right one that works just right for your situation. I have been very grateful for the hard work that was put in over at planetozh.com for their creation of the very useful Lightbox Clones Matrix, but unfortunately that resource has not kept up with all the changes that have happened in the Lightbox world, so I have taken it upon myself to find and review many of the Lightboxes that have been updated or newly released since the publishing of that great matrix.

So with that let’s get to it, so in no specific order, other then the order that I add them let’s take a look at the top 49+ Lightbox Clones and what makes them tick.

Top 10 jQuery Lightbox Clones

Top 10 MooTools Lightbox Clones

Top 10 Prototype Lightbox Clones

Top 10 Lightboxes that use their own Javascript Effects Library

Top 9 YUI (Yahoo) Lightbox Clones

WordPress 3.3 has just recently been released, and with that release comes the ability to make your content a little more… timeless. For years the basic permalink structure on wordpress contained the year and month, or possibly even the day of your blog posts. But not all blog posts are time dependent. Unless you are a News organization or have a very specific reason for having information on your site that is specifically tied to a date, you probably don’t want your information to be tied to a date. And research shows that when people see dates in urls on google or other search engines, regardless of how relevant the content may be (because it’s timeless info) the users tend to pick other options that don’t look so… well… old.

But with the advent of wordpress 3.3 you now have the ability to have just the post name/title as the permalink structure element.

But obviously you can’t just make the change without loosing all the incoming links that are pointed at posts using the old permalink structure. Well fortunately for all of us Joost de Valk over at Yoast.com has built a quick and easy solution for you.

Use this tool that he has built to generate a 301 redirect line to add to your .htaccess file, after adding it to your .htaccess file Login to your backend and change the permalink settings to the “Post Name” option, and you are all set. Timeless content is now YOURS!!

Original Post on Yoast.com

Ok, so you’re using your mac with all it’s apple goodness, and attempt to connect to another computer using the built in ScreenSharing capability. Your computer prompts you for a username and password to authenticate with the remote computer with a neet little login window. You put your login credentials in to the provided boxes and hit “connect”, immediately a little spinning wheel appears along with a “Connecting” message. You wait, and wait, and nothing seems to be happening. You attempt to connect again and you get right in to your screensharing session, but that “Connecting” window just keeps hanging around, and even when it’s not in focus it is still overlaying all other windows on your computer. It becomes rather annoying, and finally you shut off your computer out of desperation and restart. Whew the infamous box has been removed, but you also have to reopen all of your programs and documents to get back to a productive state.

I’ve been there myself many times, it is both annoying and frustrating. But there is a sure cure, besides restarting your computer. This little window is the “NetAuthAgent” and can easily be terminated from the Activity Monitor. Here’s how to do it.

From GUI:

1. Launch the Activity Monitor program (in Applications/Utilities).
2. In the Process Name list, look for “NetAuthAgent”. It may show as “Not Responding”.
3. Select NetAuthAgent, and then click Quit Process (the red stop sign button at the top of the Activity Monitor window). Then, click Force Quit.

From Terminial:

1. ps ax | grep NetAuthAgent
2. kill <pid-of-the-process-found-above>

or the Single Command From The Terminal:

$ killall NetAuthAgent

And there you have it, now you can get back to work and share screens all day long!

Visit the: Original forum post that gave me the lead I have just posted about