At the end of the line under each post’s title, I’ve added the word count, thanks to a simple WordPress plugin called Post Word Count. On the post I wrote today, Transcending Limiting Beliefs, it says “4,604 words,” for example. (Quite lengthy, I know. 
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The word counts also appear on printable views, at the end of the info line. Interesting statistics for your readers, I think. This is especially useful on category and archive pages, which only show excerpts.
I’ve created a WordPress plugin called Tweet This, which lets your readers share any of your posts on Twitter by clicking an icon that looks like a bird. It’s active on all Thripp.com and DaytonaState.org blogs! Try it out with the buttons here.
2008-10-08 Update: I removed this feature because it doesn’t work right as the comment count increases… I’ll have to change the math behind it some time.
I’ve added a value metric in the sidebar of every blog! Also, there are stats on the average number of words per post, number of tags and categories, and the number of threaded comments and pingbacks.
My blog is worth $829,191. This development blog is worth $7189. Daytona State College News is valued at $2440. VicAndHelen.com is a measly $15. My mom’s blog is worth $1270, while my cousin’s is just …
Tag, date, and category archives have a new format: they show the first 100 words of each post, including HTML and images. To read more you have to click “CONTINUE READING.”
Before, they were full-text just like regular pages, basically becoming a holding pen for posts. Most people browsing archive pages don’t want to read everything; they’re skimming for information. But the reason I refused to use WordPress’ the_excerpt tag is because it strips images or HTML. Since my Thripp.com blog is a photo-blog with the photos at the top of each post, that is unacceptable.
After much searching, I’ve found …
If you’re like me (I hope not), you have three Thripp.com blogs: The Thripp.com Development Blog (this one), Brilliant Photography, and Daytona State College News. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to feature content from one blog on another?
That’s just the feature I’ve added today, thanks to the Ada A Blog Recent Posts Widget plugin. You can add up to two other Thripp.com blogs to your sidebar under Design > Widgets, with the widgets, Thripp.com Blog and Thripp.com Blog 2. Here’s an example of mine, with my settings:
You can …
I discovered an annoying issue with the calendar widget on my Thripp.com blog today. I use the widget which is included in WordPress, WordPress MU, and Thripp.com, but for the Internet Explorer, Safari, and Camino browsers, it formats the pop-up titles with line breaks instead of commas. In Firefox it looks like this:
It’s pretty reasonable to use commas to separate post titles. But in Internet Explorer, WordPress generates the page using line breaks instead:
That makes sense, since Firefox can’t handle line breaks in title tags. Unfortunately, …
Thripp.com is now 30% faster than I said it was in my previous post. Brilliant Photography gets the biggest chunk of the speed boost, because it was the slowest to start.
All the HTML is now one line. That doesn’t yield a big speed improvement, but it’s just cool. The big thing is that I turned small images into CSS sprites and merged all the JavaScript files into one honker (148KB). That file is compressed with gzip if your browser allows it, and all the current ones do, so the bandwidth hit is only 45KB. Still big, I know, …
I made the sidebar 30 pixels wider by taking away space from the content. The blog area is still wide at 778 pixels, so it doesn’t hurt anything. This makes a big difference because the sidebar was too wide before. You can give your categories longer names without the names wrapping, and I added the count for each one in parenthesis next to it, thanks to wp_list_categories with the argument, show_count=1 in WordPress MU.
I’m taking advantage of the extra space by clarifying things. Instead of “Search Here” and “Search All,” the search engines say “Search This Blog” and “Search All …
Check out the new background for Thripp.com. Instead of light green, it’s a light green subtle mesh pattern.
If you don’t see it on the page, refresh the stylesheet in your browser’s cache by pressing Shift + F5.
The new background is nice on the eyes and more interesting. Enjoy. 
I spent the last six hours working on a redesign for Thripp.com. While I normally deal with programming, this time it was all CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Check this out; the boring old design:
And the bold new vision:
What do you think? I like it a lot. The new header and borders solidify olive green as the Thripp.com color, and the borders are pleasing to the eye for containing the content. The sidebar’s text isn’t so squished, links are nice and bold there, visited links go brighter green, the header is white on dark olive-green, …
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