Thripp.com is a new WordPress MU-powered social network focused on blogging, with the goal of harnessing technology to work with you—to enable your creativity by empowering your voice, while backing you with a community of supporters so you never have to go it alone. I just launched this on 2008 May 24, so we have a long road ahead. Join if you want to build a community that trusts it’s citizens.

Right now, the community is mostly me. I read everything posted and am active at my own Thripp.com blog, so you can count on the site progressing.

So far, I’ve implemented basic networking features: comment threading with email alerts, a friends system, subscriptions, and comment tracking, a forum, a blogs directory, collaborative blogging, mirroring to LiveJournal, Facebok photos integration, privacy controls, sitewide latest comments and posts lists, and social bookmarking. I’m planning to adapt BuddyPress to add more stuff, once it’s released.

Read the features page for lots more. But there are no themes. Just the one you see now.

You can register and start blogging, or you can post to the forum and comment on most blogs as a guest.

Featured blogs:
What’s life all about? by Hong
Photography by JT
Brilliant Photography by Richard X. Thripp [My site, with special features not yet available to the community.]
Daytona State College News by Richard X. Thripp [At DaytonaState.org yet on the Thripp.com network.]

Thanks for visiting!
Richard

Stats: Thripp.com has 626 blogs and 772 users.

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. )

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 released version 1.1.1 of Tweet This, and upgraded everyone here. Now, the post title appears in the Twitter post box when you click any of the links around Thripp.com and DaytonaState.org.

Also, you can configure or disable Tweet This on your blog by going to Settings > Tweet This. You get the same config page that you would on your own WordPress installation, which looks like this:

This version caches URLs, so your Thripp.com blog will load faster now. You can change the URL service (several are available, including TinyURL) for your blog, restrict links to single views, exclude the post title, or remove the links entirely. Enjoy!

I’ve put into place the final list of reserved names for Thripp.com. These are the names you cannot register as the part before “.thripp.com”. All these names are also reserved at DaytonaState.org.

beta browse chat email example f forum forums help join lib library mail my news photos photos-g2 proxy richardx rx rxthripp s search shop thripp tiny tn today u www x you z

beta.thripp.com: Reserved for beta testing.

browse.thripp.com, news.thripp.com, today.thripp.com: Reserved for a community zeitgeist.

chat.thripp.com: Reserved for possible chatrooms.

email.thripp.com, mail.thripp.com: In use for Thripp.com email accounts (let me know if you want one).

example.thripp.com: Reserved for demonstrations.

f.thripp.com, forum.thripp.com, forums.thripp.com: f.thripp.com is in use for the community forums, and in the future, forum and forums.thripp.com may redirect there.

help.thripp.com: Reserved for possible help pages.

join.thripp.com: Reserved as a possible registration point.

lib.thripp.com, library.thripp.com: In use / reserved for The Thripp Public Library.

my.thripp.com, u.thripp.com, you.thripp.com: Reserved for user homepages.

photos.thripp.com, photos-g2.thripp.com: In use for my photo archive + Gallery2 backend.

proxy.thripp.com: In use for a simple web proxy with PHProxy. May be developed in the future.

richardx.thripp.com, rx.thripp.com, rxthripp.thripp.com, thripp.thripp.com: Reserved for me.

s.thripp.com, search.thripp.com: Reserved for a possible search engine.

shop.thripp.com: Reserve for possible shops.

tiny.thripp.com: Reserved for an image or file-hosting service. A working demo is in place.

tn.thripp.com: In use for thumbnailing services.

www.thripp.com: Reserved, because a lot of people type www before URLs.

x.thripp.com: Renamed, permanently redirects to th8.us.

z.thripp.com: In use for my URL obfuscation service.

I could’ve reserved a lot more names, but there’s no need to. If someone develops something great at blogs.thripp.com or some other great domain, I don’t want to be the one to stop him.

I’ve repealed the previous list:

- about account accounts activate activation admin admins administrator atom beta blog blogs cgi-bin comments confirm directory donate features feed feeds forum forums g2data g2queue help home icons includes index invite join latest-comments latest-posts lib list log-in log-out login logout mail main members mission news page pages photos post posts profiles register repository richardxthripp-files richardxthripp-photos root rss rthripp rx sign-up signup subdoms the-mission thripp tn today users web wp-activate wp-admin wp-atom wp-content wp-includes wp-login wp-signup www x

A lot of interesting names are now open. My favorite is -.thripp.com. Yes, you can register for it. Don’t waste it; use it for something great!

Finding your name

Just type in yourname.thripp.com or yourname.daytonastate.org into your web browser’s address bar. If it’s available, you’ll see the registration page with the name already filled in.

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.

Check out the Thripp.com and DaytonaState.org registration pages. Signing up for a new blog just got easier: you can set your password right from the page:

Before, you’d be emailed a random password, but that isn’t convenient. With this solution we have the best of both worlds: you can leave the fields blank to get a random password by email, or you can fill them in to choose your password right away, and it will still be emailed to you for your records.

Enjoy!

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 $73. A new blog is worth $1.

What’s your blog worth? Check your sidebar now. If you haven’t posted in a couple months, you’ll have to make a new post or re-save an old one for the stats to be right.

How are these stats calculated? By multiplying the blog’s word count by the tangent of the number of comments in degrees plus 0.1 times the number of spam comments, all divided by the cosine of the number of threaded comments in degrees, then flipped to positive if negative, of course!

Enjoy, and keep blogging away.

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 a better way: a plugin called The Excerpt Reloaded. It lets you customize the excerpts by using a new function, the_excerpt_reloaded, instead of the_excerpt. I’ve customized and activated it for all blogs on Thripp.com and DaytonaState.org.

I dropped the file in the mu-plugins folder, after removing the changelog to possibly save resources. Since the Thripp.com network only has one theme, I just edited index.php to use the_excerpt_reloaded on archives and category/tag pages. I don’t use separate templates for those pages; I just use conditional tags in one index.php file.

if ( is_category() || is_archive() )

the_excerpt_reloaded(100, ‘<a><abbr><acryonym><b><blockquote><code><em><i><strike><strong><u><img><p><ul><li><script><h1><h2><h3><h4><h5><h6>’, ‘content’, true, ‘… CONTINUE READING’, false, 1, true, false, ‘p’, ‘Click to see whole entry.’, 1);

else the_content(__(’… CONTINUE READING’));

It’s as simple as that! Check out an example here. This is easier to skim, looks good, and will help our Google ranks.

Remember that when you write or edit a post or page, you can enter your own excerpt under Advanced > Excerpt, and that will be used instead. I never enter an excerpt… I don’t think it’s worth the effort. But you can if you’d like.

Check out Comments > My Comments on your blog’s menu, thanks to this WordPress MU plugin. I removed the one under Dashboard, since this one seems better. You see the comments you’ve made at other blogs recently, and comments after them.

We already have a good comment threading/email system, but this is good if you’ve just forgotten where you’ve commented recently. You can click “dismiss” on any comment to remove it from the page (the comment won’t be delete though; only the owner of the blog you commented on can do that).

Also: I removed Design > Themes, because there is only one theme (this one) anyway. Now Design only has Widgets underneath it.

Check this out:

That’s what you’ll see on your blog when you’re logged in. You can post right from the home page! Sure, you can load up the write post screen, but that’s slower and more complicated (WordPress MU’s backend is a bit bloated). When you click in a box, the default text is highlighted so you can type right over it. You can save your post as a draft, in which case you’ll be redirected to see it in the list on your drafts page, or you can publish it immediately.

From the home page you can set the title, tags, and post content. This is text and HTML only; no graphical editing. For that, click “Write” like before. This just makes it easy to make quick updates. Posts get posted to the default category; if you don’t like that you can click “Save as draft,” then click the title in the drafts list and set the category from that page, the regular edit screen.

The box will appear for any blog you’re an author for, only while you’re logged in, below the header but above the content. Enjoy!

This is for both Thripp.com and DaytonaState.org users, because the sites are integrated.

I’m delighted to announce the addition of DaytonaState.org as the complement to Thripp.com! Thripp.com will now be called the Thripp.com network wherever possible, which is inclusive of the new site.

I’d been blogging at Daytona State College News (DaytonaState.org) for a while about the school, but now you can actually blog over there just like Thripp.com; you can be You.DaytonaState.org. Sign up here: daytonastate.org/wp-signup.php.

DaytonaState.org is the only online community dedicated to Daytona State College. If you’re a student, faculty member, or just love the college, join today! Your account is for life. I’ll be reading everything posted just like I do at Thripp.com, and commenting on what I find interesting. You can too if you watch the latest posts list.

This is totally linked to Thripp.com; you’ll appear in the directory, latest posts, etc., your account is for both sites, and both sites share the same code, theme, and database (with some conditional code to distinguish them).

Feel free to start a blog at DaytonaState.org, Thripp.com, or both! I suggest you keep them under one username. You can have as many blogs as you want, in case you didn’t know. You can click “Join the fun: create a blog!” in the footer when you’re logged in to add another.

One important note: you have the same username and password at Thripp.com AND DaytonaState.org, but the sites don’t share cookies. So you have to log in at both. If you’re on your home computer, check “remember me” at each site when logging in and you won’t have to deal with it again.

Yes, you read right! I just added this feature, and redesigned the footers to use the same color schemes as the headers. To add text or HTML to your header, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your Thripp.com account.
2. From your blog, click Design > Widgets in the toolbar above the header.
3. Click the drop-down box that defaults to “1: Sidebar.” Select “2: Header,” then click Show.
4. Look for the widget “Text: Arbitrary text or HTML” in the list on the left. Click Add.
5. In the blue box that appears on the right, click “Edit” and then type whatever text or HTML you want.

For your footer, do the same except select “3: Footer” in step 3. You can also add text to your sidebar (this has been available since the beginning) by skipping step 3.

The text or HTML you enter will appear below your blog’s title in the header, or for the footer, below the normal footer text. You can use links and HTML and images too. If you don’t know HTML, links look like this:

<a href=”http://thripp.com/”>Click here to go to Thripp.com</a>

Images look like this:

<img src=”http://thripp.com/someimage.jpg” alt=”Thripp.com” />

And image links are this:

<a href=”http://thripp.com/”><img src=”http://thripp.com/someimage.jpg” alt=”Thripp.com” /></a>

I used Thripp.com for this example, but you can replace the link in the a href tag and the image in the img src tag with whatever you’d like.

You can also add any of the sidebar widgets to your header or footer, but that’s an unsupported feature. It won’t look good because the widgets are designed for the narrow width of the sidebar.

Check out an example of the header text at Daytona State College News. I also have a notice on this development blog for now.

This is a feature I’ve been using on Brilliant Photography for a while, but I wanted to make it available to the community. Unfortunately I can’t let you replace your blog’s name with a banner like I do, but you can add a banner below with HTML in the text widget. Enjoy!

I’ve been working hard on redesigning the Thripp.com comments system as of late. I don’t have a screen cap of the old one, but it was ugly. All the basic functionality was there, but the colors and dividers and layout and sorting wasn’t up to snuff with the new design. All that changes today. This is my new vision for blog commenting:

This is my gift to everyone on Thripp.com. Do you not see the beauty?

Let me tell you the features:

• The same wonderful threading interface through a modified version of WP Thread Comment.

• REPLY TO THIS buttons open a JavaScript reply window right below the thread. Use the links to reply to a particular post.

• If the original commenter entered an email address, he’ll be emailed your reply.

• Comments are newest to oldest by thread (yes!), with comments in green and pingbacks in blue. Pingbacks are always listed at the end, because comments are more important, but they’re newest to oldest in their own group too.

• Within a thread (comments that are all replies to above comments with the reply buttons), comments are oldest to newest for continuity. The best of both worlds!

• Multiple levels of nesting; up to 14 deep. Here’s an example. It looks totally cool at the deeper levels, and nothing breaks.

• If the person has no avatar from gravatar.com for his email address, a green box saying “No Avatar” is shown.

• Anonymous comments are allowed, but off by default. You can enable them for you Thripp.com blog under Settings > Discussions, by unchecking the boxes requiring the email and name. I do that on my blogs.

• My posts appear in bold red because I’m the founder of Thripp.com and I’m special. Everyone else is green.

• If you enter a website, your Gravatar is a link too! More people will click, because clicking it takes them right to your site, just like clicking your name.

• The date and time is a permalink to the comment. It’s just the same page with the in-page link, but is useful for sharing the comment with others.

• Beautiful colors and margins! I’ve spent hours tinkering with this and measuring everything down to the pixel. And yes, the layout is fluid and works in Internet Explorer 6.

• Front-end management is now fully implemented. This is the coolest thing for me. See those buttons saying EDIT and DELETE for each comment and pingback? They really work! They only appear when you’re logged in and at your blog. The delete button has a pop-up confirmation to be safe.

• Those boxes with the numbers puzzle some people. What they do is to let you thread a comment to a parent comment after the fact. The comment ID is shown in the box. In the above image, if I wanted to thread my ” ” comment to the testing comment rather than the explanation comment, I’d just enter “264″ in the box and hit Enter on the keyboard and it would be done.

• Pingbacks have a nice custom image saying “Thripp.com Pingback.” I like the colors on them too; they’re complementary to the greens.

• Threaded comments are in white while the originals (highest parent comments) are in green, so they catch your eye while scrolling.

And that’s a wrap. This applies to all old comments too, in case you’re wondering. I couldn’t get pagination in this release, but you can have hundreds of comments on one page with no problems. Here’s a post with 142, for example.

Enjoy the beautiful comments! I know I will. I’d be doing this work if I had just my blog but it’s great to be doing it in a way that benefits hundreds of people at once.

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 get the blog ID in the footer; it’s displayed for each blog there. This is better and faster than the RSS widget because it taps directly into the Thripp.com database and doesn’t show sticky posts first. I use the WP-Sticky plugin for all my blogs, which you can activate on Thripp.com under Manage > PLUGINS. It lets you pin a post to the top of the blog, like I do for the mission statement here and the intro on my own. Unfortunately, the post also appears pinned to the top of the RSS feed, but the Thripp.com Blog widget gets around it by fetching the posts by date.

If you’re wondering, the plugin only allows you to show one blog. I bumped this up to two by creating a duplicate copy of the PHP scripts and adding “2″ onto the end of all the functions and variables.

You can also feature another Thripp.com blog with this addition. Enjoy your new sharing options!

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, as you may know, I use WP Super Cache. If the first visitor to a page is using Internet Explorer, his hit generates the cached copy. For later visitors in Firefox, the titles then look like this:

Bad bad bad. There’s no space or comma or line break or anything. It’s illegible.

The solution is to serve the same formatting to all browsers, so caching is a non-issue. I don’t care for the line breaks anyway; everything should have commas. I found the culprit in wp-includes/general-template.php. This is in WordPress MU 1.5.1, but it’s the same in WordPress 2.5.1 and the new 2.6 series:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’) !== false || strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']), ‘camino’) !== false || strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']), ’safari’) !== false)
$ak_title_separator = “\n”;
else
$ak_title_separator = ‘, ‘;

Change that to this:

$ak_title_separator = ‘, ‘;

Simple. I’m surprised no one else is talking about it. I guess I’m the only one who is annoyed enough.

If you want the best of both worlds, use this instead:

$ak_title_separator = ‘, \n’;

It’ll look right in Firefox and the same as before in Internet Explorer (line breaks), except with a comma after each title but before the line break.

The problem with this is that I’m hacking the core files, so I’ll have to re-apply the updates by hand when I upgrade WordPress MU. Thripp.com is on 1.5.1 now (2.5.1 in regular WP), but I’m skipping 2.6 to wait for 2.7 for Thripp.com. Hopefully the developers will have more bugs worked out, with new ones to go along.

Surely there’s some way to do this with a plugin outside the core, but since it’s such a small thing I’m not going to look.

Your Thripp.com calendar widgets can now look nice for everyone. You can add one under Design > Widgets.

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, but considering it contains prototype.js (used for the clickable smilies in commenting screens, 124KB), the media player (check out JT’s blog for an example), the pop-up thumbnail effect (this blog, my blog, and the clickable smilies effect, that’s pretty good. Lazy loading might be better, but getting it out of the way at once reduces HTTP requests and 45KB is not much on a modern connection. Your browser caches it, too.

The site is fastest if you’re not a member, because then I can use caching and gzip to the max. If you are logged in, I can’t because the page has to be dynamically compiled each time for the links in the sidebar and the administrative controls above the header. If you make a comment, the cache is invalidated temporarily for that comment to appear, and then you don’t get compiled pages anymore. It’s still fast, just not as fast. 99% of visitors actually don’t interact at all, so most of you will be enjoying uber speed.

I already had caching and gzipping; today’s improvements are mainly on the client side. Note that pages aren’t cached or compressed till the 2nd visitor in a 24 hour period visits a particular page. JavaScript and CSS is always compressed, though.

The Google search box in the sidebar is faster to load, because I switched from the fancy JavaScript version to the plain HTML + CSS one Google offers. And I made the Google logo part of the CSS sprites file.

So the typical page is 65KB (20KB HTML + 45KB JS), plus the sprites image file (10KB), plus background (15KB), plus Google AdSense ads (who knows how much). Everything except the first 65KB can be loaded in the background, so a figure for a typical visitor, pages load in 2 seconds. That’s pretty good. It’s not fast like Google, but probably the fastest WordPress blog around. And that’s for everyone.

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 Blogs.” Instead of “Entries feed” we have “Entries RSS Feed.” Instead of “157 Spams” it says “157 Spam Comments.”

The text in the header, sidebar, and content areas have more padding. It looks better and is easier on the eyes, with a bit of white space between the paragraphs and the green border.

Ads appear on posts 1, 2, and 3 on each page, instead of 1, 5, and 10. This should make more money as it puts them center stage. Money is good because it lets me keep Thripp.com running. The second ad has a new design with a dark background like the header.

I cleaned up my HTML; Thripp.com is completely valid now, as are all the blogs by default. This doesn’t stop you from creating malformed HTML in your blog posts or comments, however.

I gave my own blog a facelift. The thumbnails in the gallery and for the random photos in the header are nice and big now. Some time I’ll have to let Thripp.com members customize their blog headers. WordPress MU has an API for that I hear.

Printable pages have bigger titles and better margins. I took the ads off them too (they never printed but were just for display).

Thripp.com and its blogs are now about 30% faster. I centralized the JavaScript and CSS files under http://thripp.com instead of each blog, so your browser can cache those when you browse different blogs on the network. Also I consolidated the JavaScript scripts down to 2 files from 4, gzipped them, and did the same for the CSS, going from 4 files to 1. Fewer HTTP requests means faster pages, and we saved about 60KB with the compression. All HTML is already compressed, but I pushed it further by removing blank lines and tabs from the source code. As always, Thripp.com checks the HTTP headers your browser sends to see if accept-encoding: gzip is there. If it isn’t, you get uncompressed files, maintaining backward-compatibility with old browsers.

<pressRelease> These small but incremental improvements represent my continuing dedication to Thripp.com and its users, browser and access compatibility, and standards adherence, firmly establishing the network as an unrestricted resource for all.</pressRelease>

Enjoy!

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, and the header titles are

big and bold

instead of small and subdued. Outside the body, the background is light green instead of bright white.

This is a fluid layout. It’s optimized for 1024×768, but larger is fine. I browse on my 1440×900 monitor most of the time. The body of the text doesn’t go above 800 pixels, because it’s hard to follow lines of text if you go bigger. But unlike other sites which hinder readers with small monitors or ones who don’t browse full-screen, Thripp.com does not. You can read your favorite blogs comfortably even at 640×480.

This is the first redesign since I launched Thripp.com (then richardxthripp.com) three months ago. Good design makes everything enjoyable. I just found that out. Hopefully this one is a good one. I’m enjoying it over at Brilliant Photography.

Check out the stylesheet if you want to see my technical work. This was a lot of trail and error for me, because it’s my first serious work with web design.

Also, the ads now look the same in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Before, they were 19 pixels too high in Internet Explorer. Really, they’d be butted up right against the tags list. The ad is a paragraph floating with CSS, but I can’t get IE to respect the margins. Can you believe this is how I fixed it?

<!–[if IE]><img src=”http://lib.thripp.com/images/shim.gif” alt=”" width=”1″ height=”19″ /><br /><![endif]–>

Talk about a massive kludge. Conditional code and a spacer GIF. So old-fashioned. It works, so I’m happy.

Enjoy the new layout. I’m open to comments and suggestions if you don’t. This affects not only the 181 Thripp.com blogs, but also DaytonaState.org and VicAndHelen.com, which are part of the Thripp.com network.

I just made a decision: it’s Thripp.com now, not thripp.com. I like the capitalized address better. Never did when it was richardxthripp.com, but it seems right now.

Enjoy the new address! Let me know if you spot pages that have the lowercase version.

I changed the code that displays the tag list for each post. It looks like this now:

<?php $posttags = get_the_tags(); if ($posttags) { echo ‘with these tags: ‘; { foreach($posttags as $tag) { if ($tag->count > 1) echo ‘<a href=”‘.get_tag_link($tag).’” title=”‘.$tag->count.’ entries”>’.$tag->name.’</a>, ‘; else echo $tag->name.’, ‘; } } } ?>

What does that mean? Now, if the post is the only post with that tag, no link is displayed. Your readers’ time will not be wasted any longer. If there’s more than one tagged post, the link is shown like before, but now the number of entries is shown as the link title attribute. If you hover the mouse over the tag “posts” in this post, it will show “13 entries”, for example.

This is a small improvement, but life is nothing but a series of small improvements. The issue of the pointless tag pages started bothering me recently, so I’m glad to have it solved.

I have two announcements today.

First, I’ve moved the forum to it’s own account. It was at thripp.com/forum, but now it’s at f.thripp.com/f. I think that’s better in the long range for thripp.com. There could even be a blog about the forum at f.thripp.com someday. All the old links redirect. I couldn’t put it at the root as Simple:Press Forum (the software behind the forum) won’t allow it, but I’m starting to like f.thripp.com/f. No messages or users were lost. Let me know if you spot any problems.

Second, my home-grown URL trimming service, x.thripp.com, has been renamed th8.us, and the URL has changed to match. x.thripp.com is 12 characters, but th8.us is 6; quite a savings. The Twitter support has taken a step up, because the “Tweet this” links now use the Twitter API. Click one, and if you’re logged in at Twitter, you’ll go right there with the shortened URL already entered in the message box. Plus, by using the www. prefix instead of http://, the URLs are 16 characters instead of the former 25. So you have more space to write about the post, and less space wasted by the URL.

For all you unawares, Twitter lets you write short messages in a “micro-blog” format. Each post is limited to 140 characters. You can link, but if the URL is 80 characters it counts for that. Trimmed URLs are essential.

th8.us links use subdomains instead of subdirectories now. So you get cool links like oorph.th8.us instead of the old x.thripp.com/oorph. All old x.thripp.com links will continue working forever.

I’ve created a new blog, Daytona State College News, at DaytonaState.org. I’ll be posting news and information about Daytona State College. The cool thing is even though this is on a domain name, it’s still part of the thripp.com and you can log-in with the same account. You can even contribute posts as I’m using the add users widget.

I’m using the Multi-Site Manager plugin to keep it the same as thripp.com. Check it out, and expect some great posts by me every once in a while.

I added a spam counter to every blog’s sidebar, below the comments count. This is cool, because it shows your readers how much spam you get. The sidebar for this development blog says “21 Comments” and “120 Spams.” I get a whopping amount of spam at Brilliant Photography by Richard X. Thripp, so my counter looks more like this: “4,411 Spams.”

All thripp.com blogs have spam protection through Akismet, so we should be able to stand up to any amount of spam (unless the spammers overload my web server). Make sure to check and clear out your spam queue under Comments > Akismet Spam every once in a while. Enjoy the new counter! It’s going to be addictive watching it go up on my blog.

I switched from the new version to the ShareThis Classic version, which opens a new page like this instead of a JavaScript pop-up. I like the new design a lot better because it’s more clean an intuitive. Now, the ShareThis link for all your posts and pages is next to “Printable Version,” instead of being floating above it which didn’t make sense. Enjoy.