The manual Excerpt in WordPress. What, why, how, tips and plugins.: Demetris has a written a very nice, well illustrated and explained tutorial on the WordPress excerpt and how to manipulate it to take full advantage of it.

WordPress excerpts, which are not excerpts, make a WordPress site easier to browse and its content easier to discover. In addition, when also used as META descriptions, good excerpts bring more and better traffic from search engines.

Topics discussed include:

1. What is the WordPress excerpt
2. Why write excerpts in WordPress
3. How to write excerpts
4. WordPress Excerpt Editor
5. Excerpts as META descriptions
6. Notes, Miscellaneous
7. Links

In Demetris’ style, the tutorial is very well written and well fleshed out.

Response for WordCamp Denver has been overwhelming. We sold out last week, but thanks to some thoughtful people letting us know they won’t be able to attend, we have 54 more full tickets available. Based on the e-mail requests we’ve received since we sold out, I expect they will go quickly.

Our morning venue space is limited (by fire codes) to 276 people. However, we’ll be splitting up into two locations for the separate blogger and technical sessions in the afternoon. We still have space in both of these areas, so we’ve created the “afternoon only” tickets. These are available immediately, and I believe we’ll be able to make as many of these available as necessary. Please note, these tickets do not include a t-shirt or access to the morning sessions.

A couple of notes:

• There will be an after-party at the Paramount Cafe - should be a good chance to socialize and network after a long day of “camping”.
• We’ve opened up a Moderator instance so that you can post questions for the presenters to consider. You can also vote on questions people have already posted. I’m curious to see how this works.
• We are still looking for folks to record the event (in HD please). Get in touch if you are interested.
• There are tickets still available for the VIP (speakers/sponsors) dinner on Friday night - looking forward to seeing some folks there.

It’s great to see so much interest in WordPress here in the Denver/Boulder area. We’ll be sure to book a larger venue for WordCamp Denver 2010.

ShareThis

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Public Post Preview

Enables you to give a link to anonymous users for public preview of a post before it is published.

Add Twitter RSS

Adds a link to your Twitter feed in the header of your WordPress Blog.

Favicon Generator

This plugin will allow you to upload an image file of your choosing to be converted to a favicon for your WordPress site.

AJAX Login Widget++

A clean AJAX-based login, registration and lost password retrieval widget.

Wordpress/Plugin Upgrade Time Out Plugin

Wordpress/Plugin Upgrade Time Out Plugin allows you to modify the files download time out value (mainly used for upgrade of Wordpress and Plugins).

WoW-Character-Display

The WoW-Character-Display plugin shows many informations from the WoW armory in a widget or post. Highly configurable and for multiple characters!

oxyXML generator

This plugin creates a XML file from your last posts.

WP Favorite Posts

Allows users to add favorite posts. This plugin use cookies for saving data so unregistered users can favorite a post.

Updated Plugins

Branded Admin 

A WordPress plugin designed to give a blog author or designer the ability to change the WordPress Administration section by adding a unique - branded - header and footer. Branding may be important depending on how prevalent the WordPress logo & native branding are to the owner or designer of a site. This plugin is now fully WordPress 2.7.x compliant and recently converted to us jQuery. jQuery was used so that others could extend the plugin to fit their own needs.

Custom Field Taxonomies

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Lifestream

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Thesis OpenHook

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StatPress Reloaded

This plugin shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

GigPress

GigPress provides an easy way for bands to list and manage their concerts and tours on their WordPress-powered website.

WordPress Menu Creator

WordPress Menu Creator ( Menu Manager ) is developed to provide website owners with truly easy to manage easy to configure menu solution.

Store Locator

A store locator plugin for developers who create sites in Wordpress & web site owners who want to quickly show important locations.

Connect2site

This plugin can be used to connect to another wordpress blog located in a subdomain on the same server. It provides various ways to display posts.

Page Flip Image Gallery

FlippingBook Wordpress Gallery plugin helps you to create Image Gallery with Page Flip effects on your blog.

In a relatively bizarre case an employee of Ryanair left disparaging remarks about WordPress on someone’s blog. Someone with the airline should apologize.

Last Saturday night many of the Irish blogging community got together in The Cork International Airport Hotel for the Irish Blog Awards. I was there with my wife Jacinta, it was a great night and I was delighted to see so many WordPress powered blogs. Both WordPress.org and WordPress.com blogs were represented again and again among the top bloggers in Ireland.

I had planned on writing a post analysing the breakdown of WordPress vs Blogspot vs MT vs everyone else but lucky for me, Cathal Garvey already did the hard work!

He has some very interesting stats on version numbers, and I’m shocked that “Best Technology Blog” (sponsored by Bitbuzz) has the worst record for upgrading WordPress. Hopefully this attention will encourage those bloggers to upgrade.

WordPress is the most popular blogging software among the Blog Awards nominees and Blacknight is by far the most popular hosting service. I don’t think you can get a better recommendation than that for either WordPress or Blacknight.

BTW - That’s Grandad in the photo above. Go read his blog, Head Rambles. You’ll love it!
PS. Here are the results of the Awards, read more by Red Mum, Robert, Niall and Jason who reminds us we should vote for the excellent Cork International Airport Hotel.
I’ll be uploading photos from the night in a post here and to Pixie later.

Related Posts

• Top 25 Irish Blogs
• Irish Blogs and Bloggers
• Irish Blogs Directory, the new boggersphere!

I always thought that I was the only one who had a problem with the WordPress Upload manager. Seems like, I’m not alone. The author of Post Avatar plugin for WordPress also had similar feelings, which was one of the reasons he wrote this plugin.

Description

This plugin simplifies including a picture when writing posts by allowing the user to choose from a predefined list of images. The image can be automatically shown on the page or output customized with the use of a template tag in themes.

Features

• Easy selection of images in the Write Post screen.
• Scans images in sub-directories of the image option folder.
• Allows the following file types: .jpg, .jpeg, .gif and .png.
• Settings display avatars automatically or through the use of template tags.
• Customize html output of avatars.
• Does not display missing images.

Demo

For an example of what this looks like you can check out the author’s site and notice the 100×100px size images before each post.

Review

The plugin includes detailed installation and usage instructions which is exactly how plugin packages should come.

Using the plugin is extremely simple. You’ll need to first set some default options mainly the directory that is to be used to find the post avatars.

You need to upload these images to this folder in order to use them in your posts. The plugin still doesn’t support this feature, but this is on the charts and hopefully, you’ll see it in a later version.

You can then choose to automatically display the avatars in your posts and / or feeds or you can manually add the code to your template file. I prefer the latter options simply because it gives you more control on where and how exactly you wish to display the avatars.

The main trick after using this avatars is the styling. The plugin allows you to either use the default styles or customize the class you wish to use as well as the HTML that will be used to display the same. IMO, you don’t really need to do this as you can use the default styles and then customize the CSS for their display in your theme.

So, are you using this plugin? Do you like it? What would you like improved?

WordCamp India is On!. The list of speakers is quite impressive and includes both Matt and Om for various talks including Matt’s famous “State of the Word“. It looks to be a fun and information filled event with quite interesting fare such as SEO, IP rights and other both techie and non-techie topics. As luck would have it, I am going to be traveling though Dubai and India next weekend (days late, dollars short) and will not be able to attend.

From the list of sponsors, the list of attendees and the list of speakers, the enthusiasm for blogging and WordPress in India is not lost on me. If you have not checked out the Delhi Bloggers Group or one of the many other blogging groups and partnerships mentioned and you are an Indian blogger, you might be missing out. I am hopeful that the turnout will be fantastic and I hope to see some of the presentations on WordPress.tv

I am jealous that Matt and Om were able to visit the Taj Mahal because it appears that parts of the Taj might be restricted to visitors. Om has an interesting take on the Taj and Apple Computers and Matt has some nice pictures posted.

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WordPress Wiki Plugin

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Plugin List

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Custom Logo

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WP_ImageMation

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Ultimate Noindex Nofollow Tool

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Faster Image Insert

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Custom Post Background

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Share On Facebook

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Fast Tube

Fast and easy way to insert videos from YouTube right into your WordPress blog posts or pages.

Updated Plugins

Plugin Wonderful

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Decategorizer

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WP Smart Sort

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AddQuicktag

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Viper’s Video Quicktags

Allows easy and XHTML valid posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and more.

Quote Comments

Creates a little quote icon in comment boxes which, when clicked, copies that comment to the comment box wrapped in blockquotes.

Secure WordPress

Secure your WordPress Installation with small functions.

WP-SpamFree

Powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes contact form.

Visiting Agra and the Taj Mahal with Om.