Right now more than 10,000 people in the UK need an organ transplant that could save or dramatically improve their lives. But each year around 1,000 people die while waiting for a transplant. Help us to give these people the chance for a new life.

My new WordPress plugin – Organ Donor Register – will add 1 of 5 promotional images to your blog, complete with a link to the organ donor registry. This can be done with a sidebar widget, shortcode within a blog or post, or a function call anywhere within your code.

The plugin page can be found here.

I’m often wanting to create quick and useful links to Wikipedia. Obviously, you could add a link manually each time, but wouldn’t an automated system be so much better?

Well, crack open your functions.php file within your theme folder and added the following code…

add_shortcode('wikilink','add_wikilink');
function add_wikilink($paras="",$content="") {
    return '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'.str_replace(" ","_",$content).'" title="Look up '.$content.' on Wikipedia" title="Look up '.$content.' on Wikipedia" target="_blank" rel="notarget">'.$content.'</a>';
}

Then, simply add the shortcode [wikilink] around any word/words that you wish to look up on Wikipedia.

For example….

The [wikilink]HTC Hero[/wikilink] runs the [wikilink]Android operating system[/wikilink].

This would then produce the following output…

The HTC Hero runs the Android operating system.

The links open in new windows (i.e. target=_blank) and I’ve set rel=nofollow – obviously you can change the above code to modify any of this.

About a month ago I blogged about some excellent customer service from ZyXEL where, after a hesitant start, they fell over themselves to help me with a problem with my recently purchased NAS.

It’s taken a month to resolve the problem, but a lot of that was due to me, but it is now fixed!

As mentioned, I was finding that iTunes wasn’t reading any contents from the in-built iTunes server. It was recognising the NAS but not listing any music from it. Over the last few weeks we’ve tried all sorts but, nothing worked. In the end, ZyXEL gathered enough information to be able to recreate the problem themselves and created a firmware update, which they provided exclusively to me.

According to their own readme file it changes the following…

1. Upgrade itunes firefly mediaserver to 0.2.4.2
2. Fix: itunes server not able to work when reboot
3. Fix re-download and re-hash issue of download service

They don’t appear to have assigned a version number to it yet as the firmware level in the admin screen only changes from V3.20(AFD.0) to V3.20(AFD.0)2010Apr06, indicating the build date of 6th April 2010.

It’s a 26MB download, which then requires unzipping. From that I had a firmware .BIN file and the aforementioned “readme” text file. The upgrade process is simple and takes a few minutes.

I rebuilt my media server and iTunes has worked since.

I’ve enquired with ZyXEL as to when the firmware will be publicly available as I’m aware, from their forums, of other users with the same problems. As soon as I hear anything, I’ll update this post.

Update: The firmware I was sent is not a complete version, hence the lack of a firmware version. It should be a few months before the final, and complete, version is made available. In the meantime, I’ll enquire as to whether I can make the version that I was sent available.

Second Update: I have made the firmware available for download – please see my new post.