Today I have updated Simple Facebook Link and Simple Social Bookmarks.

In both cases, I have added the ability to pass an API key, user name or password to the URL shortening service.

Simple Social Bookmarks also has new default options and user specific icons are now stored in the theme folder, rather than the plugin folder¹. If you have used either of these options, please review the instructions for potential changes that you’ll need to make.

1. this is because automatic plugin updates were removing these folders [↩]

Today is WordPress Plugin Developer Day.

The idea is to give back to those who provide useful, free plugins for WordPress.

What they’re asking is that anyone that has ever gotten even the slightest benefit from a WordPress plugin to say thank you today by making a small donation to the plugin/developer of your choice.

Yes, I’m one of those people, but this blog is also enhanced thanks to the plugins for others so I’ll be donating as well.

Hopefully this will make you feel as good as it does me – they deserve our gratitude.

I recently thought it would be a good idea to display on my blog a list of draft posts – a kind of “coming soon”. A plugin to do this exists but it hasn’t been updated for years and lacked some of the features that I was after (and, from the comments left on the authors website, features that others wanted as well).

I’ve therefore created my own plugin to do all this and more. Simple Draft List allows you to display a list of draft post/page titles – you can specify the type (post and/or page), the sequence and maximum number to list. You can also specify individual post/pages to omit by the simple use of a character in the title.

Full details are on the official WordPress page or on the page on this site.

I’ve released a new plugin, and updated an existing one.

The new plugin is Simple Buzz Link – this creates a URL for any post/page, allowing you to share it on the newly released Google Buzz.

Get it from the official WordPress page or read more on this site.

I’ve also updated Simple Social Bookmarks, adding Google Buzz, Yahoo! Buzz  and Yahoo! Bookmarks to the list of social bookmarking sites.

Again, get it from the WordPress page or read more on this site.

After a mild rant back in December about some of the support queries I get (with regard to my WordPress plugins), I’m happy to say that I’ve had the pleasure to work with someone who has actually been helpful, responsive and, more importantly, replied to his emails

A Dutch gentleman named Bas de Meijer reported a couple of problems via a comment on one of my plugin pages. One I was able to resolve quite quickly and update the relevant plugin, the other was, erm, more difficult to pin down. This was related to another plugin and turned out to be due to me using a PHP command that didn’t work in PHP 4 (which he was using). As far as I know this command is the only one of this type that I’d used and it was a simple job to modify it to something else and get the compatibility. However, to actually work out what it was I had to send Bas a number of different versions of my plugin, each with more and more debug output being added.

The result was the two plugin releases announced last night – indeed, even adding Technorati to Simple Social Bookmarks was his idea. Thanks Bas. But, then again, he seemed to enjoy the experience just as much….

Thanks again for the great job you have done. Not only by designing the plugin, but also by spending a lot of time to debug it with me. It is much easier to say ‘it should work, so you must be doing something right’ or ‘well, upgrade your system’. But you really wanted to make it work. That suites you.

It was a pleasure helping you. I know from myself that I rather would solve the problem, than to switch to something else.

So come on, those who have a problem, report it, but never respond back to me – I don’t bite!