Hello all! yes, yes, I know I'm late on my promised date. I've actually been compiling a list of ideas on topics to write a bout - and I've finally decided to choose one and go with it. (Yeah, I know I said it would be "How to Turn Your Existing Site Into a WordPress Theme" - but that sucker is actually taking a lot more time than I'd originally thought. But I swear, I'm working on it. It's in my "drafts" right now!) So. I decided a smaller step would be to show you how to get the most out of your widgets. You can choose whatever you want - what I'll be touching on is how to make more than one "sidebar" and apply widgets to them. "Sidebar" is in quotes because - you won't believe this - you don't HAVE to put them in your sidebar. You can put those suckers anywhere you damn well please. How cool would it be to have your site's content separated by a widget that would hold - whatever you'd like it to hold? Or Widgetizing your footer? or you header? Or how about having a different set of widgetized sidebars based on what page you're on? You can do that? You bettah believe it, suckah!

Okay, so here we move on to Part 4 of my "taking too long to add to this" series :) I had a client this week who is an author. He does some work on practice lists, and wanted a spot to gather his writing together. The thing that he wanted was something that would count the words within his posts - since many of his lists require practice pieces to be under a certain word limit (or they just want to know how many words there are). I found a few plugins, but when I went to test them, the word count was always off. One of my test posts was 301 words long, yet the different plugins would vary anywhere form 320 to 350 words. There were different reasons for this, and to me, it wasn't worth troubleshooting 200 or so lines of code in the plugin to figure out why. So I wrote my own function instead: and it took all of 10 lines (if you count the commented sections, and the two lines it took to create the function).

The Content Scraper (for sites that have no feed). ::now holding my ears to shut out the yelps:: Okay, okay - calm down. Here's the thing. I debated long and hard about putting this here. I truly did. People hate content scrapers, and yes - for the most part - the ones that use it for horrid purposes are evil bastards. But being in the Christmas spirit that I always get in at this time of year, I'm going to try and believe that people are good for the most part - and although I know this might become abused here and there...well at least I can take slight solace in the fact that this one, at the very least, will cache the content on the spammers server, so your bandwidth isn't too huge. I still have trepidation about this one - so seriously, if it does become an issue, and I get a lot of people who really don't want this one here, I will remove it. This one was a toughie to consider sharing, but I'm hoping that people use it for the greater good. I've seen a lot of requests for this kind of stuff on the forums - people who would like to "scrape" the content on their own site that they have in one place and stick it on another one they own so they don't have to write the same thing twice in two different places - and honestly, that's what this was developed for.

Ahhhhh.... ye olde "Send to a Friend". One of my recent clients really wanted this sucker for every single post on their site - all you needed to do was put in your email address, your friend's email address, maybe write a little personal note and send it on it's merry way. The problem with "Send to a Friend" scripts is the abuse factor. Basically, you're leaving your server wide open for some POS to some along and use your server as a mass spam machine. They can send to as many people as they want, and when the crap hits the fan, you are the one that gets blamed for it all, and you are the one who pays the price. God, I hate spammers.

So, as an introduction, I'm going to tell you that there will be no real rhyme or reason to this series. Over the past few weeks, I've had several paying clients (and one pro-bono, who really pushed my limits) who have forced me to learn new things, and pull out some creative thinking. As I said in this post, I'm not a programmer, I just know enough to get around. So I'm absolutely positive some of these could be written in some other cleaner way - I just don't know how. So by all means, if you know of a better way to accomplish these things, share it. So, our first trick will be something basic, something simple. Blockquotes.