GChart: Dynamic Charts for WordPress

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If your daily workflow deals with charts a lot, you may want to have some really useful and simple tools in hand. It’s time to say goodbye to yesterday’s nightmare of taking screenshots of tables and charts from Excel and editing them before inserting the images to your posts (and repeat if some numbers go wrong). Today let’s take a look one of the latest plugin for WordPress which helps to fight your nightmare. Created by Eugene Manuilov (straightforward) from Ukrainian, the developer describe GChart as a plugin allows users to create dynamic charts and embed it to their WordPress sites using Google Visualization API.

GChart

The whole package of the plugin weights around 275 KB, quite a light weight compared with other Behemoths nowadays. A detailed installation document is included and you can quickly refer to if encounter any problems. Once installed, go to the post editor and you will find a new icon beside the Add Media icon. Click it and it will pop up a ThickBox similar to media upload. In the pop-up, you can choose whether you want to create a new chart or choose from the charts library which consists all the charts you have already created. This feature is quite handy if you are using some charts repeatedly. In our case, let’s go and choose create a new chart. Continue reading…

Host Your Blog Images with Dropbox

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Hosting on a shared server and worry about the stability and security of blog files, as well as the bandwidth? There are lots of great services out there you can get your hands on. On ThemeFortress, I use Flickr but it somehow become redundant to upload, tag and do all kinds of stuffs before actually insert the images. Then here comes my favorite cloud service Dropbox. At this point, you can use similar services like SugarSync to achieve the same purpose.

Finished contest @dropbox in 3 hours #dropquest

In WordPress, you can use plugin like Pressbox to do it if you are lazy enough. My preference is of course, manually copy and paste public links on my HD which I 100% believe has a much faster speed than doing it online. To do it, you can create a public folder and move images to it. Right click and copy the public link and paste it to your WordPress. Done. Fastest way I can think of. Continue reading…

Reverie Framework 2.0 Released, Now Compatible with BuddyPress

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Four months after the release of Reverie Framework, I have received lots of feedbacks, either positive or negative. At least, people talk about it and I have seen lots of bloggers mentioned it and meanwhile Reverie was downloaded over 5,000 times on ThemeFortress. Reverie Framework was featured on Github, mention on WP Mayor, WP Mods, WP Lift, WPCandy, TheChangelog, Design Woop, Webdesigner Depot, tweet by Smashing Magazine (also here, huge traffic impact) and so forth. During this period, I have received lots of requests and bug reports, thus I was planning to make a major update. The first release of Reverie Framework has the built-in support for bbPress 2.0 forum, why not go further by adding some support for another cool plugin from the same company. So, in this new version of the framework, I added the support for BuddyPress.

Is the Framework No Longer Lightweight?

Well, don’t get me wrong. By saying adding support for a resource hog like BuddyPress doesn’t mean the framework cannot still keep its slim waist. Nothing huge was added to the framework, not even a single BuddyPress template. What I did was changing the basic structure of the framework. Please note, if you are using the first version of the framework, you may need to change it a bit. The basic structure of a BuddyPress theme is:

While in Reverie 1.0, I used a slightly different structure. One you changed the structure to the above, the first version user can also get the ability to support BuddyPress. Continue reading…

How to Make more Use out of Box.com

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Box.net has just changed their official name to Box and brought users some nice upgrades like the 50 GB extra free storage. But Box is never an alternative to our favorite service like Dropbox (iCloud? Are you kidding?). If you recall that Box actually sent users survey a while ago and I still remember one of the questions asking what’s the most-wanted feature. Of course, like the rest of us, I chose the Dropbox style sync (forget the exact name). But I guess most people know, even the Box team, that it is definitely the most wanted feature. I don’t know why they even bothered to ask this question to put themselves to the edge of the cliff. The fun part is, after you upload your files and images to the Box cloud, for Mac users like us, it’s a hell time since Box loads everything in Flash. Why do I need to load Flash in order to view my photo? It’s 2012! It’s totally pointless.

How to Make more Use out of Box.com Continue reading…

Downgrade Mac from Lion to Snow Leopard

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It has been a while since I had this idea. I had been using Mac OS X Lion since day one and right after the installation, I felt the speed was slowed down and the overall performance is a bit lagging. The decision was made yesterday when the new operation system of Apple was announced. With a cat-name of Mountain Lion, Apple finally officially abandoned the name Mac attached to its desktop OS. After a quick scan of the available features which scheduled to release this Summer, I know it would be then end of the Mac legend.

Downgrade Mac from Lion to Snow Leopard

If Lion is a transition from Mac OS X to iOS which gives you bunch of useless touch-screen only features and animations, then Mountain Lion would be completely a joke. The web is welcoming some small features like Reminders, Message and so forth which can be replaced by lots of nicer apps which already available. Continue reading…

Create Your First Web App for Chrome

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I have been using Google Chrome as my default browser for a few months now and like it a lot. Even though I switch back to Safari from time to time, Chrome stays as my major browser since it is the most comfortable place where I can do all my works. Chrome has all kinds of interesting extensions and apps in the web store, but sometime it fails to satisfy my needs. I want a simple Instapaper shortcut (like a bookmark) so I can quickly switch to my favorite offline reader but there are few options out there. You may have a similar needs so there is a simple tutorial to help you create a simple web app for your chrome. You can see the final result in the below screenshot.

Create Your First Web App for Chrome

First of all, a shortcut is quite similar to a bookmark. You can drag a bookmark from your toolbar to the new tab window and it will automatically become a web app for you. But you cannot edit it according to your needs. This tutorial is for Mac users, haven’t test it out but it should work for Windows users. On the Mac version of Chrome, we cannot use the Application Shortcut under the Tools menu, thus a workaround is needed. In this simple tutorial, I will create a shortcut link to my blog ThemeFortress and here we go. Continue reading…

How I Use Google Reader, Flipboard and Zite

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It’s information age and all I deal with daily is information overload. Luckily we have all kinds of apps and tools to help us fight against those junk, while on the contrary, sometimes, those apps and tools that help us could ruin our weekend. If you don’t like my opening, you could still continue reading since I won’t talk about those things as well. In this post, I will talk about how I deal with my daily readings.

I am not kidding that I still use Google Reader, I am not. Google Reader was and is still my most important way to consume all those feeds and things I want to and need to learn. With all kinds of great social media like Facebook, Twitter, you probably will argue I am nostalgic. Not  really. I use Google Reader simply because it is the only tool that I can have total control on what information I should ignore, skim or read. With the intrusion of social media and related tools on different devices like Flipboard and Zite, it is less possible that you can control you own information inflow yourself without using the filter behind those tools. And your information inflow is now controlled by the algorithms behind those tools and the company behind them. And no, I don’t believe their algorithms is better than mine even though they do have better algorithms. It’s information age and you cannot let people other than youself to control your information inflow. People who control the media will finally control world. Continue reading…

Plugins to Improve WordPress: Media Upload

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WordPress is good, and that’s why we are using it. But some part of it can drive people crazy. What’s your most terrible experience with WordPress? In this post, I will go through some plugins to help you increase the productivity of using WordPress. Before moving forward, let’s review the default and most primitive way to upload an image or media.

  1. First, click the “Add an Image” icon on TinyMCE.
  2. Wait until the ThickBox appears.
  3. Choose the image to upload. If you are using Flash Upload, you can choose multiple images at a time.
  4. Wait for WordPress to crunch your images.
  5. Enter descriptions, titles and so forth for your images and don’t forget to hit Save.
  6. Wait until the process is done.
  7. WordPress tells you it saved your data, and you continue by hit Insert to the Post.
  8. Good, one image already in the post, what about the second one, and there are ten more coming.
  9. Well, go back to step one. (Multiple images saved, you can skip step 3 to 6)

It’s like an endless loop which WordPress will strike on you if you accidentally wrote the wrong code. Continue reading…

4 Plugins to Create MailChimp Signup Form

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Nowadays every blogs have some sort of ways to keep their readers stick, either by social media or feed. And among which here is one of the most important, maillist. You don’t need me to tell you how important it is for your blogging life. Creating a maillist or newsletter service on your WordPress blog is extremely easy, you have loads of plugins to do it. However, most bloggers use third party services like MailChimp or Constant Contact since these services offer loads of features that 99 percent of the plugins won’t. In this post, I will go through some useful WordPress plugins that will help you set up a newsletter signup form or provide you the related features. I will use MailChimp as example but most of them should work well with different services.

Before going for a plugin, why not do it yourself? This is the most direct way and you can even add more juice to the form yourself. Remember that I have created the Reverie Framework? You can easily style the signup form by using the power of Foundation. Read my previous post for the simple process for how to create and style a MailChimp form in Reverie.

1. YIKES, Inc. Easy MailChimp Extender

This is quite powerful a plugin. Simply input your MailChimp API key and you are ready to start. Create your list in MailChimp and put the list ID to the plugin’s panel “Manage Lists”. In this screen, you can check fields you want to show, and organize their by drag-and-drop. And in your post, simply put the shortcode generated by the plugin and you are all set. Please note this plugin uses table to display the form. If you don’t like using tables for your blog, then you should try something else below. Continue reading…

How to Style Your Form in Reverie

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Reverie Framework was released one week ago and has already received lots of attentions. Reverie was mentioned on Foundation, wpMail.me and WP Mayor. Thanks for all your warm supports. wpMail.me is an excellent newsletter brings you weekly updates on WordPress related news, tutorials and bunch of other stuffs. It’s definitely worth subscribing to keep yourself updated.

In this series of posts, I will go through some basic process of creating different elements for your WordPress using either Reverie Framework or standalone Foundation. I will apply different features and combine them together with WordPress to help you get most out of Reverie Framework. To get started as the first post, let’s just create some forms and style them in Reverie Framework. When I said style those forms, I lied. I am not going to talk about how to style the forms with CSS since Reverie has the elegant CSS built-in from Foundation. You can check out the documents of how to create forms on Foundation’s website. It’s extremely easy and the only thing you need to do is write the correct markup and the rest will be handled by Reverie and Foundation. Continue reading…