Category Archives: Plugins

A Crude WordPress Based Microblogging System

Those of you who follow our Twitter feed are probably aware of an experimental project we launched last week. The goal of this trial was to determine the ease by which we can repurpose WordPress; a platform allowing bloggers to publish high quality content, into a microblogging site similar to F* My Life and Text From Last Night. The challenge itself isn’t all that difficult if one has basic programming knowledge. However, we wanted to demonstrate just how valuable the extensions created by the WordPress are and thus, placed a restriction on ourselves. To create our target site, we were only allowed to modify code created by other programmers in the WordPress community. As you may have guessed, the project was a complete success and  was completed in a little under 2 hours (give or take).

Enable Flash Hardware Acceleration on Youtube

Flash has always had a tarnished reputation amongst the internet community when it came to resource usage. It is not a surprise, seeing that a 480p Youtube video running in fullscreen mode is capable of triggering over 30-40% CPU usage (A task that only uses about 10% on VLC). For many of us still holding onto older hardware, the sluggish web browsing experience created by Adobe’s monstrosity of a plugin caused nothing but headaches. This is all true until now. Recently, Adobe announced the latest generation of flash player: Flash 10.2. One of the key features highlighting this version was the ability to tap into the power of the GPU in order to offer full hardware acceleration. This feature was codenamed, “Stage Video” and is an API that will be implemented on all major sites upon the release of the final software.

TinyURL integration with your blog

TinyURL and WordPress Intergration

Make it easier for your readers to share the URL of your posts by integrating the TinyURL service into your blog. A demonstration of the final product can be seen by scrolling to the bottom of this page. In order to follow this tutorial successfully,  access to PHP will be needed. Additionally, we will be using the TinyURL API so make sure your content follows their Terms of Service agreement. The guide below is made for Self-hosted WordPress blogs. However, the code is simple enough to be modified and used on any other platform.