After many requests, I’ve finally added new functionality to the PHPList Wordpress Integration plugin. The plugin now supports the ability to display multiple lists on the form. So if you manage multiple lists through PHPList and want to give the user the option of choosing which one to subscribe to, this is now supported the PHPList Wordpress options panel.

If you are using the wordpress the_tags function and you want to exclude certain tags from showing up with associated posts you can use the following function in place of the_tags:

Where’s Arnold Diaz from Shame on You when you need him?

We have a fairly liberal photo use policy at Pink Cake Box. We allow most non-commercial sites to use our photos as long as they add a link back to our site. The majority of people respect this license and for the most part we haven’t had any major issues.

But invariably some people violate this policy, and one of our blog readers recently notified of a really shameful violation:

Hey Anne, I write to your because of course, I love your cakes! And 2, because a couple weeks ago I was at a red light, and I saw a small truck from a cake company here in Santiago, Chile, with one of your cakes pictures printed on the back! I don’t know if you have the rights or if they have a permission from you (iI don’t think they’d do), so I thought I should let you know someone is using your cake in their company image. I took some pics of it with my cell hone, they’re not good, but here they are :

The company’s name is Candelle and their website is www.candelle.cl Note: Other cake designers will notice they have also used stolen photos in their gallery.

Our wedding cake shop was featured on CNN this week! You can see the video here.

In the video Anne talks about how the company started, how we’ve used the Internet to grow and how we’ve relied on family members like her mom to help launch the business.

Secure your wordpress blog.

Here are my notes related to my upgrade of our wedding cake blog to Wordpress 2.3:

1. Custom Query String refers to the old wp_categories table. Had to edit line 252 to reflect the new terms table:

Note: Looks like Moshu made this change and added tagging support. Download it here. This means I can now throttle the number of cakes that appear in a tag archive page.

2. Ran importer for UTW and updated theme to use new native tag commands. Everything worked fine, although I did have to run the following query in the backend to remove the dashes from the old UTW tags:

3. Dropped old wp_tags and wp_tag_synonyms tables

4. Upgraded Headspace2. I noticed headspace 2 doesn’t expose the ability to use tag names in your meta tag descriptions (someone please correct me if i’m wrong) So I hacked inline_tags.php and added the following on line 54:

Update: John has already updated his headspace2 plugin to include a %%tag%%. I highly recommend checking this plugin out. John does a tremendous job supporting the tag - please help support his efforts by donating.

5. Tags associated with a post are not searched by default, so I created a plugin to do that. I also use this plugin to correct user search miss-spellings. For example, try searching for brithday cakes on our wedding cake blog.

Note: An even better alternative to my plugin is John’s Search Unleashed plugin.

6. Updated my linking structure so that I don’t use trailing slashes for categories or tag pages

I’m happy that wordpress developers included tagging as a core feature in their latest release. And I also appreciate their philosophy of including just the bare tagging essentials and relying on the plugin developer community to expand on those features.

With that being said, one of the features that is missing from the 2.3 tagging implementation is the ability to search for tags associated with a post. Christine’s UTW did this rather well and I found it was an essential feature for our wedding cake blog. We have several posts that have been tagged with words that don’t necessarily appear in the post - i.e. Wedding cupcake Stands, or Spring Themed wedding cakes

So I created a tag search plugin that will join against the appropriate tables to ensure you tags are searched. My hope is someone will take this search component and wrap it into a complete tag management plugin. (Similar to what Christine has started)

The highslide wordpress plugin has been updated to work with Torstein’s latest version of Highslide - 3.2.3.

The changes were as follows:

- There was a minor change to the graphics folder image structure
- There is no longer a need to use the windows.onload function

If you are upgrading from a previous version of the plugin, I recommend the following:
- Remove the highslide folder completely
- Download and install the latest version with the new folder structure
- Navigate to the options section and remove the following code:

I’m usually frustrated when an online search returns another set of search results. Back in March, Matt Cutts spoke about this on his blog, and I’ve been meaning to ensure to exclude our cake search results from all search engines.

At first I thought about adding an exclusion in my robots.txt, but because the search results are built off of index.php, I figured a theme modification would be better.

To do this I added the following in my header.php:

Short and simple…:)

Today my wife’s operating system crashed - the registry hive was corrupted. We went through a restore process and after running hard drive diagnostic (chkdsk) we found some corrupt sectors.

Since the laptop was still under warranty, I called Dell and reached a live person in record time. I only had to listen to one voice prompt, and a technician (Ashish) picked up after a couple rings.

After explaining the issue and giving him the error code from the DELL diagnostic utility, he immediately said they would be shipping me a new hard drive. This literally took 2 minutes. No second guessing on his part - it was painless.

To top it off, he sent a personal email with all his contact information and backup contact information in case he wasn’t available.

This is excellent customer service, I’m glad to see Dell is getting this right.