I’ve written a new plugin for wordpress entitled “AHP Tags to Hashtags” for use with WordPress and WordPress MU. The plugin can be found for now at pastebin here, I will update when it’s been added to the official wordpress plugin repository.

The plugin appends the tags for each post to the post title in the RSS feed. For example, for a post titled “Awesome post” which is tagged with “Amazing, Awesome, Super awesome”, the RSS feed will show the post titles as “Awesome post #Amazing #Awesome #Superawesome”. Note that spaces in a tag are removed, and hash symbols (#) are prepended to each.

This plugin is useful primarily to bloggers who pipe their posts into Twitter. The post tags become Twitter hashtags. Since post tags and twitter hashtags are both a form of metadata, it is natural to simply and automatically reuse the one for the other.

Consider a blog post on the Iran election. Normally youd tag the post Iran and then when you tweet it, youd have to manually insert the twitter hashtag #iranelection. Now, you can simply tag the post iranelection (no # symbol) and it will automatically be hashtagged. Combined with a service like Twitterfeed, this plugin can greatly automate the process of piping relevant posts into the twitterverse.

Note that the plugin makes no attempt to check that the total length of the post title, including hashtags, falls within the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter.

At present the plugin has no options. The feature roadmap includes the following:
- add title character length checking
- toggle using tags or categories for conversion to hashtags
- let user decide whether to remove spaces in tags, or convert to underlines or other character

this is a pretty simple plugin so other feature requests are appreciated.

UPDATE: version 2.0 of the plugin is at pastebin here. This version no longer appends all tags, but only those already beginning with #. This way the blogger can selectively choose which tags they want converted into hashtags.

Post from: meta BLOG

Tags to Hashtags

My plugin, AHP Sitewide Recent Posts, is an entrant in the WPMU.org plugin competition. I would greatly appreciate your support! Please cast your vote here and vote for “Yet Another Posts Plugin“. Thank you!

Post from: meta BLOG

Please vote for my plugin

Building on the venerable Recent Posts plugin by Ron and Andrea, I have created an extended version that offers a lot more user control over output, including gravatar support. The basic features are:

• excludes posts on main blog (blog ID = 1)
• excludes first posts (Hello, world) on user blogs (post ID = 1)
• option to show gravatar support (24px). Gravatar links to posts by user on their blog.
• option to show post excerpt. User can specify excerpt length with extra argument. Option to capitalize 1st five words of excerpt for readability.
• option to show post author name
• option to show post date
• option to show post comment count
• all dispay options can be selectively toggled on or off using a single bitmask parameter, permitting very flexible and customizable usage (256 possible configurations!)
• numerous other display and formatting options can be easily edited in source code using global vars

The argument list:

• $how_many: how many recent posts are being displayed
• $how_long: time frame to choose recent posts from (in days)
• $optmask: bitmask for various display options (default: 255)
  • 1; // gravatar
  • 2; // date
  • 4; // author name
  • 8; // comment count
  • 16; // blog name
  • 32; // post name
  • 64; // post excerpt
  • 128; // excerpt capitalization
• $exc_size: size of excerpt in words (default: 30)
• $begin_wrap: start html code (default: <li class=”ahp_recent-posts”>)
• $end_wrap: end html code to adapt to different themes (default: </li>)

To use the bitmask option, simply add the numeric codes for the display options you want together. For example, suppose you only want gravatar, post name, and date – then the bitmask would be 1+2+32 = 35. Using a bitmask in this way, you can turn on or off any combination of display options above, using only a single function argument.

The latest version (0.6) of this plugin is at WPMUDEV with a more complete description, installation instructions, screenshot, and sample function call. You can see also see the plugin in action at Talk Islam, under the sidebar section titled “Recent Journals”.

screenshot of AHP Recent Posts plugin for WPMU

Post from: meta BLOG

AHP Sitewide Recent Posts plugin for WordPress MU