Send2Press Newswire is a press release promotion service. They provide RSS feeds of all their news, and currently there are about 90 different feeds available. This plugin allows easy access to those feeds on your WordPress blog. Either as simple headline links or complete with a 5-10 line summary. CSS can be used to tailor the look and feel.

Please note that even though the GPL says you can do more or less whatever you want with this plugin, including jumping up and down on it or feeding it to your hamster, there are restrictions on how you can use Send2Press Newswire content and trademarks. So please read the terms of service carefully, either on the web at Send2Press TOC or the included text file termsofuse.txt, before using this plugin.

For more information, see the plugin documentation.

Questions in the comments please. Note that this is technical support for the plugin. If you need Send2Press support, then hit their feeds support website on Send2Press Feeds. If you’re unsure where to go, just leave a comment here and I’ll try to answer or pass it on to Send2Press.

KNOWN BUG(S)!

Line 719 in the send2press.php has this bit of code: <h3>$title</h4>. That should of course be a h3 ending tag, not a h4.

NEW Edit/Delete of feeds do not work under WordPress 2.7. I’ll release a fix as soon as I can. If you’re adept at editing PHP code, you can try out a temporary fix. Edit send2press.php and replace all references to edit.php with tools.php and see if things go back to normal. Let me know!

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Google aggregates news from over 4500 news sources, updated continously. The results can be retrieved as a number of RSS feeds, where you can create your own specific feed by specifying one of more than 40 regions/languages, and an optional topic ranging from Domestic to Most Popular to Entertainment. Currently there are nine topics, including, of course, All. In addition to this, any feed can be filtered through a search query so that only news items matching your query will be shown. Note that not all combinations of region/language and topic has been enabled by Google but it should degrade gracefully.

This plugin works both as a widget, as inline content replacement and can be used in themes. It can be used as both simultaneously, but there can be only one instance of the widget. Multiple feeds can be configured and used accordingly.

NOTE! Always upgrade to the latest version if you experience problems, most things are fixed already.

The latest version is 2.5.

If you’ve configured feeds that use character sets like cyrillic, arabic and you’re getting errors from WP when trying to view the feeds then your WP MySQL database tables may be created with the wrong character set. Let me know and I’ll give you some pointers.

Download Google News plugin

If you have a question or other comment, use the form below. Thank you!

Known bugs:

• There is a bug in the WordPress RSS engine, that sometimes show up when people use this widget. If you get something resembling “unknown function debug() in line 504 of wp-includes/rss.php” then that’s one of them. WP is aware of the problem, and apparently a fixed rss.php might be showing up in the next release. As a quick-fix edit wp-includes/rss.php and change line 503 from if ( MAGPIE_DEBUG ) { to if ( MAGPIE_DEBUG > 1 ) {
• When the widget fails with a php error like the one above, the template goes out of whack. I’ve made sure none of those are my fault in the next minor upgrade due out soon. I’m looking at better workarounds for the bug above first, so release might be a short while yet. Don’t want to spam you all with multiple releases like some widget writers…

Example of inline content replacement.

Default feed <–google-news–>, alternating randomly between two feeds:

A different feed <–google-news#non-default–>:

Shortcode test non-default [ google-news name="non-default" ]:

Shortcode test default [ google-news ]:

Shortcodes are only available in WordPress 2.5 and up.

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This plugin works both as a widget, as inline content replacement and can be used in themes. It can be used as all three simultaneously, but there can be only one instance of the widget. Multiple feeds can be configured and used accordingly. Clicking on a news item will of course take you straight to the relevant article at CNN, as per CNN Terms of Use.

I know there are generic RSS feed widgets out there, but I figured with so many CNN feeds they warranted their own widget with easier configuration than your average generic RSS widget.

NOTE! Always upgrade to the latest version if you experience problems, most things are fixed already.

The latest version is 2.2.

Download CNN News plugin

Known bugs: See the Google News plugin post. These two widgets are virtually identical, so bugs also tend to be the same in both.

Let me know if you find bugs, or if you want additional features or changes. Admin-selectable news item look, extra class/id for CSS etc.

NEW Edit/Delete of feeds do not work under WordPress 2.7. I’ll release a fix as soon as I can. If you’re adept at editing PHP code, you can try out a temporary fix. Edit cnn_news.php and replace all references to edit.php with tools.php and see if things go back to normal. Let me know!

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Installation instructions:
Unzip in wp-content/plugins directory, enable plugin and then use as any other WordPress widget.

Download NASA Image Of The Day plugin

If you have a question or other comment, use the form below. Thank you!

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Since I was fiddling with the site anyway, I decided to go for a new theme as well. It required some code changes to work properly, for example a simple thing as showing comments on pages was missing. Easily added. I also fiddled with the look&feel, so it’s not really a clean Prosumer theme anymore. Not enough changes to warrant a rebadge and release though. Not entirely happy about the colour scheme either, so here today gone tomorrow. Leave a comment if you can recommend a great theme that not too many others use.

Found some cool new plugins while updating. Like the Democracy Polls widget on the left, just below the ahem one click is enough Income widget.

Another thing I found out about WordPress in the upgrade process was that there are quite a number of hard coded references to your web site url in the database. Not just the single config entry you’d expect. So if you want to fire up a copy of the site under another name to see how 2.5 worked without destroying your primary site, you need to dump the database, do a search & replace on the dump and then restore to the new location.

The logo image is an umodified photo taken at low shutter speed in a tunnel, just cropped to show the interesting part.

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google_ad_client = "pub-55555555555555555";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
google_ad_format = "728x90_as";
google_ad_type = "image";
google_ad_channel = "555555555555";
google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "7CC135";
google_color_text = "000000";
google_color_url = "";

compared to the new:

google_ad_client = "pub-5555555555555555";
google_ad_slot = "55555555555";
google_ad_width = 160;
google_ad_height = 600;

The other parts of the puzzle, including the Google javascript call, remain the same. As you can see, bare bones is your ad code, a new thing called an ad slot and a width and height. The latter two to speed up page rendering, as the javascript code can tell the browser how much space it will consume before loading the actual ad.

Now, if you have a lot of these old style ads that you would like to convert then Google provides a conversion tool. And you want to convert, as the Google interface for keeping track of ad types and their look and feel is a step up from doing it by hand or by third party tool. and it only takes a minute per ad to convert, ish.

To convert, go to your AdSense page and select AdSense Setup followed by Manage Ads. Around the top you will see a link intuitively called import your old AdSense code. Hit that, and you will be greeted with a page containing a big text area and a small one. Now copy the HTML code (well, javascript-code) from an old ad into the big area and write a useful name for that ad into the small area and hit the button. You do not need to copy anything other than the javascript variables, they are what differentiates one ad from another.

Note that if the copy HTML code part above was greek to you then run through Google’s explanation before you continue.

Now for the stupid part which Google really should fix. If there is an error in the HMTL you paste in you will get the very unfriendly error The snippet is invalid. With absolutely no explanation on what is wrong. And the useless part is that this syntax checker is actually more strict than the one Google uses in real life so the code in question may show a completely valid advert on your web page but still be rejected by this tool. Now, the most common problem here is that quite a few tools that autogenerate AdSense ads, including Adsense Manager for WordPress, will forget to print some of the values. See the example above, where the last variable google_color_url has an empty string as value? This works fine in real life, especially since it’s an image only ad in the first place. But the converter will see this as a problem and give you the error mentioned above. So if you are absolutely sure you have pasted in the correct code and still get an error then make sure all the variables actually have proper values. Changing "" to "000000"
in this case and the code passes the test and you have a new unit. 

Now you can just use the new and improved style on your web pages, and if you want to change the look and feel of an ad then you can do so through the Google AdSense interface.

 Is it worth it? Not really just for the current functionality, but you never know when the old style stops being supported or when only new style ads get a new and flashy feature that mesmerizes the ad clicking crowd. So get on the band wagon now, it’s not difficult.

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Which route to go depends on how computer literate you are, and what kind of site you want to have. To start with the latter. If you want a site where you can just ramble on, perhaps on a whole range of topics, and produce de occational tutorial or howto? Then a blog is the natural choice. If you can’t be bothered to look around, just pick WordPress.

However, if you plan to have a lot of fairly timeless information stored in structured categories, perhaps generated not only by you but by a group or community of people, then you might go for a publishing system instead. A couple of good ones are Drupal and Joomla.

The difference between the two systems are definitively blurring and there is a lot of overlapping functionality. Having said that, think public diary versus information site and decide which one you’re closest to.

If you can install and configure MySQL and Apache on a suitable box, then you should have absolutely no problems installing your web application of choice on top of that. But if that sentence was greek to you, or you feel out of your depths doing something like that, then look for a hosting provider that will pre-install and maintain that part of the system for you.

I picked WordPress, for a number of reasons. It’s free, it has a large user base, it’s constantly updated and there is a large number of convenient themes and addons that you can download and install. And it took me roughly 30 minutes of installation on my Ubuntu-server, as all the packages were pre-configured and all I had to do was to tweak the local configuration a bit. Not quite working out of the box, but pretty close.

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