Whilst these books are functionally and practically really no better than a well-designed website image gallery, and take a little putting together to make look really effective, they can be really impressive and offer website visitors something a little more interesting than the normal content. For example, they could be used to make your holiday rental property guestbook available online so that your web visitors get to see the real words written by your guests in their own handwriting (see our example on the right). Whilst this can be fiddly to put together, and time consuming to keep scanning and uploading more pages as they change, it can be an effective tool in persuading your visitors that they are real testimonials.

Have a play with the example on the right – you need to click the image then, once the book pops up, you can page through it by clicking the bottom corners of each page, or by using the navigation, or by double-clicking on the page to turn it.

We like it and can see a number of possibilities to use this to make some of our own content more appealing, as well as for our clients (e.g. brochures, newsletters etc. and anything where you want to give your customers the opportunity of saving the planet by providing an online version of your printed materials – if your website doesn’t already do this!).

We did come across a few glitches when installing, configuring and using the flippingbook plugin, the most confusing of which was having to change the file attributes of some of the images in the gallery to at least ’644′ before the book would display its contents.

What do you use it for? Can you see a use for it on your website? Get in touch and ask us to help.

Then comes the cold slap of reality, that cold kipper round the face (see example on right).

These aren’t comments from people that have something real and insightful to say about your post. It’s SPAM – verbal diarrhea, garbage, provided by those whose only interest is in writing a completely irrelevant comment in the hope that it generates traffic and link juice for their own web page. This is usually a pointless exercise anyway – as nobody will read the comment and think “ah, that sounds interesting, I’ll just click through and find out more” and there will generally be no link juice to be gained because the page will either not be valuable enough to have any in the first place, or the site owner would have instructed search engines not to pay attention to these links (see earlier post on using nofollow on your web pages).

But – these comments can still be rather disruptive to your blog, as they will devalue your content if left in place and can be time consuming for the blog owner to keep removing manually. Akismet is a plugin that all WordPress site owners can use (free for non-commercial use) to trap spam comments and bin them before they spoil your blog. You can review the comments it traps before deleting them for good, and you can set it so that all trapped comments are automatically deleted after a month.

So if spam is still spoiling your blog, take a look at Akismet and make it a problem of the past.

The reason for this is that WordPress automatically strips out parameters it doesn’t recognise before it builds your pages. The solution is to trick WordPress into accepting your parameters as though they were integral to the framework. I couldn’t find an ‘official’ wordpress plugin to allow me to do this, but came across this neat solution….

http://www.webopius.com/content/137/using-custom-url-parameters-in-wordpress

You will need to edit the template file which loads the page you want to receive the parameter, and you will need to upload some code as a plugin to name the variable(s) that you want to use, but it seems to work well.

Here is the plugin code, which needs to get uploaded to your plugins folder and activated….

<?php
/* Plugin Name: Parameter
Plugin URI: http://webopius.com/
Description: A plugin to allow parameters to be passed in the URL and recognized by WordPress
Author: Adam Boyse
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://www.webopius.com/
*/
add_filter('query_vars', 'parameter_queryvars' );
function parameter_queryvars( $qvars )
{
$qvars[] = 'yourvarname';
return $qvars;
}
?>

…and here is an example of how to use it in your template page….

global $wp_query;
if (isset($wp_query->query_vars['yourvarname']))
{
print $wp_query->query_vars['yourvarname'];
}

You need to change yourvarname to the name of the variable your page expects to receive.

Take a look at some of our other Polls – we’re trying not to go bonkers with them!

If you use other poll or survey software on your site, let us know how you are finding it.

“When a new car rolls off the production line, the component parts are never created from scratch but are parts that have been engineered for use in earlier models (and cars produced by other companies) and perhaps enhanced in some way to make the car lighter, faster, more energy efficient etc. Why should websites be any different? They too are formed from a collection of component parts.”

Many of these website components are “donated” by their developers, although there are generally conditions associated to the licence granted for their use. Some want recognition by getting their name in lights on your website; others ask for links (discrete or otherwise) to their own websites; some ask for voluntary donations. As a developer myself, I realise the considerable amount of work that goes in to most of these pieces of code. I also understand how much enjoyment can be had from building something that others find useful. I suspect that most users of the code snippets, widgets, plugins and scripts just take them, use them and don’t give another thought to the person who did the hard work – indeed, I have seen many posts on the forums or blogs of these developers where the users, happy to take and use the code, then complain when something doesn’t work quite as expected (even though the developer nearly always supplies it without guarantee).

I am shortly going to start donating more often for the code that I use. This is only fair, and if more people did it, then as well as rewarding the developers for their efforts it would surely encourage them to make their widgets even better. In addition, I hope to feature some of the best widgets that I find – so check back frequently.

Here's my Avatar - stunning in its lack of originality!

Gravatar (which stands for “Globally-recognised Avatar”) is a service that provides globally-unique Avatars. Hmm, ok you say, but what is an Avatar in the first place?

Well, an Avatar (apart from being a film and a Hindu term referring to the appearance of a deity descended from heaven to earth) is a computer-users representation of him/herself or an alter ego (see Wikipedia definintion). Most avatars are far more ingenious than mine (see right), and are often graphical representations of an object representing the person rather than a plain old photo, but their purpose is basically to represent you in graphical form anywhere on the web where your posts and comments appear.

Gravatar takes things one stage further and enables you to register an image as ‘belonging’ to an email address. Then, wherever your email address is used to post website comment your Gravatar will appear too. WordPress, as well as many other blogging tools and other websites, will automatically look for a Gravatar for you when you post a comment, and display it next to your posts and comments. With one registration at Gravatar you can add any number of your email addresses and assign the same, or different, images to each email address (which might be useful if you have a serious, and a less serious, persona depending on the forum or blog you are contributing to).

Just in case you’re not convinced, there are apparently 29,000 avatar images served every second of the day! Now that’s impressive.

The complication with this website was that a couple of the pages in the existing site had some considerable PHP scripting code which also needed to be incorporated into the new WordPress site. There are plenty of widgets around to allow you insert blocks of PHP into WordPress pages, but none of these seemed to work for the code on the site we were converting, giving various parsing errors, problems picking up included files, and also problems passing data from a form inside the included php file. For completeness, the widgets we tried were Executable PHP Widget and Inline PHP.

After many hours struggling to get it working we eventually just stuck the php file inside an HTML iframe tag, set the width to 100% and the height big enough to cope with the entire page, and it worked like a dream first time. We have accepted that iframe isn’t universally supported by all users, but it is a good, time-effective solution to the problem.

Here’s the code you need….



<iframe src="yourphpfilename.php" width="100%" height="1500" scrolling="no" frameborder="0">
<p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p>
</iframe>

If you have managed to overcome this problem without iframe, please let us know