Without caching each time the page was viewed my server would have had to hit Twitter and parse out the JSON; not a good solution. So this little plugin caches the request into the options table and only refreshes when needed. By default it’s every 5 minutes, but you can change that.

Usage

Upload the plugin to your wp-content/plugins folder and activate.

Insert <?php just_a_tweet(‘username’); ?> into your theme where you’d like it to show up.

The just_a_tweet takes 4 parameters.

$twitterUser – Required – The Twitter user name of the account you want to use

$cacheAge – Optional – The number of minutes to wait until the cache is considered stale. Defaults to 5

$forceRefresh – Optional – If true, then the caching is not done. Defaults to false

$echo – Optional = If true the tweet is echoed. The function returns the tweet either way.

Download

Download from the WordPress plugin library

Once activated, there is no work required on your part. The plugin takes care of parsing any external links out of your content and adding them to the list.

Options

Default On – You can decide whether you want the plugin to display links by default. Either way you set this, it can be overridden on individual posts using a meta fields on your posts.

Heading – Allows you to set HTML displayed above your links. Default is <h2>Links</h2>

Meta Fields

If there is content in either of these meta fields then they’ll trigger. lf_off takes precedence over lf_on.

lf_on – Force the links to display, even if default is off

lf_off – Force the links not to display

Download

You can download the Link Footnotes plugin from the WordPress plugin library.

On another blog I write a handful of posts at a time and schedule them out over several days.  But I have to keep going back and forth to the post list to check dates.  This plugin adds a link to the new post page that will automatically set the date for the post you’re working on based on the last post on your site.  It’s a subtle little link.  Take a look at the screen shot to the right.  Notice where it says ‘Auto’ next to ‘Edit’. Clicking that will run an Ajax call that will get the next date.

Options
Two sets of options for you.

The start and end time are the earliest and latest times respectively that you want posts published. The plugin will pick a random time somewhere in between the two.

The day different between the last post and the newly scheduled post will be somewhere between min days and max days away from the current latest date.  In the example above the next post will always be 2 days after the current latest, but if you want a little more randomness you can enter different numbers.

One note: The plugin does not necessarily use the date of the last post.  If there is a future dated post it will schedule based on that date.  If there aren’t any future dated posts it will date based on the current date.

Download

Get Auto Future Date from the WordPress plugin library

What I did need was a way to select a Twitter account, get the most recent tweets, and cache those results to keep from going over the 150 request per hour limit imposed by Twitter.  And, of course, it helps page load time to pull from a cache whenever possible.

Enter rTwit.  With a short code you’ll be able to insert any Twitter feed into your page.

Installation
Download the zip from the link below and unzip it to somewhere on your computer.

Upload the /rtwit/ folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder on your server.

Activate the rTwit plugin.

There are a few options under Settings -> rTwit.  You’ll most likely want to set the default account, although it’s optional.

Usage
Note that there are no spaces after [ or before ].  I’m just putting them there so WordPress doesn’t try to format.

The short code for this plugin is [ rtwit ].  Using the default short code will pull the 10 most recent tweets from whatever default account you have set.

[ rtwit account=Bob123 ] or [ rtwit account="Bob123" ] will pull the 10 most recent tweets from Bob123′s account.

[ rtwit account=Bob123 count=20 ] will pull the 20 most recent tweets from Bob123′s account.

Sample?
Need to see a sample?

You can see it in use by checking out this post on Evernote I wrote for another site of mine.

And a note…
This is a first release, and still may have bugs lingering.  Best I can say right now is that it’s working on the site I wrote it for.  Of course please let me know of any issues you come across.  

To add a file simply add it as a post attachment just like you would with an image.  Instead of inserting into the post you just close the media window once it’s been uploaded.  You may want to take a look at the mime-config plugin if you’re going to be uploading non web file types.  WordPress tends to not like authors uploading some formats.

PNG icons are from http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/