As you probably know, I am a user of Ubuntu (currently running 8.10).

By way of giving a little bit back to the community, I have created a unified desktop environment with Login Screen, Desktop, icons and sounds to provide a cohesive (to my mind) environment.

If you would like to try these out on your Ubuntu Desktop feel free to download the 19+ MB set here. Note the readme document which contains installation instructions.  I am guessing that this environment will work on any Gnome/ Debian base… but I have only tested it on Ubuntu 8.10.

Enjoy!

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For those of you who have been kind enough to spend time on our site, we thank you AND we are pleased to say that we have made a significant breakthrough in our site’s performance.

The long and short of the issue is Plugins. Plugins can act as a significant drag on your site’s performance. We have noticed load times on this site approaching 11+ seconds (wayyyy to slow!). Now the load times are running at about 4.5 seconds (we think that’s much better!). In order to solve this load dilemma we have been using a set of free tools from Pingdom.

Areas of problems we noticed in our debug process included:

• misplaced and missing image directories in the tarski theme (we now have three directories of our little gif images… because of the errant calls within the theme internal calls)
• broken image links (yes we were part of the problem too…)
• numerous poor (read slooowwwwww) plugins; these are all removed

Additionally we have learned to remove any unused (not active) plugin. Inactive plugins can still act as a performance hit. And lastly, I scrubbed our DB. Numerous plugins had left a trail of unused tables and rows in our DB– the worst culprits were a forum plugin and an audit trail plugin.

Again, thank you to everyone for sticking with us. We appreciate your patience and hope you will find our little lessons-learned useful.

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The TreeMagic-Banyan tools on this site now provide easy access to more than 800 cross referenced WordPress articles.  These articles are read and cross referenced using AmbientWebs unique SWED  based technologies and served on our Banyan portal.
To gain access to this wealth of WordPress knowledge from the world’s leading WordPress sites, simply double-click on any word and open the WP Banyan Portal.  Let us know what you think.  Use our contact form to provide us with your observations and feedback.

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WordPressHelp (WPH) is very pleased to announce that we have implemented the newest release of TreeMagic-Banyan thereby aggregating the web’s most important WordPress information all in one location!!!

In our continuing efforts to make WordPress easier to use, WPH now affords WP developers & users the opportunity to double-click on any text word on this site and gain “instant” access to related WP resource information from:

• WordPress
• Lorelle
• Automattic
• WordPress Themes
• WordPressHelp
• AmbientWebs and
• TreeMagic

Users may access the information from these sites either individually (via the drop-down menu which appears when you double-click on a term) or in a collective, intelligently, pre-processed and correlated fashion (via the WP Banyan Portal). This Web 3 functionality allows users access information ‘on-the spot’ and then return to the source for continued reading and information gathering.

If you have additional sites you wish for us to incorporate in our WP Banyan Portal and TM-Banyan Search function, please use our Contact page to let us know.

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AmbientWebs is pleased to inform everyone that the following sites are now enabled with TreeMagic-Cypress or TreeMagic-Banyan:

• TreeMagic-Cypress sites:
  • http://treemagic.org
  • http://drdiab.info
  • http://ambientwebs.com
  • http://goodwines.org
• TreeMagic-Banyan sites:
  • http://wordpresshelp.org
  • http://processteam.org

Please let us know other sites that are using the plugin… oh and we are also interested in what you might want to see this plugin do next….

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TreeMagic Cypress is a new lightweight browser plugin for WordPress. Install, configure, then double click any word, or select a group of words on the page. On mouse-up a small popup appears adjacent to the selected text that gives you instant access to define, expand and explore related resources. It does not replace or interfere with existing hyperlinks, but adds an instant and powerful reference compliment to all your texts, regardless of formatting and styles.
The plugin can be configured to any external Internet website, as well as connecting to your own data, or network. TreeMagic Cypress is available as a free download from the downloads section of this site

The popup has a list of links that is configurable from the plugin administration section. The idea is that when you double click or select a group of words on a page, the popup is invoked adjacent to the word(s) allowing you to rapidly select a web site from the list. Typical examples of this are search engines, Wikipedia, Refdesk and similar knowledge-base sites. After selecting a site, the word(s) you have selected become part of a search string that returns results in a smaller separate popup window. You can of course keep your query results ‘on site’ such as searching your own content, help files or related resources. Because the query URLs are completely configurable in administration, you have total control over the searches, including opening the results page in a resized new window or using the existing target.

TreeMagic Cypress is not new technology and utilizes a small javascript and css to provide the fastest possible way to show extended meaning, content and relationship for text on a page. Once installed every text word on your site, that is not a hyperlink is potentially active. It does not interfere with any other mouse click functions and is totally unintrusive in use. Installation is simple, via a standard WordPress plugin. There are no database changes and the plugin adds negligible overhead to your HTML.

The broad concept is to provide the visitor greater freedom to take diversions from interesting cues in the text, but not taking them from your site in the process. Too many turns in the road and too many temptations to explore, can take your focus away from the content on a page. Most of us have come to realize that it is all too easy to be a ‘browser butterfly’ taking detours from hyperlinks and searches that often leave you marooned and lost in hyperspace. TreeMagic Cypress addresses the need to explore and supplement page content from other resources, but keeps your visitors safely focused on your website.

Searches can be configured for anything from a dictionary definition, translations, image searches to a full blown encyclopedia expositions. Following further links within the results ‘new window’ allows readers to explore in a separate browser page, while keeping your website in view when they want to return. Because we use a new window to display content, all your usual browser tools are available such as page saves and bookmarking your excursions for future returns.

As a web master, you have a simple administration interface that gives options for adding and deleting your website search strings, also the results window target and size. We have included a few samples to get you started, but the choice is up to you to provide the most suitable supplementary content for your website. There are numerous types of applications available for this tool and because you can manage your own reference links, you can offer a variety of offsite or internal content. All you need to do is track down your reference site and discover the correct query string.

Some typical examples of sites are as follows:

Google search
–Images
–News
–Maps
Wikipedia search
Currency converter
whois /IP lookup
answers.com
dictionary.com
Clusty.com
Translation
–en-fr
–en-ge
–en-it
Currency conversions
–£-$
–$-£
Navigation
–Home
–Contact us
–Help!
–Site map
–Site search

Do you need TreeMagic Cypress?

One of the main considerations with WordPress is choosing carefully which plugins to use. Too many and your website can suffer with decreased performance. Because of the tiny script footprint, this plugin will not add any significant processing burden to the database or page loads. It’s simple to use and will add some great features to your web page texts with the minimum of setup. The features and benefits are only limited by your imagination.

Download here …

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Licence.

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If there are files that you wish for us to provide on WordPressHelp please contact us directly.

Currently the following WordPress Plugins are available:

1. TreeMagic-Cypress is a Creative Commons Share & Share-Alike version of AmbientWebs MetaQuery toolset (plugin) for WordPress. btw. This is the same download you will find on the WordPress plugin site.
2. Drop-Down Menu is a slightly modified version of Zoute Snor’s Drop-Down Menu plugin for WordPress. The modifications in this version focus on making the CSS a bit cleaner and validated.

Ubuntu Linux related downloads

Desktop Wallpapers (Free)

• Penguins on Beach (image from sxc.hu)
  
• Icebergs (image from Digital Blasphamy)

Screensaver(s)

• Cosmos (images from Hubble)

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WordPressHelp offers several handy features to authors and readers. We have selected a few plugins that help to create increased readability and connectivity within the post contents. Here is a brief summary of plugins used, what they do and how to use them

1- aLinks. This plugin automatically links keywords both systematically and automatically. It’s a complex plugin that uses algorithms to search and match kewords you input to relevancy on the page. Thats the automatic part, once you enter a keyword in the admin section of the plugin. This ‘search and match’ is based on a scoring method and the top match is used in the link. This match changes, as posts get added, because it’s a dynamic action that gets passed to the database as the page is being rendered. The actual links, don’t exist, until the page is displayed. Additionally, the ‘search and match’ is restricted to a maximum of 30 days previous posts, to make the process as fast as possible in the database scans.

The other option of this plugin is to create a keyword with a specific URL for it to go to if the keyword is found in any post. This is more deterministic and the link to that URL remains indefinitly. My guess is there is less processing involved and no DB scans are involved.

Alinks also has an Amazon associate section, that searches amazon items according to keywords. We don’t use this function in our context.

If we DON’T like the automatic linking, via scoring of posts content, but prefer to hard link a post to a specific keyword, we should consider a simpler (with less overheads) plugin called SH-Autolink. (this is already installed) This plugin has no scoring system, but only offers a ‘keyword to specific URL option’. The only downside is that it matches EVERY occurance of a word in all posts, where as aLinks only matches the first occurrance of a keyword per post, to avoid link saturation.

Do we have a preference as to which method we prefer?

The other WPH author features are more straight forward and easy.

1- Footnotes. This is a neat plugin that lets authors add footnotes really easily to their posts. The footnote is linked (anchored) from a numbered superscript character to the actual footnote on the page. The footnotes have a ‘return’ link that takes you back. Here’s how you use it. Any text, link or content that you want to be a footnote is created inline with your page text as follows. ((This is my footnote)) yep, 2 curly braces round your content makes a numbered footnote. Make sure you leave a space between the start and end braces!

2- Snippet Highlight. Great plugin that renders code in well formatted lined snippets for easy reading and copying. Simply enclose any code snippet with <pre> </pre> to render full html, php, etc unparsed on the page.

3- Image Caption Easy. Transforms the alt text of an image into a caption which can be controlled through css. When you insert an image into a post you can make a caption and a nice genle border round the image. To make a caption, the ALT tag must be entered and this becomes the text in the caption. No ALT tag and no caption is created. I’ve asked the developer to add an option of allowing an ALT tag, but not transforming this to a caption to make images xhtml compliant. He’s agreed. This plugin allows nice captioning for diagrams, charts, images etc.

WPH also has some other connectivity features that work in the background. These are designed to create a ‘thick website’ of interlinks and related content. These are listed as follows:

1- Simple Tags. Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3. Auto-completion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags. One of the best available tagging system for 2.3 after UTW. This tagging plugin produces rich cross referencing and auto -suggests tags in posts creation.

2- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches, limited by a certain relatedness threshold. The list is conveniently situated below the full post. It can be configured for matching thresholds.

3- TreeMagic-Cypress. Provides instant queries against any word or phrase on the page. Query resources are configurable and provide highly focused, non-intrusive supplementary information for the user.

WPH posts management features.
1- Audit Trail. Keep a log of exactly what is happening behind the scenes of your WordPress blog. This needs to be accessed in the website admin section. Although it does not allow for conventional ‘rollback’ to a version previously, versions can be viewed and re-saved, or data salvaged.

2-WP Admin Bar Reloaded. Adds a small admin bar to the top of every page. Simple and fast access to admin sections through this discreet addition to the header of every page. Seen by logged in users only and permission based for the available links.

3- WP-DownloadManager. Adds a simple download manager to your WordPress blog.

4- User Permissions. Provides user read/ write permissions on a per post basis. Easily set from a block in the editor write page. If we trust this … it’s useful for internal posts not for public consumption

5- Subscribe to Comments. Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

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We support a community of users interested in innovating and implementing WordPress sites that extend the web! We are committed to

Making WordPress Even Easier to Use!

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