Classic Image Button plugin Now Available

The Plugins Podcast is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the new Classic Image Button WordPress plugin.

The Classic Image Button plugin adds the classic image button option to the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress. The plugin adds the image button to the top row of the text formatting options. The plugin can work in tandem with the built-in WordPress image functions. This plugin also includes an option to disable inline styles in case you want your image styling to be compatible with the widest range of feed readers.

Classic Image Button

Disabling inline styles reverts the image properties vspace, hspace, border and align as image attributes instead of inline styling (e.g. border=”2″ instead of style=”border: 2px;”).

The Classic Image Button is added to both the main post and page visual editors as well as the smaller Press This editor.

The plugin may be downloaded from the WordPress Plugins Directory or by the following link: Download version 1.0.

Pinging Web Logs and Updating Services in WordPress

Today I gave a friend my list of web logs I like to ping. If you’re not familiar with pinging as far as blogging is concerned, it is a method for your blog to let other web blog directories know that you’ve published a new post. If you don’t ping sites to let them know you have new content, then your post will not get picked up until a web crawling app crawls your site. I personally like things to be instant, which is why I love weblog pings.

In WordPress, these ping sites are saved in a field titled Updating Services. Each Service (or weblog, as I like to call it) URL is entered on a new line. Here’s my list of weblogs I currently ping when I publish a new post.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rssrpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://odeo.com/api/xmlrpc/1.0/ping

Pingomatic.com one is the default value. Technorati.com, weblogs.com andĀ blogsearch.google.com I believe are the most important sites to ping. I still include some others as you see above to get the most bang for my ping.

You can learn more about this topic on the Update Services page on wordpress.org.

What sites do you ping and why?