Author Archives: geert

Seven things successful people do differently

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In the last 5 years I’ve had the privilege to work with and talk to al lot of successful people. I’ve noticed they all have something in common, they do things differently.

Here is what they do differently:

  1. Stop thinking you can get somewhere by simply implementing a seven point check-list. In most cases you are required to walk the extra mile and use some common sense.
  2. See point 1
  3. See point 2
  4. See point 3
  5. See point 4
  6. See point 5
  7. Stop reading this and invest your time in something that is real fun or productive and preferably a combination of both. In general creating something is what drives success.

Enough is enough

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Galland.be WordPress PluginAfter deleting WordPress spam for another hour or so, it became clear to me. Enough is enough. Either I would register a bunch of Akismet keys (Enterprise or Pro) for some of our websites or develop my own SPAM protection plugin. I took a closer look at the hooks available for comments and accepted the challenge. A few hours later my first prototype was ready. It appeared to work as I did not receive any comment SPAM for 2 days but this could be a case of serendipity. So I updated the plugin with a counter indicating the number of SPAM comments stopped. As for now the plugin stopped over 100 spam comments and I didn’t have to delete a single comment. As of yesterday the plugin became available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Feel free to try it on your website and keep me posted.

Galland.be WordPress tools
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gallandbe-wp-tools/

Multilingual WordPress

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In most cases where multilingual is required, I end up using Drupal, but in this case I really needed a WordPress solution.

On WordPress.org you can find a lot of information about setting up a multilingual WordPress — http://codex.wordpress.org/Multilingual_WordPress

My initial idea was to opt for a “multi-site” solution so I started exploring Multilingual Press and Multisite Language Switcher.

Multilingual Press
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/multilingual-press/
I do like the workflow of this plugg-in, but the lack of support for custom types and the need to debug from the start, discouraged me to use his plugin.

Multisite Language Switcher
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/multisite-language-switcher/
Probably the best concept as you can link content to other content types.  But it requires a translated WordPress interface for every language (installing a .mo file) and it becomes rather cumbersome in case you have to manage a lot of content.

WPML – ($79)
http://wpml.org/
Until now the best solution, although it’s not using a multi-site environment but offers the same user experience.

Remember Posterous

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RIP PosterousOn February 15 2013, Sachin Agarwal (Founder and CEO) announced the end of Posterous. Posterous will be turned off on April 30, 2013 as a consequence of the acquisition by Twitter almost a year ago. Users can download a backup of their posts and are suggested to move towards WordPress or Squarespace as they both provide importers.

In the future, every time somebody starts an argument about using a existing platform as company website he will get the answer: “Remember Posterous”.