wp_get_archives(’type=alpha’);

And you can do so without banging your head against the wall for an hour like I did.

You have exceeded my expectations with this project, your eye for designing with only an idea is spectacular! I will be coming to you for all of my future projects.

Great to hear Paul, you are awesome to work with and I appreciate the space you give me to create. Keep a lookout for for a post highlighting this new project soon – it’s not your average blog.

While I know that there are other lists of Twitter plugins out there – I wanted to publish my take on the issue of WordPress plugins for twitter because I have actually tried a large number of WordPress Twitter plugins and have experienced the excellent, passable, and just plain bad.

While I will spare the creators of the just plain bad plugins, I did want to share a simple list of good to great Twitter WordPress plugins:

• TweetSuite
  I suggest you start here if you use WordPress and Twitter. It features: TweetBacks, ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack, A digg-like Tweet-This Button, Automatic Tweeting of new posts, and a half a dozen more features without javascript or remote calls.
• Ping.fm Custom URL
  This is a feature rich wordpress plugin that works with Ping.fm’s Custom URL feature to collect blog entries, microblog entries, and status updates and post them to your blog.
• Twitturls
  On the other end of the spectrum there is the very simple Twitturls, a WordPress Widget that displays currently popular links that have been tweeted.
• Social Profiles Wordpress Plugin
  This plugin is a bit more specialized but great if you run a multi author blog. Social Profiles allows you to add social network profile links to the comments of your registered users as specified by the user on their profile page
• Twitpress
  Twitpress is a wordpress plugin that accomplishes 1 popular task well, it submits a user definable tweet to your twitter account notifying any twitter followers or friends that a new blog entry has been published on your blog.
• Tweet Tweet
  Tweet Tweet is a plugin for WordPress that polls Twitter and archives your tweets and the tweets of those you follow so those insightful conversations you have at 1am are never lost.

So there you go, JTk’s favorite Twitter related WordPress plugins. Each accomplishes a slightly different task and comes at making the integration of your WordPress powered site and Twitter more effective from a different angle.

Sometimes I worry that I am doing myself and my other clients a dis-service by lingering too long helping clients with tasks well beyond what I have agreed to and what I have been paid for. And then I get an email like this:

“It’s evident in the quality and support that you provide, that you’re committed to building long term relationships with your clientele. Simply put; it has been a pleasure to work with you.”

That was written by David C. who I have worked with multiple times now.

The moral of this story is that if you are waiting on me to finish your WordPress project, hang in there and I will provide you with the same service that I did David.

So if you want a custom WordPress theme and and can wait 30 days, feel free to contact me. If you want to co-brand a creative commons Wordpress theme by all means get in touch.

But if you need a new theme by Tuesday, need Wordpress consulting right this minute, or any other service that puts my current time-line in jeopardy I’ll have to pass this time.

P.S. all baby gerts are lost…

Hey Now, I am happy to announce version 1.2 of the Blue Meanie free WordPress theme. Blue Meanie is a free theme that Conlan and I released about a year ago – and it needed some attention… It’s a variable width, liquid layout, stretchable type theme that I’ve always liked and judging by the number of support questions I get about it – it’s fairly popular.

Check it out here.

That’s exactly what Jeff over at People You’ll See in Hell did, he gave me some time and creative freedom and we created something that we both liked. His dedicated audience has been decidedly positive as well.

I think times, they are a changing. CNN Political Blogs are now using MU, and the blogs at ZDNet are using some flavor of WordPress.

Silent Bob blogs with WordPress, that should be enough for the Ninja by itself. Yahoo is using WordPress ( I know because they asked me to work with them on a WP project once, but that is another story…) and Sony trusts the PlayStation blog to WordPress.

Rolling Stone, NewYork Times, Delta Airlines? Check.

I am admittedly biased, but I think if these big-timers can trust their sites to WordPress, we can too.

WordPress says:

WordPress has the ability to allow post authors to assign custom fields to a post. This arbitrary extra information is known as meta-data.

You can find the Custom Field entry form near the bottom of the Create New Post section of the administration backend, but to use it you will need to hack up your WordPress theme somewhat to get the data to show up. The data itself can be just about anything – your current location, mood, etc. – I have used it in the past so a client could include a photo thumbnail in each post at a specific place in his WordPress theme that was not possible through the standard post form.

This is the code that I used to impleiment the custom thumbnail:

<?php //get article_image (custom field) ?>
<?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘article_image’, true); ?>

<img src="<?php echo $image; ?>" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" />

My suggestion is that you check out the WordPress codex about the custom field but don’t get bogged down in the examples that they show you. You can do almost anything with this data so get creative and start using the WordPress Custom Fields!