Spring Cleaning

An attempt to give my website a bit of spring cleaning has resulted in several new WordPress plugins.

The first is Tidy Up, which adds the ability to run HTML Tidy through all your posts and comments and produce a report on the quality of your HTML. If you’re feeling brave you can also have the plugin automatically fix any problems.

Next is Search Regex. As the name would suggest, this is a search and replace plugin. It allows you to search and replace phrases inside posts, pages, comments, and meta-data. In addition to plain text searches, you can also use full PHP regular expressions. This makes it very easy to bulk-modify a WordPress installation, should you decide to move directories. Several other similar plugins exist, but I couldn’t find one that provided the regular expression capability that I needed.

Next up is Drain Hole, a download monitoring plugin. What this does is take control of a nominated directory. Any files downloaded from this directory (the drain hole) are monitored by the plugin, which retains certain statistics.

The other half of the plugin is that it allows you to version downloads, from an administrative interface, and you can then insert download information (URL, file size, version etc) into a WordPress post by using special tags. Change the file’s version and it automatically updates throughout your site.

Finally there are two mini-plugins that perform very simple functions: Google Ad Wrap and Disable wpautop. The first wraps posts and comments in Google’s Section tags, supposedly which may help Google detect what is the real meat of your posts. The second just disables the WordPress wpautop automatic formatting function.

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