Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with plugins

How can I install Final Cut Express plugins/effects?

eric1200 — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:03:22 -0800

How can I install Final Cut Express plugins/effects? I am using Final Cut Express HD 3.5.1. I downloaded some free plugins but I don't know how to install them. I haven't been able to find ANY information about this anywhere!

The closest I have come is reading that I should drag them into a plugins folder, something like Library>Application Support>Final Cut etc. However this folder doesn't even exist on my computer.

Where should I drag these plugins/effects?? THANK YOU IN ADVANCE (even if you tell me I'm clueless and it's not possible).

Need a WP Amazon plugin that fits some specific specs

electric_counterpoint — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 04:33:14 -0800

Looking for a Wordpress plugin to display, in every post, n Amazon links from a given list. They should chosen based on the post's content. So, we've got a big list of books on the topics that our blog covers. I'd like to include, say, two Amazon affiliate links at the bottom of every post to them, but obviously it's important that the books match the topic of the post. Is there a good way to do this automatically? I've looked around the WP plugin database, and nothing looks quite right... maybe the best is AzLite, but it's now unsupported.

Oh, book cover thumbnails would be awesome.

A couple ideas I've had:

Work each title into a that wouldn't display on the main page, categorized as "Books", and then use a "Related posts" plugin to select only from the "Books" category. Downsides: requires a lot of manual Wordpress hackery and sorting; no thumbnails.

Categorize the list of books using the same taxonomy as the blog's categories. Write a plugin that will select from such database, and display a couple randomly chosen books that match the post's category or categories. Downsides: way beyond my skills; hard to update the database with new books.

I'd really like to avoid a manual solution (i.e., choosing books from the big list and adding them to each post by hand), because this blog has many authors and the list of books is constantly expanding — not everybody will be familiar with every title on the list.

Firefox extension to change page style?

Mrs. Buck Turgidson — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:10:26 -0800

Is there a firefox extension or plugin that will allow me to change page style? I know I can select page style/no style; but what I'd really like to do is temporarily tone down a stark, white page background.

Wordpress plugin for document management?

trokair — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 19:40:54 -0800

Is there a Wordpress plug-in that does document management? I do a lot of writing for my college newspaper and I have all of the articles I've written stored away in a few folders on my PC. My roommate is currently hosting a blog for me on a Wordpress MU platform.

I wanted to know if there was a semi-easy way I could go about uploading all of these articles and display links (and other pertinent information) in some sort of index page. It doesn't have to be fancy, but I'd rather not upload and manually link everything on a custom page.

Pimp my text area.

wfrgms — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 13:57:00 -0800

What tricks have you learned that make writing, editing, and formatting in web page "text areas" easier? I'm realizing that I spend way more time typing in text areas at places like MeFi than I do writing in word processing apps. Cutting and pasting between Word and a comment box has increasingly become a risky proposition as some characters are mangled and links and formating seldom carry over.

Firefox's spellcheck feature sure does make life easier, but are there any tricks out there that can extend the abilities of my browser? I'd really like to highlight text for special formating or hyperlinking regardless of where I'm posting.

I'm aware of Xinha Here!, but it hasn't been updated in a while and I really would like to see something that is integrated directly into the text area.

Thanks for your tips, tricks, and suggestions. Happy Holidays!

How to recreate my handmade, RSS-aggregating, local-info website using existing CMS & plugins?

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:00:38 -0800

How could you use an off-the-shelf free CMS, theme and plugins to generate a (5+ column, RSS-aggregating, screen-scraping, client-side-scripting-free, fast-loading, autoupdating) page like this handmade local-info-aggregator webpage? OK, so I did things the hard way: last spring, after running into too many third-party-applet surprise limitations, I spent way too much time rolling my own local-info aggregator.

Now I need to know if it's worth improving&extending my Ruby scripts. It's not worth doing so, if there's a CMS with theme and plugins that can do the same things more elegantly and extensibly.

At present, my script runs hourly to generate a cached webpage, using an RSS aggregator script which groups RSS feeds and arranges their posts and other info onto the page as specified by some configuration files.

----------------------------------------------------
Advantages:

1) Site owner can configure column positioning, any # of columns, widgets within columns, widget types

2) One widget type aggregates posts from a group of RSS feeds, and sorts the aggregated posts by their creation date (so if the blogger fixes a speling error in an older post, the old post doesn't jump to the top)

3) Another widget type gives extra prominence to a particular feed of a particular single weblog, and extra prominence to its most recent post but only if said post is fresh. (not a dealbreaker, I could still run a separate script to do this, right?)

4) There's no scripting (client-side nor server-side) when delivering the page, so it loads fast and is friendly to scripting-disabled browsing.

5) No reliance on the benificence and continued function&extensibility of third party applets/sites

6) When it breaks, I can fix it...
----------------------------------------------------

I know that much of this effort was reinventing the wheel, but I don't know - without a lot of trial and error, some of which I've tried... - how I could duplicate the page using existing tools.

Perhaps you do?

(the main sticking points would likely be the 5+ 'equivalent' columns and 5+ separate aggregated feedgroups, not making the client use Javascript, and not depending on third-party websites and their continued existence&functioning&lack of limitations)

Thanks much if you can help -
Anna
(I'm not really anonymous, just didn't want to tie my site to a Metafilter account)

My readers don't understand how permalinks and anchor tags work

arielmeadow — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:41:05 -0800

Is there any way to automagically strip anchor tags from externally linked URLs? I frequently use of Wordpress's "more" feature, meaning that many of my blog readers click "more" a post in its entirety.

Many of my readers aren't blog geeks, so when they want to link my posts, they just grab the anchor tagged url from their browser (say, http://mysite.com/2007/10/post-title#more-474) and use that to link. This means that often when my posts are referenced on the web, readers click through and find themselves in the middle of the post.

I've tried dealing with this usual ways (posting announcements on my blog, making permalinks more prominent, adding "share this post" plugins, etc) but ultimately I'm fighting against the way my users read my site, which is "click more -- then grab the URL from their browser to link."

I also explored an .htaccess solution to see if it could strip anchor tags from external links, so that they'd point to http://mysite.com/2007/10/post-title instead of http://mysite.com/2007/10/post-title#more-474. But anchor tags are a browser issue, not a server one.

I can't be the first blogger to have wrestled with this. Any advice other than ceasing to use the "more" feature?

What are the best Safari plugins?

jroybal — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 13:26:21 -0800

What are the best Safari plugins? I recently bought my first Mac, a MacBook, and now I've switched to Safari. What are some Safari plugins that I should be using? Preferably free. Mac OS X Tiger, 10.4.10, Safari 3.0.2 Beta. I've seen some related threads on here, but they're kind of old, and there's no mention of Safari 3 Beta.

Two things specifically, but really anything that would be useful.
1. Something that would give me more control over tab behavior
2. An ad-blocker

Thanks very much.

How to make it easy for user to upload images, mp3s to a blog project site?

cortex — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 21:08:47 -0800

Good, free solutions for implementing super-easy userland image- and mp3-upload capability into a Wordpress-based blog project? I'm kicking around an idea for a participatory bloggish thing, and part of it involves letting users/participants upload images and mp3 files in as painless a fashion as possible. I'm pretty conversant in WP, basic PHP, and author-driven bloggery, but letting other folks push stuff onto a site easily is not familiar territory.

Are there any particularly good solutions for allowing reasonably secure uploads? Is this stupid easy? Hope me; I am a babe in the woods, here.

turn on, plugin, drop out

dw — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:55:30 -0800

I'm looking for two Wordpress plugins: One that provides the same sort of comment editing tools you see with the MeFi comment box (bold, italic, link), and one that lets you limit the total number of comments shown on a page to, e.g., the last 25 made. I'm trying to help a blog with a lot of HTML-illiterate readers and 300+ comment liveblog posts to improve usability and cut back on the bandwidth.

Plugin One should be self-explanatory. Plugin Two would make it so that instead of listing every comment on a post page there'd be a message like, "300 comments, last 25 shown. [link]View all comments[/link]" or something to that effect.

I can code up the plugins myself, but I'm lazy and don't want to reinvent the wheel if I can.

Image uploader plugins for Movable Type

cg2 — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 06:35:21 -0800

Does anyone know a good image uploader plugin for Movable Type that does exactly what the built in image uploader does in Typepad? (in Typepad, when you insert an image in a post, the image code is inserted for you into the entry, and you can upload multiple images and Typepad continues to insert the image code for each image uploaded into the single entry). I have tried NetPBM, but it only shows the html for the pop up thumbnail image, it doesn't insert the code into the entry for you. Tips and references on customizing NetPBM are also welcome. thanks a lot!

This stupid website doesn't like my operating system, help me trick it

Mijo Bijo — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 21:05:36 -0800

I'm currently using a computer with Windows x64 as its operating system and I need to log into a tax website to file my taxes, but the website does not support my operating system. I've tried Firefox, IE, and Opera, so it is definitely the operating system. Is there a plugin for any of the above mentioned browsers that will identify my operating system as plain ol' vanilla Windows XP?

Fighting WordPress spam

Robot Johnny — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 11:35:21 -0800

Best spam-fighting solutions for WordPress? WordPress does a great job of keeping spam comments from being published, but I still get LOTS of spam piling up in my moderation queue, and it's just as a pain in the ass to delete them from within the queue as it is had they been published as actual comments.

What are the best plugins/combos/solutions for combatting spam comments using WordPress? (FYI, my site is currently set up to allow comments from anyone who has already had one approved comment, and anything else must be moderated)

How do I do a global wordcount in MT?

Marquis — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 09:22:12 -0800

How do I get a global wordcount for every post made on my MT 2.66 blog? MT Wordcount only seems to have tags for obtaining the number of words in each entry. I want to know the big number that is the total sum for all (558) entries on the blog.

Apparently MTWordStats used to do this, but the plugin's no longer available.

Thanks!

Movable Type plugins?

o2b — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 09:09:26 -0800

I'm starting to plan a new Movable Type project, and I'd like to know: What are your favorite plugins? This new project will be using MT, but will not be a blog. I'll be trying to push MT a little, so I'd like to know what plugins you've found useful in the past, or you think would be useful for a content-heavy site.

I know the pagination plugin is going to be helpful to me, and dirify plus is likely to come in handy, but I want more. I need to break boundaries and expand the abilities of the editors. I have lots of ideas, but I don't want to miss anything.

(BTW: Please don't try to sell me on Wordpress - I love it and use it, but MT has features that are deal-breakers for my project.)

WordPress plugins?

monju_bosatsu — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 09:09:11 -0800

WordPress users: What plugins have you found useful? My wife and I are both new WordPress users, after an arduous battle to wrest our previous entries from Blogger's paws. I'd like to extend the functionality of our sites, but the number of plugins available is a little daunting. What plugins do you use?

Question number 13017

moonbird — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 13:25:45 -0800

I'm using the latest Firefox, with a few basic plugins. In the past few days, I had these alert boxes that popping when clicking a link that only display a single digit and the 'ok' button. What's a' happenin'?

Question number 12589

LouMac — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 18:37:13 -0800

WinAmpFilter: The constant variation between too loud and too quiet is killing me. Which WinAmp plug-ins for volume normalization do you recommend? Yes, I know iTunes does it well, but iTunes doesn't play nice when I have a couple of other programs open.

Outlook .ics subscription plugin?

auzten — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 11:01:29 -0800

Is there a plugin (or some other mechanism) available that will allow Outlook in Windows to subscribe to an iCal *.ics file? [more inside]

Lyrics Websites

dhoyt — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 11:30:24 -0800

How come many lyrics sites try to install virii? LyricsDepot.com, eLyrics.com, LyricsFreak.com and so forth all suggest you download their dubious-sounding "plug-in".

Question number 7354

tr33hggr — Wed, 19 May 2004 08:42:38 -0800

Before I spend the $9.95 or whatever to purchase a MS approved plug-in for Media Player, are there any good AND free utilities available to convert music files from WMA to MP3?

Question number 7171

brownpau — Tue, 11 May 2004 15:28:24 -0800

Hey, Celestia users. I have a couple of questions about buggy textures, and I want your recommendations for plugins. I am on Celestia for OS X. More inside.

Question number 6180

noisia — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 13:05:04 -0800

Are there any visualisation plugins for winamp (or other windows based mp3 players) suited for ambient music?

Question number 5765

armoured-ant — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 10:42:14 -0800

CoolEdit Pro plugins. Which playing guess-and-play with the inbuild Graphic EQ plugin with CoolEdit Pro 2 is all fun, I'm looking for a graphic that will display a VU/EQ of the track behind the EQ of the track. Kinda like the little VU in WinAmp, but with EQ controls in front of it. Also; anyone know any other killer CoolEdit plugins?