Update to WordPress Posts to PDF

August 24, 2023 | Comment

A few weeks ago I released a tool that allows you to export your WordPress posts to a nicely formatted PDF file. I have today pushed some changes to the code which you can find on the GitHub page. This includes the following:

Heading (H1, H2 & H3) tags are all now supported
List (ordered & unordered) tags are now supported
Inline images (not supported) captions are silently dropped
A new command line parameter to choose the order of output
Progress now shows the number of posts out of the total processed (see image below)
Improvements in the

… Read the rest

Exporting all WordPress Posts to PDF

August 2, 2023 | 2 comments

I had a requirement to export all my WordPress blog posts into a nicely formatted PDF file and so I looked at plugins that were available to do the job, of which there are a few. I tried some and none worked for me giving no output at all so I decided I would roll my own. Here’s how you can use that code to download your posts to PDF too. You can see an example of the output at the bottom of the post.

To do this required two things: accessing my posts via the WordPress API and … Read the rest

Custom HTML Widget Changes in WordPress

April 17, 2018 | Comment

Last week I was asked by a client if I could help them put the Mailchimp newsletter signup form on their site. They had been trying for a while and they couldn’t get the form to appear at all. “No problem” I said, think that this would be a doddle. A couple of hours later I was pulling my hair out as I tried everything I could to get it to work.

Finally I did the inevitable Google search and discovered the at some point recently the custom HTML widget had been changed and that “some HTML tags like script, … Read the rest

Going Secure via Cloudflare (and a Warning)

August 15, 2017 | Comment

Forced to be Secure by Google

The more observant amongst you may have noticed that the site is now “secure”. Quite why a blog needs to be so I am not sure but Google is starting to insist on such things so I am in the process of converting all my sites to load via https.

To be honest it has been a bit of a trial, partly because this site runs on a WordPress multi-site installation and that has thrown up a few peculiarities. Anyway, the change from Google has forced me to look at all my sites and … Read the rest

WordPress, Cloudflare, Caching & Version Numbers

December 23, 2015 | Comment

While I love WordPress one thing that really bugs me is its insistence on adding the version number to the end of resources, so you end up with links links this:

http://www.spokenlikeageek.com/wp-content/themes/required/style.css?ver=4.4

The version number is added to enable browser caching of files thereby speeding up page loads. The issue with this is if you make a change to the resource it is difficult to get the changes showing without clearing your cache. Additionally, as I am using CloudFlare this step by WordPress is superfluous.

All is not lost however, you can remove these version number by adding the … Read the rest

Flattery as a form of spam

August 11, 2015 | Comment

As spam goes this is pretty benign but irritating nevertheless and I have no idea how to rid myself of it.

Just recently I have started to receive messages through the contact form on our website that are allegedly related to our blog posts and they are smothering with kindness and praise for our work.

I blog quite often and I seriously appreciate your information. This article has truly peaked my interest. I’m going to take a note of your site and keep checking for new information about once a week. I subscribed to your Feed too.

When they take … Read the rest

Hacked Off (again)

December 9, 2012 | Comment

A dozen years ago, when the web was a very different beast to what it is today I, wrote a series of scripts in the language Perl what was a simple content management system (CMS) to run my websites. Those websites have run using those same scripts with little change over that time. Now I only have two sites left on that infrastructure and after a hacking this week I have decided that it is finally time to retire the scripts and more the sites to WordPress. I am a bit sad to have to scrap my work but I … Read the rest

WordPress 3.4

June 15, 2012 | Comment

So the latest version of the WordPress blogging and CMS platform, on which this and so many other sites are based, has been released. Version 3.4 brings a number of new improvements such as the really neat Twitter integration you can see below. To get this to work you simply need to cut and paste the tweet URL into the editor and you are good to go. So to get the block displayed all I had to do was include the following:

https://twitter.com/spokenlikeageek/status/213251531871490048

I have been playing about with WordPress more and more since the hacking incident, mainly to … Read the rest

Blogpress perfection

August 27, 2010 | Comment

Yesterday saw an update to the iPhone and iPad blogging platform Blogpress that makes it leagues ahead of the competition.

In a recent review of blogging on the go I identified the ability to easily add links as key – and now you can. Not only that you can also do things like insert bold text and change the font properties, such as the colour. ll this makes Blogpress so much more usable as typing the HTML by hand was torturous at best.

I was already finding that I was doing most of my blogging from Blogpress and less … Read the rest

An App Addiction

June 2, 2010 | Comment

I saw an interesting post on JKontherun today that I thought summed up how I feel about applications for the iPhone/iPad exactly. I had intended to post about it using the dedicated WordPress application which I thought would be fitting, however, I quickly discovered that it is pretty hopeless. Not only is there no way to apply any formatting you also cannot put any links in as the paste facility doesn’t work. Instead I have resorted to using the website via the browser on my iPad which does work.… Read the rest