Here are some discussions and mentions around the web:

• an article on Weblog Tools Collection
• a forum post on WP Tavern
• twitter retweets

Sure, there are drawbacks to this method and it does require some more processing on the backend and it's not for everyone, which is why we should always strive for an even better solution.

I stand by my point of view that, for instance, my dedicated gallery shouldn't load for people who will never even go see my photos.

I think an ideal solution would be for WP core developers, who had a lot of experience designing WordPress' internals and who know what can work and what can't, perhaps Matt included, to get together and think about a better solution really hard.

Conditional loading similar to the one discussed here is already possible in the admin area, which creates dynamic hooks by appending page ids to 'admin_print_styles' and 'admin_print_scripts'. It is, however, still not good enough to be used more generically because those hooks rely on the page you are on, rather than the content of that page.

Another possibility is using a PHP technique called output buffering (ob_start(), ob_flush(), etc) that grants second chances to data that had already been echoed. It intercepts all echo and print calls and redirects them into a memory buffer, so instead of printing data to the page right away, you can now modify the header even if it had already been processed. It's like giving it a second chance.

Would it work for WordPress? I am not sure but I sure could use your feedback, devs.

• [WordPress Plugin Development] How To Include CSS and JavaScript Conditionally And Only When Needed By The Posts
• Swapping Column Values in MySQL
• How To Dynamically Increase Memory Limits When Interfacing With WordPress Using XML-RPC (Windows Live Writer, Etc)
• How To Remove Inline Hardcoded Recent Comments Sidebar Widget Style From Your WordPress Theme
• How To Diagnose And Fix Incorrect Post Comment Counts In WordPress

In this tutorial, I am going to introduce a WordPress technique that I believe was unpublished until I raised the question a few days ago on the WordPress forums.

In short, the problem I was trying to solve was plugins unnecessarily loading their JavaScript and CSS on *every* page of the blog, even when doing so would achieve absolutely nothing and the plugin wouldn't do any work.

Let me explain using this example:

• a code formatter plugin only does something useful when it sees a [code] shortcode in any post on the page.
• most of your posts do not contain the [code] shortcode as you don't include code snippets that often or you only started using this particular plugin recently.
• the plugin, however, loads the CSS and JS (which are most likely GeSHi and take up loads of space) on every page.
• these CSS and JS do absolutely nothing on most page loads.
• bandwidth is wasted, extra DNS and HTTP requests are processed, the browser is slowed down, and for what? For no good reason, other than the plugin author didn't know how to achieve this conditional loading.

If you think about it, there are many plugins that only do something once in a blue moon. Table of contents, text manipulators, galleries, sliders, etc, etc. If only they loaded their frontend code strictly when necessary, most page loads would suddenly become much lighter.

So what can we do to solve this? Let's look at a few techniques.

Loading CSS And JS In Place?

Here's one, albeit pretty bad, solution - only print the CSS and JS includes if and when you determine somewhere in the middle of loading the posts that the scripts and styles are indeed needed, then set a flag to avoid printing them again. In our example, that would be when the plugin detects the [code] shortcode.

This, however, is a mediocre solution because, while it's not a bad idea to load Javascript in the footer, CSS should be loaded in the header, otherwise the page might look unformatted until the CSS is reached.

Additionally, it's not the cleanest and most robust solution because you shouldn't be writing <script> and <style> tags manually but rather using wp_enqueue_style() and wp_enqueue_script() functions.

What's This About wp_enqueue_FOO?

Now, you might say: "What's this about wp_enqueue_style(), wp_enqueue_script(), and then hooking into 'wp_print_scripts', 'wp_print_styles', 'admin_print_scripts', and 'admin_print_styles' hooks"? You know about these, right? Right??

Allow me to explain this, in my opinion, greatest and most underused WordPress paradigm in a short refresher:

Enqueuing Alone Is Not Enough

Enqueuing is great for loading your JS and CSS but using it alone doesn't achieve the conditional behavior that we are looking for here.

This is a classic case of Chicken or the Egg, because WordPress makes only one pass through all of the content.

You see, since the header needs to be printed before the content, wp_print_scripts and wp_print_styles hooks are triggered before you even get to the posts. If you enqueue a script or style from within the 'the_content' hook, for example, the queued up scripts and styles will never get printed. It's too late to print them then anyway, as you're already in the middle of printing the posts.

The Solution

What we need to do is take a step back, before even printing the header, and then peek ahead.

Sure, this adds an extra pass over some data, but since no filters are applied during this process and if you avoid regular expressions (using stripos(), for example), this extra pass should be quite negligible.

The upside, however, can be potentially very substantial.

Credit goes to @white_shadow for the idea.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

add_filter('the_posts', 'conditionally_add_scripts_and_styles'); // the_posts gets triggered before wp_head
function conditionally_add_scripts_and_styles($posts){
	if (empty($posts)) return $posts;
 
	$shortcode_found = false; // use this flag to see if styles and scripts need to be enqueued
	foreach ($posts as $post) {
		if (stripos($post->post_content, '[code]') !== false) {
			$shortcode_found = true; // bingo!
			break;
		}
	}
 
	if ($shortcode_found) {
		// enqueue here
		wp_enqueue_style('my-style', '/style.css');
		wp_enqueue_script('my-script', '/script.js');
	}
 
	return $posts;
}

This simple function fires before the header gets printed, as it's attached to the 'the_posts' hook. However, this time it has full access to the posts' content.

I have tested this method and it works really well - if you have heavy scripts in your plugin, please do us, users, a favor and incorporate this logic into it.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you have seen a method of loading scripts and styles for you plugin conditionally. This technique allows for less bloated pages and faster page loads.

Plugin developers, what is your take on this solution? Do you use another method? Please share in the comments.

• Follow-up To Loading CSS And JS Conditionally
• How To Remove Inline Hardcoded Recent Comments Sidebar Widget Style From Your WordPress Theme
• How To Dynamically Increase Memory Limits When Interfacing With WordPress Using XML-RPC (Windows Live Writer, Etc)
• How To View A Specific SVN Revision In Your Browser
• How To Diagnose And Fix Incorrect Post Comment Counts In WordPress

Troy's Twitter Script

Enter Troy's Twitter script for Firefox that I reviewed in detail a few months ago.

Troy's script added the RT button to my stream (along with inline picture and video embed, auto url expander and shortener, name autocomplete, and other things) way before Twitter introduced it.

It also allowed me to add a couple of words or rephrase the retweet to make it more relevant to my followers.

Here is what clicking on the Retweet button used to do after you installed the Twitter script:

Twitter's Own Retweet

After Twitter rolled out their own Retweet, it simply took over the Retweet button that Troy's script added and everyone was happy. Right?

Wrong. Many users, including myself, were left craving the old functionality back.

The Newest Version Of Troy's Twitter Script

About an hour ago, Troy announced version 10.9 of his script which brings back the old functionality in the form of the "Comment" button. Here it is pictured below:

which yet again gives me the opportunity to edit the retweet:

Now we can have the best of both worlds – the new Comment button lets you retweet and edit while the Retweet button remains the same Twitter's own one-click Retweet.

Download Troy's Twitter Script

Again, here are the simple installation instructions to get Troy's Twitter script:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Credit

As before, all credit goes to the awesome Troy.

Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions

If you, like me, love StackOverflow, SuperUser, ServerFault – the community programming/software/sysadmin Q&A sites built by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood and you are an active member of these sites, you owe it to yourself to install this underappreciated and unadvertised greasemonkey script: StackOverflow – User Info Aggregate. I really think it should get more attention. All credit goes to Jon Erickson.

(What? You've never heard of the sites mentioned above and you call yourself a programmer? Shame on you – go check them out immediately!)

Once you install the script, the top bar that normally shows only single site statistics, like so:

will turn into a multi-site bar, with all your stats at a glance, like so:

Each icon is hyperlinked to your account on the respective site, which makes navigating between all of them very easy.

Installation

Here are the steps required to get the script up and running:

1. Install greasemonkey for Firefox.
2. Install the StackOverflow – User Info Aggregate script.
3. Right click on the greasemonkey icon and select Manage User Scripts…
   
4. Select the script from the list and click the Edit button. This should open up your favorite editor or prompt you to select one.
   
5. Find the section with userIds and replace them with ones of your own (by default the IDs belong to the script author). You can get your own IDs from the user info page (click your name at the top of each site you have an account on).
    
6. Now save the script file and reload the page – you should have all the stats displayed in one place.

Credits

• Big thanks to the creator of this script Jon Erickson.
• Orginal Meta.StackOverflow post by Jon.

Enjoy.

• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• How To Make Firebug's JavaScript Debugger Break Inside Dynamic JavaScript Using The 'debugger' Keyword (IE & Chrome Too)
• How To Export/Import Your ExpanDrive/SFTPDrive Drives And Settings

I don't know about you, but I'm incredibly sick of Facebook quizzes. Yeah, shit like this which occupies 90% of my news feed:

And to make matters worse, Facebook provides no means to block these quizzes and rid your profile of them forever. The only thing you can do is block each individual quiz. But just like weeds in your backyard, when you block one, three more rise up in its place. I know I am not alone here – there are literally billions of people searching for a solution to the plague.

So, what does the tech community do when it is not happy?

1. Runs to mommy, crying.
2. Drinks heavily, passes out, and comes to work with a keyboard faceprint, dressed as Koolaid.
3. Ignores the problem and lives with it (pussy).
4. Takes the matters into its own hands and develops a solution.

The correct answers are:

1. 2. and 4.

Enter a true geek at heart by the name of Steeev with his Facebook Purity greasemonkey script that was created with the sole purpose of BLOCKING THE FUCKING QUIZZES. Go Steeve Steeev!

Solution

Installation is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Facebook Purity script

That's it. Now go to your Facebook page (make sure you access it via www.facebook.com or www.new.facebook.com and not YOURUNIVERSITY.facebook.com (like ucdavis.facebook.com)).

Check it out – all quizzes are gone, the script even tells you how many quizzes were blocked:

Pure bliss. Rest quizless now, everyone.

• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• Are Your Youtube Video Embeds Missing The Full Screen Button? Here Is How To Fix It
• [Web Dev] Browser Breakdown Stats+Charts From Plaxo.com For December 2009 And Thoughts

You could only dream about such twitter improvements… that is until you use the Troys Twitter script. Just perform the following steps and you will have the features I describe in this article. Here we go:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Once you are done with the above steps, head over to twitter.com (there’s no need to restart Firefox). You will then be able to enjoy the following enhancements, which I ordered here in terms of usefulness to me:

Autocomplete

Do you have a few friends with names so complicated, you can’t type them out by hand? Troys script autocompletes your friends’ names – just type @ and a few letters of their name. This is my favorite feature.

Before:

After:

Search Bar And Favorite Searches Saved

A search box is added to the sidebar. You can make a number of favorite searches, which then also remain sticky on the sidebar above the search box. When you click on a search term, the current page is updated without reloading the whole thing. Note that the favorite search terms are saved locally in your browser and won’t show up on your other computers.

Before:

After:

Auto Expander Of Shortened URLs

Automatically expands url shorteners, so instead of seeing a load of tinyurls and bit.lys, you see proper urls and their native page titles (neat!).

Before:

After:

Auto URL Shortener

Updated: The URL shortener auto shortens urls as you type them but only if they will overflow the 140 character limit, otherwise they stay as they are (it now works flawlessly).

Before:

After:

Auto Pagination

As you reach the bottom of the page, more earlier updates are automatically loaded after a few seconds. This means you don’t need to click or leave the page in order to see earlier updates. It could get a bit annoying, so I requested an ability to turn off certain script features. Update: you can now turn off every feature of the script individually.

Auto Media Embed Expander

Pictures and videos are automatically embedded.

Before:

(Uhmm, I don’t know why I highlighted “sack” but I don’t feel like retaking the screenshot… Yeah…)

After:

Retweet (RT) Button

Adds the missing RT button to each update.

Before:

After:

Autopopulate Bios on User Listings

Updated: This function will save you hundreds of clicks – when viewing someone's followers, rather than just seeing their names, the script adds their bios.

Before:

After:

Hyperlinked Hash Tags

Hash tags are now hyperlinked to the twitter search page. Seriously, twitter can’t do that by default?

Before:

After:

User’s Local Time

The script adds a user’s local time. See the example below using the profile of a lovely Kamikazekitty. This feature seems unpublished and I found it by accident.

Before:

After:

Nested Replies

This is a great feature – it gives context to @ replies. For example, @ev’s reply to kevin is boring and out of context until you see what they’re talking about, all without looking up @kevin’s updates.

Before:

After:

Mutual Friends Marked

Updated: This is a new feature. People who you follow and who also follow you back (mutual friendship) are marked with a little smiley face.

Before:

After:

Auto @fxxxmylife Expansion

Updated: Woot! Following the infamous @fxxxmylife is no longer annoying: all posts get auto-expanded. Brilliant. For those who don't know, FML is a site collecting short stories that all start with "Today," and end with "FML". Here are the top FMLs to get you started [hooked].

Before:

After:

That’s it for now in the current script version (6.5) but what a world of difference, isn’t it? Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)

While writing a 1093985th Perl script the other day I was facing the following dilemma:

• Let’s say there is a local library, called TheUberLib.pm. It is so uber that most of my scripts, located all over the machine, include it.
• Now, let’s also say that there’s an even more uberly important binary called run_me_now_or_you_will_die but the only way to find it is by using a relative path to the aforementioned TheUberLib.pm, for example ../bin (RELATIVE TO TheUberLib.pm).
• I don’t want to hardcode the path to run_me_now_or_you_will_die because it can be different on multiple machines and the code wouldn’t be robust enough – all I know is that the path is relative to an included library.

So how does one get the path to an included TheUberLib.pm (in my case to deduce the path to run_me_now_or_you_will_die), regardless of the script location and the current directory?

I started looking at all possible ways of getting this information.

• At first I looked at $0. $0 returns the path to the Perl script itself (LibraryPath/lib_path.pl) and is completely useless here.
• The FindBin module that I sometimes use was also of no help as it also deals with the caller script path.

Solution

After digging around for a bit, this is the method I came up with that did exactly what I wanted:

1
2

use File::Basename;
my $path_to_uber_lib = dirname($INC{'TheUberLib.pm'});

and the clean way to get the final path to run_me_now_or_you_will_die is:

1
2
3

my $relative_path_to_bin_dir = "../the_path_we_want/run_me_now_or_you_will_die";
my $path_to_deadly_bin = Cwd::realpath("$path_to_uber_lib/$relative_path_to_bin_dir");
print "The path to deadly bin is: $path_to_deadly_bin\n";

which prints /tmp/LibraryPath/some_path1/the_path_we_want/run_me_now_or_you_will_die.

Here is the full program with all directories that you can check out from SVN:

svn co http://beerpla.net/svn/public/Perl/LibraryPath/

or just browse the code here: http://beerpla.net/svn/public/Perl/LibraryPath/

Explanation

The %INC hash contains all included libraries, with library names as keys and full paths as values.

The dirname() function is part of File::Basename and returns just the directory part of the path.

Finally, Cwd::realpath() is a function that resolves relative and symbolic links to canonical absolute ones.

And there you have it.

• FTPRush Cleanup Script
• How Do I Get Both The Return Value And Text In Perl? Backticks vs. System() (Perl 5.10)
• [Perl] Finding Files, The Fun And Elegant Way
• Parsing JSON In Perl By Example – SouthParkStudios.com South Park Episodes
• [WordPress Plugin Development] How To Include CSS and JavaScript Conditionally And Only When Needed By The Posts

Note that this script is only compatible with the ANSI FTPRush version. The Unicode version is not supported.

You need to have Activestate Perl installed in order to run this script. http://www.google.com/search?q=activestate+perl+download

Script source is available from SVN here.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# AUTHOR:   Artem Russakovskii
#
# URL:      http://beerpla.net
#
# DATE:     02/21/07
#
# ABSTRACT: Removes all ftprush queue items that don't download to localhost.
#           It is useful to run if you FXP a lot of files back and forth and want
#           to clean up the queues from time to time, but don't want to delete
#           anything that is downloading.
#           Feel free to make a shortcut to this script and run it any time you want.
#
#           Note that this script is only compatible with the ANSI FTPRush version.
#           The Unicode version is not supported.
#
#           You need to have Activestate Perl installed in order to run this script.
#           http://www.google.com/search?q=activestate+perl+download
 
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
use File::Path;
use File::Find;
use Cwd;
 
my $ftprush_location = "C:\\Program Files\\FTPRush\\Queue"; # FTPRush queue location
 
sub return_file_list
{
  my @filelist;
  find(
    sub {
      if ( $File::Find::name =~ /rfq$/i )
      {
        push @filelist, $File::Find::name;
      }
    },
    $ftprush_location
  );
 
  return @filelist;
}
 
foreach(return_file_list()){
  open(FILE, $_) or die "Couldn't open $_";
  my $file = ;
  close FILE;
 
  if($file =~ /\bLocal\b/){
    print "File $_ contains localhost downloads\n";
  }
  else{
    print "Deleting $_\n";
    unlink or print "$!\n";
  }
}

• [Perl] Finding Files, The Fun And Elegant Way
• [Perl] How To Get The Path Of An Included Library (.pm), Regardless Of Current Directory
• Quick Perl Snippet: Finding If A File Has A Media Extension Using Regex
• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• The Repositories For apt-get In SUSE 10.2