There is a neat BreadCrumbs Plugin available for WordPress, and it’s been recently updated. It is a plugin that can make your site more “usable” or user-friendly.

But, first, what are breadcrumbs doing on websites, and why are they called just that?

The search for a comprehensive answer took me to the usability glossary, which says the following about breadcrumbs :

on websites, a form of navigation where the current location within the website is indicated by a list of pages above this page in the hierarchy, up to the main page. For example, if you were browsing the products at a department store, you might see the following hierarchy when you’re on the Sneakers page:

Home > Products > Clothes > Shoes > Sneakers

Each of the categories above the current page is usually a link to the corresponding category page.

The term “breadcrumbs” is a reference to the Hansel and Gretel tale where they leave breadcrumbs as they wander the forest so they can find their way home. The metaphor is imperfect because the breadcrumbs do not represent the actual path the user took, but instead the optimal path from the home page to the current page in the hierarchy.

So, the idea is, you give the user a way of knowing where she is, in the virtual hierachy of the blog.

This plugin handles posts assigned to multiple categories very gracefully. The plugin’s output can be customized too.

If you use the Permalinks feature in WordPress, and you use relative links to link to files or images on your server, as follows:

<a href="images/foo.png"> in your index.php template, or your posts, then it will not work properly, since it will automatically become something like
<a href="http://example.com/archives/post/images/foo.png">

The usual work around is not to use relative links in your template, or posts.

But in case you want to, you can use the w3 org recommendation and add a base URI to your index.php, which looks like :
<base href="http://www.youwebsite.com/">
to the index.php file, in the “head” section. This should prevent the relative links from getting botched.

Originally seen at the Support Forums.

Thanks to chiensavant for posting the solution and Ali_ix for bringing it to my notice.

You might have seen the post titles at photomatt, which are actually png images. Here’s an example (since most of his recent posts are “asides” without titles).
A lot of people have asked, over the ages, as to how to create such “dynamic” titles.
Matt’s code is available here.
Later, WeblogToolsCollection had an article about a different approach to Creating dynamic PNGs from text using PHP

Well now we have a plugin to do the grunt work. The title images plugin can do this for you.

Blurb:

The Title Images plugin is made to show post titles as an image with a font of your choice, with your choice of colors, shadows, and size.

I just found that there is another WordLog, which, not surprisingly, is a log with some interesting words and their meaning(s). There seems to be no way to put together two sensible, relevant English words and get a domain name + identity that is unique. I played with all possible combination of “word”, “press”, “log”, and a few other words, like “watch”, “user” and even “mate”.

Now we know why new companies adopt names like “Celix” and “Dumbent”

Just by looking at the New England Press Consortium website, one wouldn’t guess there’s WordPress behind all of it.

The creator says :

The New England Press Consortium website is live and powered by WordPress. The site content is mostly temporary until real stories start being posted tomorrow during the Democratic National Convention. Lots of MPEG-4 video is coming this week.

Most of the development work centered around the front page and back end. Custom queries were used to call the appropriate entries. The back end had to be friendly enough for even an XHTML-ignorant broadcast journalist to use. Excerpt text boxes were enlarged, quick edit buttons were changed to more understandable terms and to allow easy video segment linking, file upload displays the code for video and flash content (not just img), and the upload automatically resizes the images.

Goes to say how easy it is to hack wordpress to do your bidding, and how, to start with it is quite user friendly.

Nifty!