Hi everyone, I’ll be at AnimeNext this weekend. One thing I wanted to specifically point out is a panel I’ll be on called “Online Distribution Options for Comics” that occurs on Sunday June 22nd at 2pm. This is an opportunity for anyone to come down and get some questions answered by me about web set up options as well as insight into other methods of getting your work out there through the internet. I’ll also be around at the “Onezumi.com/Stupid and Insane Defenders Against Chaos” table on Saturday from about 1:30-6:30 pm and also 10-1:30 on Sunday to answer questions (and maybe sell some stuff :) ) . Stop on by and say hello, I’m always happy to give advice or answer questions.

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As part of my “Hidden” features of AWSOM Plugins I want to point out a usage for the AWSOM News Announcement plugin for WordPress that may be of use to Site Admins. Most people who use the AWSOM News Announcement plugin typically use it for it’s most basic function: adding a News block above your posts on the Index page of your site. This is one great usage of this plugin and the most obvious one. But you can have multiple News Posts active at the same time, so I’d like to point out another easy usage that adds power and capabilities to your site.

One of the things that you can select when adding a new news announcement is what viewer level is able to see that particular News Post, and each News Post can have different viewer levels. By default it’s set to “everyone”, but you are able to restrict the viewer to any of the regular WordPress registered user levels. So, you can make a News Post only visible to Subscribers or Administrators, or any level in between. This makes the News Post a handy way of informing other members of your site about important information that only applies to them.

Of course an obvious usage is to restrict certain things so that only registered visitors can see/use things. An example is an audio/video player for extra site content. With the “run php” setting in News Announcement turned on you can embed any player that requires javascript or php code to function. Now you have created an incentive for visitors to sign up to your site.

Conversely you can do things so that ONLY non-subscribers see certain News Posts. By selecting this as the viewer level for a post, it only gets shown to general visitors–>which makes it an excellent way of displaying ads to non-registered users while making it a “benefit” for people to sign up to your blog so that they aren’t presented with ads. Since any content can be added to a News Post and can run, almost any ad company code or system can be set to display in a News Post.

So not only do you now have a way to give your readers information, but you can present ads and reserve enhanced content and generate more reasons for visitors to interact with your blog.

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AWSOM Pixgallery for WordPress version 4.5.5 has been released and is now available for download from the AWSOM.org website. This version of the Pixgallery image gallery plugin has an important fix for a small number of people who were having an issue with Fancy Permalinks adding “index.php” into their URL’s (causing 404 errors). It also clears up an issue with the Visual Editor function used by Pixgallery for caption entry by adding in a new dedicated Visual Editor with more advanced functions than the standard WordPress editor.

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Hi everyone, if you haven’t been visiting Harknell.com recently you might not be aware that I’ve been working on a fix for a weird Fancy Permalink issue that causes “index.php” to be added to some people’s AWSOM Pixgallery galleries. This then totally screws up the links to the actual single image page causing 404 errors. I believe I have a fix for this issue, as well as a fix for the Visual Editor problem (where it doesn’t correctly populate the variable names for the tools). So far it has corrected the issue for one person, but I’d appreciate if anyone else is seeing this issue if they could go here: http://www.awsom.org/filerepository/awsompixgalleryabsolutefix2.zip and grab the test file and try this out. You may need to also set the option for “absolute linking” to yes in the Pixgallery options/settings page for the fix to work, but try it without that first. I’d really appreciate it if after trying this out please email me and let me know if it worked (or even more importantly) didn’t work to solve the problem.

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I’ve come to realize that as a piece of software grows so does it’s complexity. As a result many features can easily be overlooked, especially if they are designed to be used in only specific circumstances. So I’ll post a spotlight on certain features or capabilities of AWSOM WordPress plugins from time to time that I think people might find useful, but may have overlooked.

The first such feature is the ability in AWSOM Pixgallery to select and display a custom image for a sub gallery in the thumbnail view. Normally Pixgallery uses your sort option setting to determine what image it uses to represent sub galleries in the thumbnail view–so it will typically show either the last added image or alphabetical image as the folder image. This means that in many cases the image displayed by the folder will change over time if you add new images to the folder. This can be good to alert visitors that new images have been added to a folder. However, in some cases you may not want this to happen and would prefer to have a set image for a particular sub gallery.

With Pixgallery it’s very easy to accomplish this. All you need to do is place an image file within any sub gallery folder and call it “pxggalleryimage” with any standard image format type (gif, jpg, png–so pxggalleryimage.gif is an example), and Pixgallery will use that image for the folder. This image will NOT appear as a member of the sub gallery, so you can use an image that you don’t even want to have actually appear in the gallery itself if you want. Every sub gallery can have it’s own individual custom image file, and you can even mix and match with some being automatic and some being preset. It’s yet another way that Pixgallery speeds up your workflow but allows you flexibility when you need it.

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