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All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of John and Amber’s discussion of this weeks plugins that have been reviewed.
WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #505 here.
That’s Not a Unicorn It’s Episode 505 – We have plugins for Pulling off April Fools day; including Unicorns, Fresh Eggs, Seeing in Black & White, Making it all Disappear….., and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #505
John: All right. First off, ClassicPress options. No, I still don’t have any new ClassicPress options aside from the usual stuff. I’m really hoping people start kicking some ClassicPress stuff to me. Their community’s been pretty quiet lately. I’m expecting that sometime soon. They’ll start kicking into gear again because I’ve noticed, like anything new, it goes up and down, and up and down, and they’re in a downward down at the moment. So we’ll see what happens to it. I expect to hear something new, but in the meantime, we still have the list of ClassicPress resources. You can go check out in all of our show note links.
Off we go into WordPress plugins though. And so what do we have for you today? First off, the first one I’ve got for you right out the gate is the Easter Egg Drop plugin. This one’s kind of cool. It’s not overly exciting, but it is kind of neat. Basically, once you install and activate it, you can just go into the adjustments tools — what’s called there — you know, where your administrative window for this plugin — why is that word escaping my brain? At any rate, you can go create any message you want. What happens is the egg drops down from the top of your screen, hits the bottom, and people can click on the egg, and a big message pops up on the screen. The default message board is Happy Easter, but you can put any message you want in there. You could use it as a marketing message or as, “Hey, you found the egg. You get a 10% discount off on our store.” “Enter this code,” or anything along that line. Lots of cool uses for this Easter Egg Drop. And because it’s such a cool plugin, I’m going to give it a five-dragon rating.
Amber: Can you change the Easter egg? Like can you change the design of it?
John: No, the design is set, but you can change the color. You can change the color to any color you want.
Amber: Cool. Okay. So first one I’ve got is Zing. Good thing if you’re looking to get some back for last April Fools, this is a great one. It’s an old one and it doesn’t look like it’s been updated for a bit, but it still works beautifully. You plug it in, activate it, and everything goes upside down. It works beautifully. Totally free too. Honestly, it took me a moment to orient my brain to read upside down and right to left so I could deactivate it. And I can only guess what would happen if you were to put on a buddy site, and they had no idea what the plugin is called. Definitely go check this one out. I rate it five dragons.
John: Absolutely, that one’s kind of cool. I find it amusing that they leave the menu right side up, but they flip all the content upside down in the dashboard.
Amber: Yeah, I’ve been saving up all of my April Fools plugins for a bit now.
John: Yeah. Well, that was kind of cool. All right. This next one here — this one here is just downright funny. It’s called Cornify for WordPress. And it’s a bit of an older plugin, not too old, but basically what happens is you install it on a site and then you set the timer, you can adjust the timer by going into the JavaScript and changing out the speed. But basically what happens is if someone pauses on your website for five seconds, it starts filling up with unicorns. And pretty much every unicorn style you can find from princess, ponies to golden ones to everything under the sun. They just start popping up on the screen. The moment they move the mouse, they all vanish. They start and they stop, and it starts popping up again, unicorns, everywhere, unicorns, unicorns dancing. I thought it was just a funny one, which is just something that would just annoy somebody knowing that they didn’t know how to deal with it. At any rate, it is kind of neat and it is kind of cute. And because it’s free, and it’s a fun joke, I give this one a five-dragon rating.
Amber: I think I came across that one last year, and I used it for a bit just for the hell of it. And the next one I’ve got is Now You See Me. This is another fantastic and rather Viper full stroke plugin. Once you activate it, it makes everything go poof, it’s all gone. You need to press the letter H in order to see anything on the page again, and then you get to press H to make it all vanish again. I couldn’t actually find this one in the plugin page oddly enough, like I had it saved, I come across at some point and saved it, but when I went searching for it in the actual plugins page in the site, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I had to download it separately, which I found that really interesting that they just totally made this thing vanish.
John: Well, I can tell you why because it’s six years old. It’s been six years since it was updated, and I’ve noticed that WordPress is lately anything five years or between four and five years or older. You can’t find them when doing a search in the back-end anymore.
Amber: I found Zing just fun.
John: Yeah, Zing.
Amber: That one is six years old too.
John: No, is it?
Amber: Yeah, it was old and hadn’t been updated for quite a while either.
John: Well, maybe they just don’t like this guy.
Amber: Probably not. Anyways, this one is totally free. And it could be amazing payback although, you know, it may be dangerous. So I rate this one at five dragons. Go and check this out.
John: Another five dragon rating.
Amber: Yeah, but we need one for you too because you’re doing all five too. This is a five kind of day.
John: We don’t have enough. We don’t have one for me. We only have one for you. So. Yeah. All right. So the final plugin we’ve got here, it seems both of us landed on it because I get to speak first; I get to talk about it first. All right. This one here is called WP Pranks, and it’s full of all kinds of stuff. Now, I’ve got a thing in my show notes, it says whatever you do, don’t visit 2030countdown.com because for some reason, it’s all upside down. and in a few seconds, it starts filling up with unicorns. See it bounces an egg from the bottom all the way to the top. You know, you can watch the egg fall up, and after a few more seconds of keeping the mouse off the screen here as I try to talk and talk and talk, I’m waiting for the bloody unicorns to start appearing. It is a little slow at first. Yeah, we’ll come back to it in a few minutes.
At any rate, WP Pranks, this one here, you can do all kinds of things. The only irritating part, of course, is you only get to do one at first. I thought can you turn them all on at once? What a mess you could make. It make some black and white, upside down, hide odd number pages. I like the upside down and the black and white. I’ll leave the other ones for Amber to go on and on about and see how it works on here. But yeah, and then what happens, when it does flip it upside down, it scrolls from the bottom to the top, which is pretty messed up, especially if you do it to somebody who has a higher-end website. You just mess with their brain to no end. At any rate, of course, as a free joke plugin, we’re going to give this one a five-dragon rating
Amber: Yep, I found the exact same one, and I had the same issue. I didn’t like the fact you can only do one at a time. And you forgot to mention the poop emoji. I really liked the poop emoji in the upper left-hand of the page.
John: I left that one just for you. You know, it’s funny. I’d say it would be funny as if you can flip it upside down and put the poop emoji up at the same time, you have a big pile of poop down the lower right corner.
Amber: Hey, use the two plugins at once. Use the zing to turn it upside down, and then you just one for the poop emoji.
John: There you go. There’s getting creativity, make it fun. Have fun with your pranksters, not as many. The one thing I did notice when I went digging for prank, there used to be way more prank plugins in the repository than there are now. It’s like everybody’s losing their sense of humor, you know.
Amber: Maybe people are getting sued.
John: Why would they get sued? They create the plugin. You can’t sue somebody because you use their plugin and mess things up. You’re responsible for that. That’s on you.
Amber: Fair enough. Although I did notice that WP pranks very specifically says that he is not liable for anything.
John: Well, he’s just covering his ass.
Amber: Fair enough. Well, the other three things that this does is poop emoji, Comic Sans, where it turns all text to Comic sans font, which I guess would be really irritating if you have like a specialty font.
John: Oh, yeah, especially fonts, but Comic Sans is the font that everyone loves to hate.
Amber: Really?
John: Yes, Comic Sans was — that font was created as a joke, and then it got adopted by Microsoft, and then it spread to the world. And, of course, it’s the most horrible looking font. It’s like for a while you could not go anywhere and not see one of those presentations — those presentations that they give — bloody hell — presentations, PowerPoint presentations. It seemed every PowerPoint presentation was done in Comic Sans.
Amber: Funny because I did everything Comic Sans when I was a teenager.
John: That was when it was popular. That’s what made it popular and what turned it so evil. Everyone started to hate it because it was everywhere because it’s not a very readable font either, especially when it’s used in text. When it’s used in text for reading, it’s horrendous. So it looks okay occasionally as a headline font, but not in text. And this promise it was being used everywhere. I can’t remember all the stuff with it, but Comic Sans is just like it was evil incarnate.
Amber: Well, the last thing that this plugin does is it makes the text insanely large as well. So here’s a question. Since I rate this at five dragons, does that mean that this one plugin get to 10 in total?
John: Good god, Amber. There’s another five dragon rating.
Amber: That would be fun for you too, man.
John: So anyway, it is a full-house tonight. I don’t think this has ever occurred where every plugin got a five-dragon rating.
Amber: I don’t think so. It’s pretty exciting, but then again, April Fools is awesome.
John: Lots of cool plugins, and there’s lots of fun stuff you can do out there, and have some fun with people. And nope, it’s just not going to happen. All right. But the unicorn one does work in, I thought it was amusing. At any rate, that’s all we’ve got for you on plugins. This show is still brought to you by
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John: Absolutely. Alrighty. This is a point where we like to take listener feedback, but we don’t have any, so we’re going to skip right along here to our contest. Absolutely, thanks to Steve Goodtime and Brent Matthews for that jingle. And I do want to thank Charlie for helping out the show. Right now, we’ve put the contest on hiatus, probably for a couple three more weeks until we completely revamp everything and bring it all back together. But keep — stay tuned, we will have contests and we will announce them out as soon as we’ve got them launched again. You can keep up on the info, just go to wppluginsatoz.com/contests. Okay, so before we jump into the Q&A segment, we got to close out a couple of quick things, and I’m going to close out in this episode. I covered up the following plugins WP Pranks, which I rated at five dragons, the Cornify for WordPress, which I rated at five dragons, and the Easter Egg Drop, which I rated at five dragons, which has so many other uses and just the Easter egg component.
Amber: And I covered WP pranks, which I gave a five. Now, You See Me, which I also gave a five, and Zing, which I also gave a five too.
John: All right. And a couple of quick reminders out here is — the meetup is coming. We will see those soon, but, of course, they just locked us down again just when you’re starting to be breathing freely, and maybe hey, let’s get together and have a party. They went nope, nope, no party for you. So at any rate, that’s where we’re at. If you’re not getting enough of Amber and I for podcasting, go listen to us over at the roguestavern.com/live where we do a weekly live show on YouTube and also upload it as a podcast to the website, and that when there is more of a free for all. It basically goes down tons of rabbit holes, go check that one out. If you’re a developer out there for plugins, and you want to be on an interview show, which is separate and apart from this show, it’s a separate thing I do there about 15 minutes long, and they get uploaded into the podcast stream, and almost everybody who’s done interviews has seen a marked increase in the traffic to their sites after the interview. So it can be a good way to market yourself. Just follow the link in the show notes to go schedule an interview with me. I have specific time slots available for those interviews. All right. It is time for
It’s question and answer time with Amber.
Amber: This is our first —
John: With Amber. And this is — real quickly, we will split this up. So make sure you stay tuned, folks. All right. Off you go, kid.
Amber: First of all, if anyone out there has any questions that they’d like to have asked, send them in to me at amber@wppro.ca, and I will get them in here. I’ll read them out and get you some answers. First question I have for you is what is a CDN, and what is a CDN that you can offload media to?
John: Okay, CDN stands for content delivery network. And what that’s for, that came about several years ago back when the Internet was much slower than it is now. Servers were just as overcrowded as they were — as they are, but they were much slower servers, and so people’s websites were really slow. And the content delivery network is they created additional servers that you can load your content to, and have your images — and the content being images, PDF, files, graphics, and other things for your website because that takes the most amount of space and the most amount of bandwidth to be delivered. It’s held at another server apart from the server your website’s hosted at. And so when your web page loads, all the images and stuff are loaded from another server in parallel to your website being loaded from your server — all of your text and stuff. And so what it did was it speeded up the load time for your page because your web server might be in, say, Eastern United States, the person viewing your website might be in California, and you’ve offloaded your content to a content delivery server that is located in California. So now that content is located closer to that client, who is downloading the website, and so that content downloads fast while it downloads your other content. So that’s what a CDN is, and what it’s used for, and why it is used.
Amber: Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
John: So, you know, it’s a great idea. I’m not certain that it makes much difference now with the speed of the Internet now. It’s like bandwidth on the Internet has increased dramatically. Even my own servers over the years — I’ve gone from servers that only had 250k ports on them to now they have gigabit ports on the server for delivering the data from the server. And, of course, most people have gone from dial-up in their home to high-speed cable modems.
Amber: Dial-up, I haven’t thought about that in ages.
John: Well, that’s the range of dial-up, like I still remember when 28k was super-fast and when they created 58k modem, I was like in heaven because now I could download a song in seven minutes instead of 20.
Amber: I remember seeding songs. I would wait for like three days for 12 songs.
John: Well, I remember Napster because I was there when Napster – and, of course, when Napster was delivered, that was the first year that they came out with the high-speed cable modem, and I was one of the first 100 customers in Victoria to get a high-speed cable modem. So I connected up my high-speed cable modem, and I was going to Napster like a kid goes to ice cream, you know, just pour it down. I’ve just enjoyed it a brand 24×7, and I ended up with gigabytes of music.
Amber: Well, I can see how that may not make much difference in speed, but it would definitely make a difference in space. It’s a pretty awesome idea.
John: Yeah, you can offload it and give you more space. Alrighty.
Amber: My next question is what is the difference between a data center and a server?
John: Okay, well, a data center and a server is well — a data center is a place where servers are stored. A data center is a big giant warehouse building or those shipping containers. They’ve tried all kinds of things for data centers — most of them are big warehouse buildings where special security, special air conditioning, and special heating — no need heating because they got so many computers run into heat is the problem. And so what the data center is the place where the servers are stored. A server is just a computer. You can take any computer and turn it into a server, literally any computer. All you got to do is load on server software instead of Windows — like Windows makes Windows server software. I’ve run my own servers from home. I’ve run my own server and networks for my business. I ran Windows NT server back in the day. I ran an entire NT network with 15 machines one time. God, was that a nightmare. My servers currently run on CentOS, which is a version of Linux. And that server software — but you can take any computer you’ve got, like if you have an old laptop somewhere you can turn that into the server, just download a copy of CentOS or Linux, the free server software loaded up on your machine, poof instant server connected to your high-speed port and your cable, and now you’re delivering stuff to the Internet via your server, though cable companies frown on having your own personal servers in your house. But the difference between the two is simply a data center is a place to put multiple servers, and a server is an individual machine. Most data centers like the data center where my servers are located, that data center probably has 10,000 servers or more in it. Does it say probably a five-acre warehouse.
Amber: That’s a little big.
John: And they have all these big massive cables coming in that serve the Internet to the globe.
Amber: Yeah, says climate control, which I’m not really sure, climate control?
John: Climate control, that would be where I briefly mentioned that the servers put a lot of heat, so they’ve got air conditioning to keep them cool. They have special types of climate control in those places to help keep it cool because computers put out a lot of heat.
Amber: Yes, yes, they do.
John: Who was it? I think it was Facebook that when they started building their own data centers, they actually created a new type of cooling system to keep the servers cool with a special water system for capturing the heat through water. It was very unique.
Amber: I’ve read about those. They’re really cool.
John: There’s a lot of new unique stuff.
Amber: Okay, so I have the last question. I’ll read it out, and then, I guess we’ll cut off?
John: Yeah, we’ll split it off here.
Amber: Yeah, my next question is, how do the algorithms work for places like YouTube, and do the algorithms work similarly to search engines?
John: This one’s going to be fun, folks. But you’re going to have to tune in to the YouTube version just for this. And that, I’m going to let my girl take us on out of here and enjoy my shot.
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John can be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly at john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.
Thanks for listening to the show. This show is copyright by JohnOverall.com. So until next time, have yourselves a good morning, good afternoon, or a good evening, wherever you happen to be out there on the globe today.