Tag Archives: WordPress

For GetMyTweets Users

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I needed a very very very simple Twitter plugin for wordpress, just to show my latest tweet. I found GetMyTweets to be just simple enough. Then I started to get some warnings, and reflexively hit the Google.

But to my surprise, doing a query on “getmytweets” on google got me this:

Picture 5

I recently had a couple of warnings with the GetMyTweets wordpress plug-in. These weren’t the same warnings, but you’ll get the gist of it:

Warning: XMLReader::open()
 [function.XMLReader-open]: php_network_getaddresses:
 getaddrinfo failed:
 Name or service not known in
 /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 38

Warning: XMLReader::open(

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/joshkim.xml?count=1)

 [function.XMLReader-open]: failed to open stream:
 No such file or directory in /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 38

Warning: XMLReader::open() [function.XMLReader-open]:
 Unable to open source data in /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 38

Warning: XMLReader::read()
 [function.XMLReader-read]: Load Data before trying to read in
 /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 39

(Note to self: Fix <pre><code> later. Sorry about that, to everyone who got this post multiple times.)

Obviously, the problem is with being unable to grab the xml provided by Twitter. Due to it’s ridiculous open architecture, I don’t blame Twitter when it chokes now and then (and not as much as it did when the whole Fail Whale was in vogue). For now, I just decided to hide it. Just append the following at the top of getMyTweets.php, just like with any other PHP warnings.

ini_set("display_errors", 0);

I’m fine with this fix, because I made the title for “Recent Tweets” link up to my twitter page anyway.

Now back to Rails.

WordPress 2.7

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Sure took my sweet time in getting this updated here on the blog. K2 came out with RC7, and updated that too.

I’m in the middle of a switchover process again. I’ll update the blog when that happens. For now, this is all I’ve got.

Definitely digging the new UI and all the new features of the web interface. Wee! I may have to go back to using the web interface, rather than busting out the MarsEdit.

This really should be it’s own version number, but WP doesn’t like version number inflation. Update, people, update!

CHANGELOG – Blog

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  • Installed QuickPost. This should make quick blogging random links I find interesting all the easier to do.

    • Easier and faster. While the posts will eventually make it to the feed reader of your choice, the tweets generated via a plugin notifies a Twitter follower much faster.
      • Realization: Tweets are much less valuable than full posts that aren’t limited to 140 (160, in actuality) characters. Hence, leveraging the quickness of tweets to link to a more information-laden post is awesome.
    • Problem: Duplications.
      • I link to something online.
      • I post on the blog.
      • Blog posts to Twitter.
      • Feed reader grabs the post.
      • Blog grabs the day’s worth of Twitter posts into a post (but silently).
    • What happens if I post a link to Twitter instead?
      • This is a change to the workflow… I don’t want people on Twitter to unnecessarily click on an extra link to get to the data…
    • I’m going to just see how this goes. It’s not like it’s not getting “documented” somewhere anyway.

  • Created a “Links” category for all posts made using this quickpost.

  • Created a “Mac Applications” for review mac applications. Thinking about making a “Mac Development” for… you guessed it. I’m wondering if I should be collapsing a few of these categories, but seriously, it’s kinda like that multi-year project of putting all of my old posts up here: It’s not really particularly important.

  • Changed the prefix to a new blog post tweet that gets set to Twittter from “New blog post:” to “Blog’d:”.

TextMate: Desktop Blogging Software for the Mac (vs Ecto and MarsEdit)

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In an effort to streamline the blogging process, I’ve been looking at some alternatives to my current usage of TextMate. I hope by doing this that it’ll save a lot of time and reduce the friction required to get a post up here.

Instead of using the web interface provided by WordPress, I’ve been using TextMate as my main blog editor (blogged about it here). I’m pretty sure a whole lot of you developer kinds have heard about TextMate and the ridiculous extensibility of the bundles, but it seems as though the Blogging bundle has been gone largely unmaintained for some time. (Maybe a year or so, but I may not be looking hard enough. I even looked through the public list archives, but couldn’t find anything… If anyone knows of the status of this project, let me know.)

Previous Workflow

When I get the desire to write, this is normally how it goes:

  • Open up a new blog page using shortcut I crafted (ctrl + opt + cmd + n)
  • Fill out the text for “Title: “
  • Write the post
  • Create keyword field (“keyw” + tab), fill out keywords
  • Create category field (“cat” + tab), wait for server, select which blog I want, select the blog AGAIN in a second dialog box(for some reason, this never got fixed)

Then I’d fill out the title, and start writing. After I was done, I would type “keyw” + tab for the keyword field, then type my keywords, cmd + opt + ctrl + p for preview, and post using ctrl + cmd + p to post online.

Problems With This Workflow

  • Timezone Bug: Talked about this before. I don’t know if this is ever going to be fixed, where if you reupdate an old post, you will continuously subtract or add the difference from your time zone and the GMT. For example, if I fetched this post and reposted it, it would be 5 hours behind. I didn’t realize this for a long while until I started posting in intervals faster than 5 hours when I noticed that certain posts were written earlier than I had thought.
  • Double Dialog Boxes: There’s also a strange bug requiring a blog to be selected twice on the drop down menu before looking up categories or posting to the blog. If you’ve got multiple blogs, this is just a little annoying.
  • No live preview
  • Image Handling: It’s cool that you can tell it to upload to your blog, but there’s no image manipulation… nor is there a way to get some Flickr integration.
  • File Creation And Saves: The file that you create while posting should have the filename of the post title. If there is no title, then ask them with a dialog box. (I love this feature in MarsEdit and Ecto. I don’t have to worry about making up crazy permutations of “asdf” and numbers.)

Features That I Hope To Keep

  • Linking: Creating links from the clipboard (ctrl + shift + L) and from the top Google search (ctrl + cmd + shift + L) is a feature I don’t want to let go.
  • Snippets: There’s something to be said about TextMate’s ability to do so much with so little. The ability to type a few characters and hit tab to create a data field is ridiculously handy.

And so, I have started to look at Ecto and MarsEdit, to see if I can become a little faster. But of course, I don’t think I’ll be able to let go of TextMate for everything else. So many lovely shortcut keys… the delicious snippets… everything, but for this specific domain of blogging.

Meta Meta

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It might be of interest that I’m doing this in MarsEdit after a quick run-through of both MarsEdit and Ecto applications. I hope to have a full blog post.

As I was in the shower, I realized how meta all of this became again. I blogged on how I updated WordPress, my blogging software of choice. I am now blogging on the current status of how I’m blogging. I will be blogging on blogging applications for the mac.

Screen One

Screen Two

I took a screen shot and annotated it to show you how crazy it’s becoming. You see how the coding is off to the side, while the blogging insanity continues into the wee hours of the next morning?

This is halfway a test of MarsEdit and halfway an actual post.

Sidenote: After opening this post (which was written in MarsEdit) in Ecto, Ecto has informed me of the dirty HTML MarsEdit was outputting. What is the deal with that?

CHANGELOG

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More or less a changelog for myself, so when I look back on today, I’ll see that I was actually a bit effective in doing things.

  • Three columns over two
    • We’ve got larger screens, time to start using them
    • Still keeping the main content area to 400px width, and so images to be framed within 400x300px.
    • Used the new third column specifically for Twitter updates
  • Turned off “Advanced Navigation” in K2: Wasn’t working anyway…
  • Making Twitter Updates into Asides
    • I’m starting to use Twitter enough, but they shouldn’t be the main content of the site. It’s starting to make sense that they serve to be jumping boards to full-fledged posts on a topic
  • Moving back to “Personal” as the default category
    • For some reason, I started to make personal posts into “Asides”, but it turns out, this site can be about myself also
    • “Asides”, as mentioned above, is used for Twitter
    • “Asides” = “Twitter Updates”

And with that, hopefully I’ll start the template tweaking I’ve been waiting to do for days, nay, years.

Legend… wait for it… "air"-y.

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It has happened. It took me quite a long while to do this, but, I pulled the trigger. Now to spend the rest of the night configuring the darn thing so I can actually start doing some work.

Sidenote: I love Time Machine. It’s just the restoring part that’s a little painful and untrustworthy. Time to do what I do best: Go and bring a machine back to its awesome state after a reformat (in this case, a new purchase).

Another Sidenote: I haven’t posted on the blog using the actual WordPress interface for a while. Doesn’t seem to shabby, but I still prefer the TextMate bundle.

A Third Sidenote:Â WordPress on Safari doesn’t like to retain html tags in the visual edit mode. That’s why the post before without paragraph tags. What’s the deal…

Considering Switching to WordPress.com

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I love WordPress. I love the guy who started it, and am love with in the network that has been created at WordPress.com. (Note: WordPress.com is the network, WordPress.org is the place to download the source of the WordPress bloggin software) Automattic, the company founded by Matt, creates not only the blogging platform but also Akismet, the tried-and-true workhorse of the Internet for catching comment spam… which I’m glad for its existence.

Maybe it’s the fact that Automattic took off around the time I had my PHP blog site going… or something. I don’t know. But really, I support his (or their, I don’t know enough about the history of the company… I should find that out) push towards having the platform be open source (and I don’t like how Six Apart took this long to take the jump).

Moving to WordPress.com from Dreamhost

I really don’t want to code for the blog, other than the template. I think WordPress has matured enough for me to move this into the Clouds, so to speak.

What I mean by that is I won’t have to manually update the php code myself. Dreamhost does have a very nice button I can click on now and then, but WordPress.com would push out the updates on me, regardless if I like it or not. I wouldn’t have to even think about what version number we’re at (unless I have a problem… but I trust them).

But more importantly, I’ll be hooked into the network of the bloggers that are on the system. Yes, I have technorati and feeds, but this is just another way to get my stuff out there.

Sweet. Now to pick a time and date to do the move. Maybe I’ll blog that experience, too.

Oh Look, They Did It For Me

Pros and Cons

One huge HUGE con is I can’t use Markdown for adding markup to the pages. This is a huge HUGE problem. I don’t know if I can go back to typing out HTML anymore.

Alas, more to think about…

WordPress Related Fun: TextMate Blogging Bundle's Time Zone Bug and UltimateTagWarrior

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REMINDER TO SELF: Times are finally set to the correct Central Standard Time.

This is more of a summary post on what I’ve been doing with this WordPress installation.

Tags Galore

I’ve finally taken some time with WordPress, and it seems like Ultimate Tag Warrior is no more. Luckily, WordPress has nice importers from people who used other tagging plugins in the past.

There are still a few bugs I have to work out with the code I changed when I did use UTW.

TextMate Time Zone Blogging Bundle Issue

I noticed this a while back, but never really looked into it. After poking around the int3rw3bz0rz, it seems like there was an actual bug with the timestamps.

Sidenote: Blogging Bundle. Holy crap, get some nested comments… or a forum… or SOMETHING ELSE. This is seriously why I think blog comments are broken, but that’s another project idea for another day.

Regardless, this is what you want. From the MacroMates wiki:

Specifying Date Created

There has been a few problems related to correct dates. This comes from the fact that the dateCreated argument (in the XML-RPC protocol) has no time zone info, and until WordPress 2.2 it was interpreted mostly as server time.

Starting with WordPress 2.2 this field is GMT and dates should be offset correctly.

Unfortunately WordPress 2.2.1 introduced a Z in the date format which breaks Ruby 1.8.2’s XML-RPC parser — so if you use WordPress 2.2.1 then you need to update your installed Ruby version. If you have MacPorts installed then you can run sudo port install ruby and update your PATH. See RubyVersionIssues for help with that.

Even more unfortunately, the next version of WordPress will revert its date handling to before 2.2 and so, after that release, dates will again use the wrong offset.

Just need to be really careful and just set the timestamp in the “Date” field by adding the appropriate amount of offset. For this post, I would have to add 6 hours to the hour every time I update to make sure I’m not adding a 6 hour offset.

WordPress 2.3.2

Updated. Feels good to be back in the blogging game.

Google Reader "Plug-in" for *ANY* Website

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You know, it took me long enough… seeing as how much I read the feeds on a daily basis:

From your 179 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 13,522 items, starred 296 items, and shared 0 items.

Finally, the site has list of the most recent starred items I found to be interesting. I’ve always wanted to share my recent feed links with the rest of the world. Think of it as a JK filter.

I thought that this was available through a WordPress Plug-in (I think it was called “hacks” back in the day), but actually, it’s just two script tags that you can add to any page on the Internet.

Google RSS Reader Shared Links

Just go to settings, and click on “add a clip to your site”. Whoo hoo!

Now, get to reading all those lovely posts on the iPhone and Facebook’s platform.