Latest Updates: Wordpress RSS

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  Realtime feed updates with Pubsubhubbub on Afrigator

  Stii 8:34 am on March 10, 2010 | Comments: 6 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Afrigator (22), pubsubhubbub (2), Wordpress

  Okay, I’ve implemented this beast. Feeds that support Pubsubhubbub functionality will now be able to distribute their posts as they are published to Afrigator. Well, all but Blogger or Blogspot feeds as I’m having a weird issue with pubsubhubbub.appspot.com which is the hub for Blogger/Blogspot blogs.

  If you are using Wordpress.com (i.e. yourname.wordpress.com) your good to go. If you run your own installation of Wordpress, I strongly suggest that you install the PuSHPress plugin. Why? Here is a good couple of reasons:

  1. It get you more exposure. Your latest post would be published immediately. This results in your content being distributed as they’re published instead of hours later.

  2. It saves you bandwidth. We don’t need to check your entire feed every hour. We sit back and wait until you publish a blog post.

  3. We’re not the only ones doing it. Other services and aggregators also uses Pubsubhubbub. Services like Friendfeed, etc. Which means you’ll save even MORE bandwidth and your content would be even more realtime.

  Okay, I’m still having issues with Blogspot blogs. They use a Google Appspot application to enable the realtime publishing of their feeds. However, when I try to subscribe at pubsubhubbub.appspot.com it always returns a 500 Internal Server Error and I’m not sure why. I tried setting various headers as I thought that maybe it is because I’m using a Python script to subscribe, but to no avail. I checked using the service Hurl and that works every time without fail. I’m a bit frustrated and lost. If anyone have any ideas, I’d welcome it.

   

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  Dare you to say Pubsubhubbub when drunk

  Stii 4:41 pm on March 9, 2010 | Comments: 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Afrigator (22), pubsubhubbub (2), pushpress, Wordpress

  What a crazy name! Anyway, the idea is much cooler than what the name is. Basically, what Pubsubhubbub does is it enable your blog to broadcast your new blog posts as you publish them. Instead of aggregators like Afrigator periodically fetching and processing your feed, you tell Afrigator “HEY! Listen up! I’ve written something new and here it is.”

  A lot of services uses it nowadays and it is gaining traction. If you’re on blogger/blogspot or wordpress.com you needn’t worry about it as they have already enabled it for those platforms. If you are on a self hosted wordpress blog, I suggest you check out the awesome wordpress plugin called PuSHPress. Install it now! It would be worth it ;)

  Oh and here is a video explaining it in a cool way.

  Note: I’m going to churn quite a bit of posts to test our Afrigator implementation of Pubsubhubbub.

   
   
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  Priceless comment SPAM message

  Stii 9:38 am on December 16, 2009 | Comments: 4 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: akismet (3), comment spam (3), spam (5), Wordpress

  HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia and being forced to post spam comments on blogs! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. They’re coming back now. Please send help!

  Well, dude, sorry to hear about your shit! Have a nice life, or should I say death? Anyway, R.I.P. and Feliz Navidad.

   
   
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  Stii 9:46 pm on September 14, 2009 | Comments: 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Blogging (8), Design (4), themes (5), Wordpress

  Geez, I’ve been under a rock it seems. The Prologue2 Wordpress theme and the Press This! bookmarklet suddenly converted blogging into so much more fun! I’m kinda peeved that I didn’t do this sooner! Try it, you’ll love it!

   
   
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  Boring blog designs, etc...

  Stii 3:34 pm on September 14, 2009 | Comments: 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Blogging (8), Design (4), themes (5), Wordpress

  Following my previous post on blog designs that are boring, I’ve started realstii.com as an experiment. I want to use it mainly for a little more serious thoughts. Thus far, it is not working out too bad, since it doesn’t take forever to customize those posts in that way. What does tend to take a little time is the imagery, but I’m sure as I get better it would become quicker and easier to do.

  I’ll admit to this: It won’t be a mainstream model any day soon. It is a little harder than I initially thought and I do all the post markups by hand. People without fair HTML and CSS knowledge will not cope at all. We can always work on some Wordpress plugins to streamline the process!

  

  As for this blog, I’ll do it the way Nic has done it. Using the simple, quick to publish Prologue2 theme to do Twitter-like updates. I do like that. Also, I’m changing the flow in that random pics and photos won’t go to pic.stii.co.za anymore, but everything gets drawn here. One blog to rule them all!

  I’ve spent enough time musing and fuming about this. Everyone for himself and the devil for us all. Enjoy it, else you’re not doing it right!

   
   
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  Blog designs are so... monotonous and boring

  Stii 11:43 am on September 1, 2009 | Comments: 26 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: blogs (2), magazines, print, themes (5), Wordpress

  I’ve been thinking about the way our blogs and templates look for a loooong time. It is boring. Even the best looking Wordpress blogs like Matt Mullenweg and Sue Rutherford’s blogs (which are fantastic designs) is, or rather become, boring. It might not be boring the first or second time you visit it, but after a while you don’t even notice the design anymore, not true?

  

  

  Why then do we stick with our same old boring templates post after post? Can you imagine you buy your favorite glossy magazine and page through it only to see every single page looks exactly the same? Yes, you may argue “…but print is dead!”. Newsflash! Our medium is boring. I’ll rather be dying than be boring. So why do we refuse to draw on years of research on design? When we were still based in Media City in Cape Town amongst the magazines I talked to a couple of the editors and I basically wanted to know how they design their look and feel? It turns out that it is a science. You may think they only take a bunch of words, slap in a bunch of good looking pictures and BAM! Print it, ship it. No, not quite… A lot of thought goes into the design and layout of individual articles. I’m sure not all magazines take that approach, but basically the good ones do.

  Don’t get me wrong. I think theme designers out there do a great job at making themes unique and very pretty. Awesome job guys! It is just that if you read it regularly, it becomes boring. Have a look at Dustin Curtis‘ blog. That is an amazing way of doing articles on a blog! It is definitely a step in the right direction.

  

  

  Have a look at some of his posts and you’ll get the idea. The post is the main focus, as it SHOULD be. No sidebar. There should not be one IMHO. Looking at my stats (not that I think that is anything to go by) a very small amount of clicks goes to sidebar links. VERY SMALL. So what is the point? No, point. Yes, it sucks at the moment, but even before this crappy design it had very little clicks.

  Now people that know me would agree that I’m a crap designer. Doing posts like Dustin’s would require that you not only put thought into your writing, but also your post layout and design! What a bloody mission, I’ll admit, but it may well be a worthwhile mission. Lets try and see.

   
   
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  Comment spammers get creative

  Stii 3:02 pm on July 2, 2009 | Comments: 7 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: akismet (3), comment spam (3), spam (5), Wordpress

  Every now and again I check my Akismet spam section in Wordpress to see if there is legitimate comments that gets trapped as spam. So I notice a couple of comments from people I know well being trapped as spam. At first I thought that was strange and clicked the Approve link to un-spam it. A bit further down I saw another bunch of comments from well known people also trapped. Then I saw, waaaait a minute! The email addresses and the URL’s does not match up.

  I realised that I just fell for their stupid tactic. Ugh, dumb! I should have known to simply trust Akismet. It has never let me down before, why would it now?

  Here is a comparison between the two comments. One legitimate, the other fake. If only these spammers would stop doing shady stuff and start applying their immense creativity and skills to real business… Too much hard work I suppose!

  

   
   
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  Playtime with a new theme

  Stii 1:21 am on June 30, 2009 | Comments: 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: themes (5), Wordpress, wordpress 2.8 (2)

  Since my old theme broke when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.8, I thought I’d systematically build a new theme. It is a work in progress and will probably stay that way for some time to come. I’ll work on it as time sees fit. And time is not kind to me lately. I find it very hard to recognize my ass from my elbow. :P

  This time round I won’t take any old theme out there and mould it to fit me. I’ll roll my own. I also have a few ideas for plugins which I’d like to throw out there, but patience is a virtue people. With me, you’ll have to have an incredible amount of patience…

  

   
   
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  Add DZone widget to selected posts only in Wordpress

  Stii 11:44 am on March 12, 2009 | Comments: 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: custom fields, dzone (2), hacks, javascript, templates (2), widget, Wordpress

  DZone is a great resource for developers. Lots and lots of valuable articles. Thing is, on my blog, not all posts are technical of nature, thus I don’t want the DZone widget to display on all of them. I want the widget to only display on posts that may be worthy and that are of a technical nature. Here is how I’ve done it with Wordpress using custom fields.

  Wordpress allows you to add custom fields to your posts. This is potentially very handy, but not always widely used or implemented. I created a custom field called dzone and set it’s value to yes.
  
  
  I then edited my Wordpress theme to check whether the custom field is selected on a post:

  <?php
  $show_dzone = get_post_meta($post->ID, "dzone", true);
  

  The get_post_meta() function allows me to get all custom fields of a post. In this instance I passed 3 parameters to it. The post ID, the key or name of the custom field and set the third to true so that it returns the value of the key as a string. If that is not set or set as false, it would return an array. (Keep that in mind)

  All you need to do next is to test whether $show_dzone is set. If it is not set, it won’t display anything. If it is set, it would assign the necessary values, like the url and title, to the DZone javascript and display it with your post.

  if (!empty($show_dzone)): ?>
      <script type="text/javascript">
          var dzone_url = '<?php the_permalink() ?>';
          var dzone_title = '<?php the_title() ?>';
          var dzone_style = '2';
      </script>
      <script language="javascript" \
          src="http://widgets.dzone.com/widgets/zoneit.js">
      </script>
  <?php endif; ?>
  

  This is by no means an ideal solution and a plugin would be more useful, I’ll admit that. Should you want to do this however, here is a text file with the snippet of code you can simply copy and paste into your template files. Note that if you do it this way, you’ll have to insert the code on all template files that display a post like the index.php, search.php and single.php.

   
   
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  blogs.24.com - Some advantages to be gained from Open Source.

  Stii 10:33 am on February 27, 2009 | Comments: 4 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: 24.com, blogs 24, Open Source (3), Wordpress, wordpress mu

  Matt wrote a piece on the redevelopment of 24.com’s blogging platform. He mentioned that they are considering to some extent whether or not they should consider building it on Wordpress MU.

  Personally, I feel that they should go for it. As Matt, I’m totally biased. Another thing is that I’m a n00b at Wordpress MU and have only looked at it a couple of times before, so I’m a bit less qualified than Matt (who has done quite a few of them in the past) to really comment about the pitfalls, but I think one should consider that Wordpress.com runs the same code base and Wordpress.com is one of the biggest sites on the internet. I.o.w. it is a proven success!

  The thing about building on top of an Open Source framework is this:

  You get the privilege of having thousands of brilliant developers maintaining your platform’s core. FOR FREE! Free as in beer. Taking care of all the pesky things like SPAM and security amongst others. Yes, it seems that Alistair and the boys are going to open up the platform to the world to participate and leave comments, but that thing is, they’re going to have to contend with lots of new issues.

  The other thing that they should consider is support. Having dealt with the blogs.24.com users a little when we integrated Afrigator with them it is quite evident that they love support and tutorials and quickly share it. They’re willing to learn. I’m sure not all of them are like that, but a lot it seems are. They’ll have more that great support from the Open Source communities. There are sites with Wordpress tutorial videos. If you’ve ever made a video screen cast tutorial, you’ll know it is not something that takes a few minutes always! That is priceless resources you simply get for free.

  It is relatively easy to support user’s own domains. Templates by the thousands are available for FREE! Gosh, there is just so many advantages over building a new system. I hear what Alistair says about the single sign-on system (RAP) and integrating that into MU being an issue. There will be pitfalls. It won’t simply be plain sailing, I can appreciate that. Tough, decision boys! One I’m glad I don’t have to make!

  Add your views. It would be great if we could convince them! ;-)