Annual theme change.

This blog underwent the annual theme change. This year I wanted to go with something simple, something plain, but still very functional and pleasing to the eye. Seeing that Twitter is so big (popular), and as I mentioned in a tweet from earlier today, I have decided to mainly use Twitter, if I am going to use a micro-blog platform, at all. So what better than have a matching Wordpress theme - Blue Bird by Randa Clay.

I have made bunch of changes to the theme and I am pretty much done with reorganizing my blog. Just making it more user friendly.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Twitter Tool - I love you, I hate you!

The Twitter Tool, a Wordpress plugin, is an awesome tool. I love that it posts to my Twitter account whenever I make a post on my blog. It also provides me with the ability to make new tweets from my blog’s sidebar and from within the Wordpress administrator menu. But the feature I find most valuable is the Twitter digest. The plugin creates a blog post with the day’s tweets, thus creating a back up of my Twitter activity. This is also the feature, which makes me HATE this plugin.

The damn thing creates the digest posts, which are scheduled to appear at midnight with the days tweets, but it generates the posts 4 to 6 hours prior to midnight, right before my active time and thus missing my tweets from the day the post is supposed to reflect. I tried contacting Alex, the creator of the plugin, weeks ago, but I never received a peep from him. I told him about the problem and asked him how can I tweak the code to compensate for this problem, but like I said - not a peep.

It is a love-hate relationship.Unfortunately there isn’t another plugin like it. I guess I will just have to spend the time looking through the source code, line by line, until I figure out how it all works and what needs to be changed to resolve this headache. It won’t be the first time I have had to improve a plugin.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I very much dislike scrapers!

I just spend 15 minutes blocking splogs and scraper IPs for jutiagroup.com. It is a pain in the rear. I have to spend time sorting through comments, that are marked as SPAM, to make sure there aren’t any good ones. Almost always they are bad, and 99% of the time they are trackbacks from scraper sites, that steal content and place it on their ads bloated sites. Do they really believe that having a trackback link makes it OK to steal the content?

Ahh, it is so annoying!!! That is the problem when you have a real site that allows commenting. You have to deal with this kind of crap. This doesn’t happen as often on this site, though. But I had one last week on my post about Alerth Thingy, now that douche doesn’t have a Google Adsense account any more. I hate this loozers.

By the way, I ended up blocking freehostia all together from being able to read content on Jutia Group. There were a lot of trackabcks from blogs hosted by them this time around. So more no longer!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Which will it be?

I have been using Twitter for a long time. It is at the top of the microblogging structure. I also use Jaiku and Pownce, but I think that Tumblr has something to offer, something to compete with against the rest of them. I would say Pownce comes the closes, as far as features, when compared with Tumblr.

Users can have custom themes, in addition to being able to edit the provided themes code and throw enhancements to the pages. Just like I did earlier with Disqus! Tumblr has plenty of room to grow when it comes to features to be added. But in my opinion it is the better one of all of them.

I hope that it will soon pick up speed and become more popular amongst the microblogging community. I did try to find a Wordpress plugin that integrated Tumblr the way Alex Kings plugin integrates Twitter. But, I did not even find one that can interact with it. Helpfully soon someone will produce something.

I have arranged all of my microblogs feeds here. It is much easier to follow and read then this way.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Latest Posts v1.0 by Cypher

While looking for plugins for Jutia Group I stumbled upon Latest Posts v1.0. It is on the left side, under “10 Newest Entries”.

I needed some more functionality out of it so I took the liberty to modify the code a bit. Just to make it a tad more flexible.

I started by changing the function call for inside the template. I changed it from:

<?php cypher_latestposts(); ?>

to

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts(); ?>

What this does is, before the function is called its existence will be verified. This will prevent your theme from braking and your pages loading halfway and then displaying errors when the function is called:

• if you disable the plugin (now you can turn on and off the plugin without the visitors getting page errors)
• the plugin file is moved, corrupted or deleted

In other words, if something happens to the plugin and you are unaware of the problem, your site will not brake. This of course is bad, but it will not have a negative effect on your site.

My next change was to make the number of posts being displayed flexible. With other plugins and the ability to call the function in any page or post you might want to display different number of posts at different places.

I started by deleting the variable

$max_posts

from the global declaration.

Then I placed that variable in the function declaration.

Old

function cypher_latestposts($before='', $after='<br>')

New

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before='', $after='<br>')

Now when you call your function you can set the number of post to be displayed at the function call location. Like this:

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10'); ?>

In this example I want 10 posts. You can change this number to anything you want.

Here is an extra. Some of you might want to display your links in a list, others separated by a comma (no idea why), slashes, hyphens or as in the original just with a line breaker. So what you will do is change the function declaration like this:
From

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before='', $after='<br>')

to

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before, $after)

When you call your function just insert what you want to separate the links with. Here are some examples:

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','<li>','</li>'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','+','<br />'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','','/'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','==','=='); ?>

Popularity: 77% [?]