Tag: WordPress

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WordPress has been making a big deal out of their new default theme, Twenty-Ten, released with WordPress 3.0. Meanwhile, I’ve been watching this site get more and more cluttered, and I keep having to tweak the existing theme to be able to deal with new WordPress features like nested comments, custom menus, etc.

Last week I had to replace the theme’s comment form (fortunately with something simpler) because it didn’t interact quite right with WordPress 3.0.

What the heck. I haven’t changed the look since 2007, so I might as well give it a shot.

I’ve switched over to Twenty-Ten, using one of my own photos for the banner. It’s a view from Modjeska Grade Road, taken last January.

Modjeska Grade View

I’m not quite happy with it yet, but I’m not sure what I want to do next.

My main goals for the new layout are:

  • Move the last of the customizations out of the theme and into plugins (so that I can easily switch to another theme if I want to).
  • Keep the new page uncluttered and relatively fast-loading (which is why I haven’t added everything back to the sidebar).

I have had to make a couple of adjustments to the theme itself. Twenty-Ten insists on showing excerpts instead of complete posts for archives, categories and searches, so I had to go in and modify that. I also added a couple of bits to the stylesheet: alternating comment backgrounds, tweaks to the old Twitter digests, etc. Still, I’m making a point of keeping those changes minimal and grouped together.

I’m also trying out WP-Minify, which should make scripts and styles load a lot faster, or at least the ones hosted locally. Unfortunately there are still a lot of remote scripts for things like Google Analytics, the Share This buttons, and the Link Within thumbnails. Some of them might work. I’ll have to experiment.

So, things are in a bit of flux. Please let me know if you find something that doesn’t work, or miss something that used to be here, by doing one of the following:

  • Leave a comment on this post.
  • Use the contact form.
  • Email me at kelson – at – pobox – dot – com.

Thanks!

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I’ve been using Alex King’s Twitter Tools for about a year now to both publish my WordPress posts on Twitter and build a daily (or, on another site, weekly) digest out of my tweets to post on my blog. I’ve recently started using Selective Tweets on Facebook to transfer my Twitter posts to Facebook.

The reason it’s called Selective Tweets is that it lets you choose which items to transfer, instead of just blindly dumping everything from Twitter to Facebook. You do this by adding the #fb hashtag to the end of each tweet that you want to also appear on Facebook.

On the downside: after the message is copied, that extra hashtag is just clutter. You can’t do anything about removing it from Twitter itself, but you can filter it out of your digests on your WordPress blog!

All you have to do is install and activate this plugin (after installing and activating Twitter Tools), and it will use the Twitter Tools API to filter out the #fb hashtag instead of linking it.

Download it: ktv-twitter-tools-skipfb-1.0.zip

I had intended to also filter it out of the sidebar, but the Twitter Tools API doesn’t seem to provide a way to do that.

If I ever do future versions, I’ll track them here: Twitter Tools Skip FB Plugin.

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Since the normal Twitter/Facebook link stopped working, I’ve switched to Selective Twitter Status. Instead of importing all your Twitter status updates to Facebook, it only pulls in the ones that end with the hashtag #fb. I’ve thrown together a plugin that hooks into Twitter Tools and filters out that tag when building a daily or weekly digest. (It was complicated by the fact that the README didn’t provide any real detail for the relevant API hook.) I tested the function outside of WordPress, then set it up to run on Thursday evening.

Good: It worked! Every instance of the #fb tag was removed, and everything else stayed.
Bad: Twitter Tools posted four copies of the digest.

Well, Twitter Tools does that sometimes. I’ll frequently see it post 2 or even 3 copies, and while I’ve determined it’s not related to WP Super-Cache, I haven’t gotten around to seriously debugging it. So I don’t know if it has anything to do with my plugin. Actually, it probably doesn’t, since it runs within the digest-building code.

For what it’s worth, Friday posted only two copies of the digest. I only found one item worth saving, though. (Well, two, but I expanded the other one into this post.)

I guess it still needs some testing. When I’m sure it’s working properly, I’ll post the code.

Update: Check out Version 1.0.

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I’m really impressed with the new version of WordPress Mobile Edition. It handles both the low-end and high-end (iPhone, Android) devices cleanly and efficiently. I was using a three-tiered setup with WP-Mobile for basic phones, WPTouch for iPhone and Android devices, and of course the regular theme for desktops, but it seems simpler to drop WPTouch for now.

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I’ve been using Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition for a while to provide a mobile-friendly version of this blog, but haven’t really paid much attention to it since my last few phones were extremely limited in web browsing ability. Since I got the G1, I’ve been paying more attention to mobile access, including setting up WPTouch for a high-functioning iPhone– & Android–friendly version of the site. Last week I finally got around to testing the two plugins in combination, and determined that they do seem to work together with the right priorities.

I also ran the main page through the mobile-readiness evaluator at ready.mobi, and noticed that most of the issues it cited with the mobile edition of the site were really simple changes. Some were basics like fixing unbalanced HTML, and others were recommended practices like including a DOCTYPE and making sure that headings were nested properly. So I whipped together a patch for WordPress Mobile Edition 2.1a. (It’s labeled as 2.1.1 in the readme, but it shows up as 2.1a in the list of plugins.)

Changes:

  • Add XHTML Mobile 1.2 Doctype.
  • Fix unbalanced <small> tag.
  • Fix mising <ul> tags around list of recent posts.
  • Avoid empty class attribute on comments.
  • Add type attribute to style element.
  • Change non-standard value attribute on <meta> tag to content attribute.
  • Reassign headings so that h1, h2, h3 appear in order.

Download:

wp-mobile-validation.patch [removed, see below]

The patch should be applied to the wp-mobile folder that you place in your themes folder.

Update: This has been completely superseded by more recent versions of the plug-in, which use Carrington Mobile instead.