I am making a small improvement on TwitterPress to make it support Microformats hCard.

I tested with the Operator toolbar and Microformats bookmarklet, it looks good:

I will release an upgraded version of TwitterPress later.  Sorry, I was too busy to upgrade TwitterPress, so it was still remain on preview version 0.1

Popularity: 12% [?]

Share This

TwitterPress is a wordpress plugin which mashup Twitter and your Wordpress blog. TwitterPress was inspired by AlexKing’s Twitter Tools.

 This is a 0.1 preview version, I was suposed to implement more features and enable more options inside it, however some plan changed and I suddenly become very busy these days.(Life is random, isn’t it?) So I have to release this preview version out just in case I was sucked in some works so TwitterPress may be delaied too long.

Features:

TwitterPress 0.1 have following features:

• Display your twitter friends on your blog, like any other Social Network did
• Display your friends (on twitters)’s latest update, so you and your reader can easily discover some topics inside your friends network
• Automatically send twitter when you post new blogs, so your friends will get notified and come to read

I plan to add more in the near future:

• More widgets, so you have more flexibilities to add twitter friends, latest updates on your blog
• Lightbox style display of twitter friends on the blog
• Friend of friends browser in Ajax
• Add twitter friends directly from blog
• Integrate twitter account with blog comment users
• and more…

How it look like:

This is a screen shot from my Chinese blog, I put TwitterPress in my right side bar. (see the red arrow pointed part)

How to install:

• Download TwitterPress (current version 0.1 preview)
• Decompress into your wordpress’s “wp-content/plugins” directory, make sure the “cache’ directory inside ‘TwitterPress’ directory is writable by your web server (simplest way is set to 777 or ‘a+w’)
• unzip TwitterPress-x.x.zip
• chmod 777 TwitterPress/cache
• In your wordpress admin page’s “plugins” tab, activate TwitterPress plugin
• Then you will have a new Option tab named “TwitterPress”, setup your Twitter account there
• Navigate to wordpress admin’s “presentation/widgets” tab, and you will find a “Twitter Press” widget ready to use, drag it to your sidebar.

Download

• Download Version 0.1 preview

Thanks

• Twitter’s Alex Payne who setup the source “TwitterPress” for me
• Alex King and his Twitter Tools, it’s a great Twitter Wordpress plugin, I am just following what Alex did and improved a little bit. http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
• twitterPHP lib
  // version 0.1
  // By David Billingham
  // david [at] slawcup [dot] com
  // http://twitter.slawcup.com/twitter.class.phps
• Caching Libraries for PHP5 by Richard Heyes http://www.phpguru.org/static/Caching.html

Popularity: 74% [?]

Share This

Today I found a great wordpress plugin today:

Features:

• logs every visit on your wordpress blog in your MySQL database
• automatic cleanup of logs in your MySQL database
• contains the same information as Apache combined server logs with ip, referrer, method, status, uri, user agent and access time
• additionally stores geo-ip information with country, ISO country code, city name, latitude and longitude
• displays a list of current visitors
• displays a top-10-list of referrers, visited pages, visitors‘ countries and visitors‘ cities
• has functionality to prevent referrer spamming
• ip blocking of known referrer spammers
• contains a set of free (GNU-GPL / Creative Commons) country flags from Wikipedia
• Google maps integration: shows your visitors‘ locations on world map
• fast geoip retrieval through local database
• contains installer and update scripts
• uses MaxMind GeoLite City
• see it in action here
• and of course it’s free to use!

Very cool, very useful and with google maps displaying who si from where…

See it live in my site:

http://dev.robertmao.com/visitors-map/

Download it here!

Popularity: 24% [?]

Share This

 AlexKing’s Twitter tools is a great wordpress-twitter mashup plugin:

Twitter Tools

This plugin creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

Download | README | SVN Repository

Latest Release: Version 1.0, 2007-05-07.

However this version TwitterTools have some problem in my Chinese blog, all Chinese characters are displayed as “???”, that should be an encoding problem.

After I investigate this problem, I found it because my MySQL database’s character set is not UTF-8 unicode, so TwitterTools created a table as default charset,  that cause the problem.  Why wordpress’s posts show correct encoding? I looked through wordpress’s code, and found that they will force create tables in correct encoding and won’t just use default one.

After I pull some code from wordpress’s wp-admin/upgrade-schema.php and plugin TwitterTools.php, problem gone! (All previous data in the table remained problem, I just delete that table and re-activate Twitter tool again. NOTE: Deactivate TwitterTools seemed not delete that table, so you need to delete yourself. )

I will email Alexking the update and he may put this changes to his next version, but before he change it, I release an non-official version here:

Download Twitter Tools with better internationalization support.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Share This

Yesterday, I decided to host my feeds with FeedBurner like many bloggers do. There is no problem to create a feed of this blog, however when i tried to create a feed for my Chinese blog, FeedBurner refuse to continue because it said that my feed can’t be validated:

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3a%2f%2frobertmao.com%2ffeed

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

line 167, column 77: ‘utf8′ codec can’t decode bytes in position 10676-10678: invalid data (maybe a high-bit character?) [help]

…

In addition, this feed has issues that may cause problems for some users.
We recommend fixing these issues.

line 115, column 21: description contains bad characters [help]

…

After I check the error message, it seemed that the problem is from my blog post content, I did copy/paste some text from some other website in some of my posts, but how could I know those text may contain invalid UTF-8 char? It seemed to be a serious problem.

I can’t believe that why FeedBurner can’t handle this, since my feed can be read correctly in Firefox, Google Reader, Bloglines, and a bunch of other RSS readers, aggregators. But since it can’t handle, and my feed did have problem to pass validation, it’s my job to fix it.

I wrote a very simple wordpress plugin to fix this problem, it will correct all possible invalid UTF-8 data inside the feed content. After I activate my plugin, my feed can pass the validation correctly, so I have no problem to use FeedBurner any more.

I release this simple wordpress plugin here, just in case someone else have similar problem as I had.

Download: wordpress plugin to fix the invalid UTF-8 data inside the feed

Version: 1.0

Install: Download and unzip the file in your wp-content/plugins directory, and then “activate” the plugin in your admin panel’s “plugins” menu.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Share This

I wrote a new simple wordpress plugin for my own use, but I guess maybe someone else may need it, so I release it here.

This plugin is very simple, it put a google search box right behind your blog post, and it fill this post’s title in the search box for you.  With this search box, you and your reader can search the related information easier, they no longer need to open a window, browse to google and type in some words… now all they need is click the button.

The search box will only show up in single post display, it will not show in front page,  category,  search results, …

This version I  only add standard google search form, in the future, if required, it can be configured to support site search, or google co-op search, and use user’s Adsense account to make some money from the search result.   If anyone think such feature is important, let me know I may add it.

Download Here: Wordpress Plugin - Add Google Search box to blog posts

Version : 0.1

Install:  uncompress it in your wordpress plugin directory, and activate this plugin.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Share This

Wordpress MU is great, however Wordpress MU’s authors think it’s not safe to enable the html tags in the default text widget. Unfortunately, today many excellent widget require Javascript, if we can’t enable Javascript support, those widget will not able to appear in the blog sider bar.

There are some blogs talked about hacking the code to enable HTML tags in the widget, however it’s not a standard way and may not compatible in the next version. That’s the reason why I made this plugin: Widgetize-AnyHTML. With this plugin, you can add anything you want unfiltered in the sidebar…of course AT YOUR OWN RISK, wrong code may break you page and even bring in vulnerabilities.

This is my first wordpress plugin, and actually it’s just changed slightly from Erik’s great “widgetize anything”, which enable you to add any PHP code directly in the siderbar. I found his plugin when I am trying to find out a solution to enable WPMU’s javascript enabled widget support, his plugin is not what I want, but very close, actually I change very few lines to make this plugin. (Note: I am not sure if my plugin’s using Erik’s code has break Erik’s license agreement or not, Erik, if you think I shouldn’t do that, pls. let me know, I will remove it)

Download Here: Widgetize Any HTML Plugin for Wordpress MU

Version: 0.0.1

Install:

Download the zip file uncompress to Wordpress MU’s wp-content/plugin directory, then enable this plugin in the “plugin” menu, you will have some “Widgetize Any HTML” widgets in your “Presentation / widgets” screen. You can set as many as widgets in the “Option / Widgetize Any Html” screen.

Popularity: 37% [?]

Share This