Looks like my twitter feed as imported by the Fresh From FriendFeed and Twitter plugin is acting up and posting multiple copies of each tweet. Will need to look into this, and tidy up the posts

I just installed the Fresh From FriendFeed and Twitter plugin for WordPress so that I can capture my tweets on Twitter as @anlaochsiorai in the blog here as blog posts. I’ve found myself microblogging via Twitter from my GPhone more often than posting regular posts here, so thought it would be good to capture them all in one place. As usual the plugin search and installation worked really well from the new Dashboard in WordPress 2.7.

I ended up tweaking the code of the plugin a little to remove the “Fresh from Twitter:” prefix to all the post headings, and I also increased the number of words extracted from the tweet to make the post title from 3 to 6. I found that if I kept the setting on that shows the profile picture it was messing up my page format since it was adding a <br clear=”both” /> tag which pushed the post metadata and other posts below the end of my sidebar Switching the option off leaves the posts with just a small Twitter icon which I actually prefer the look of, and doesn’t mess up the flow of the page.

So, on with the microblogging!

So, it’s taken a while to get around to it, but I’m back on the blog again! There’s been a couple of updates, including upgrading to Wordpress 2.7, changing my theme, and adding widgets support to the sidebar. There’s still a few things that need tidying up such as the colour scheme for the Google Ads, and I’m not sure if I’ll keep the link colours

One of the changes brought about by the addition of widget support is the RSS feeds in the sidebar. These are originally sourced from Google Reader which can republish them as Atom feeds. However the MagpieRSS feed reading code built into Wordpress can’t deal with the fact that the news item source data in the feed also includes title and link elements, so it ends up combining these with the title and link elements for the actual entry, messing up the feed entries in the sidebar. I came across a workaround in the Wordpress support forum – pass the feeds through Feedburner and use the Convert Format Burner option to turn it into an RSS 2.0 feed. The RSS parser in Wordpress deals with those feeds fine, and I’m using the KB Advanced RSS Widget to take a little more control over how the feed is displayed compared to the standard RSS widget.

As for Wordpress 2.7, I really like the new Dashboard, and especially the features for installing plugins directly instead of having to upload them manually. I think I’ll have to look at upgrading My Halo News.com and Our Adventures too now

I’m hoping that this might mark the start of more regular blogging, as there’s lots to say – just maybe not enough time to say it. Let’s see how long it takes till the next post!

I’m about to attempt to upgrade Wordpress to the latest version (v2.1.3), so the site may be unavailable for a little while. Hopefully this will go smoothly

UPDATE: Looks like things are working well so far. I’ve had to tweak the template stuff to make things work, and the Google Sitemap Generator plugin doesn’t seem to want to work, other than that looks good!

Another Update: Sorted out the Google Sitemap Generator problem. I had to tweak sitemap.php to cater for a duplicate declaration for the js_escape() function. Here’s what it looks like now (it’s at the very beginning of sitemap.php):


if(!function_exists('js_escape')) {
// Escape single quotes, specialchar double quotes, and fix line endings.
function js_escape($text) {
$text = wp_specialchars($text, 'double');
$text = str_replace(''', "'", $text);
return preg_replace("/\r?\n/", "\\n", addslashes($text));
}
}


So, all back to normal now

I just installed the Wordpress PDA Plugin, and it’s absolutely great. I tested it out via the browser in my Sony Erricsson K800i, and the display is much cleaner, and much quicker too. I’ve also added it to My Halo News.com. I may play with the templates a little, but the defaults are good enough to use without any tweaking. Highly recommended

I’ve also been playing around with the layout both here and at My Halo News.com. I was trying to find a nice-looking way to handle the embedded Amazon aStore page at My Halo News.com using an absolutely positioned sidebar on the right of the page, but I couldn’t get it looking well. I really don’t want to use TABLE tags, so I decided the easiest way to get a more flexible layout is to put the fixed-width sidebar on the left of the page, and let the main content adjust itself on the right of the page. This has worked quite well, and actually looks pretty nice too. You’ll see this style on both sites now.