Monthly Archives: December 2008

This week on twitter 2008-12-28

General
  • today I'll make my life easier by replacing gentoo with ubuntu.Sick of waiting for everything to compile even on a 3 machine compile cluster #
  • recruiting HTTP hdrs: X-hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header. #
  • Do you have a blog? Then why not add twitter id to your comment form? http://tinyurl.com/9wdgl5 #
  • @Bloggeries I think most of these "how to get rich" books are by people who have given up digging for gold so they r trying to sell shovels in reply to Bloggeries #
  • RT @Bloggeries I think most of these "how to get rich" books are by ppl who have given up digging for gold so they are trying 2 sell shovels #
  • @Jimconnolly your blog ate my last comment on this post: http://tinyurl.com/5uv8lg . Was it on purpose? Too many links? in reply to Jimconnolly #
  • @mvndrvrt if you're interested about how to set up the twitter field in the comments take a look at this: http://tinyurl.com/9wdgl5 in reply to mvndrvrt #
  • just because I comment on your blog it doesn't mean I want to get your promotional emails. That's just like spam. You know who you are. #
  • You autoresponder should not send me any more messages after I unsubscribe. Not even a confirmation! #
  • @qutequte I saw your comment on @jimconnolly blog.re: WP-Twitip-ID u might want to take a look at my mods for it: http://tinyurl.com/9wdgl5 in reply to qutequte #
  • @ariwriterdotcom if you use WP-Twitip-ID, you might want to look at this: http://tinyurl.com/9wdgl5 in reply to ariwriterdotcom #
  • The World's First Energy Generating Revolving door http://tinyurl.com/6gom83 #
  • RT @LorenMcDonald Email Marketing Tip O' Day: Make it easy 4 subs to change their email addr - otherwise they'll unsub & likely never re-sub #
  • just installed social homes plugin on my blog http://tinyurl.com/9gg5hy . An easy way to add links to your social ids in the sidebar #
  • WP Greet Box is a great plugin. Take FirstTimer to a whole new level http://tinyurl.com/696ew3 #
  • Merry Christmas to all! #
  • reading "Income From Donations - Amazon Wish Lists Rock" http://tinyurl.com/7nqkz2 @shoemoney #
  • I want facebook connect on my blog but I don't like the existing wp plugins cause they create users on my blog. It's bad for security #
  • @LisaBarone P2P in reply to LisaBarone #
  • got another type of spam today. From someone I don't even follow. How do I report it ? #
  • why can't I just DM @spam ? #
  • @graywolf I'll read your post even though I don't know what MWM stands for 🙂 but I think that's just a guaranty that I'll not steal it 🙂 in reply to graywolf #
  • it's amazing that I still get links and visits to a wp plugin that I wrote almost two years ago and that's not even working anymore #
  • I wonder how many out there are still using wordpress 2.3.x #

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WP-Twitter-ID Social Profiles Integration

wordpress, , , , , ,

A few days ago I wrote a post about a wordpress plugin that will add a twitter id field to the comments form and I was reporint two problems with it. One was solved in that post and for the second one I'm going to show you a solution in this post.

The Problem

The second problem was that the twitter id field was show assigned to a comment when a registered user was commenting.

Basically I needed a way to specify the twitter id of a registered user in the profile and then just make the WP-twitip-id plugin use that value form the profile. I could have done this by implementing the necessary code to show the field on the profile page and save it's value when the profile was saved but I was lazy and I wanted a quicker solution.

The Quick Solution

The quick solution was to install the Social Profiles plugin, set my twitter id in my profile and then do a simple modification to wp-twitip-id.

To make the modification just open wp-twitip-id.php in any editor, look for "function addtwitterfieldmeta($comment_data){" and right after that line insert the following code:

  1. span style="color: #ff0000;">'atf_twitter_id''atf_twitter_id''cyc2_twitter');
  2. }

That's it. Simple don't you think ? Now next time you post a comment as a registered user you should see your twitter id in the comment header.

Download

Here's the zip file with all modifications including the one in the previous post.

[download#1]

This week on twitter 2008-12-21

General

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Getting Social: Google Friend Connect

blogging, , , , , , , , , ,

Lately I have become more involved into social media/networking. I'm far from a social media expert, and I think too many people declare themselves social media gurus. If everybody's a guru no one's a guru anymore :).

Anyway as part of my social networking involvement I try to experiment with new things as time permits. One of these things is Google Friend Connect.

What is Google Friend Connect?

In a few words it's a service that allows a site's visitors to connect with their friends that might also use the same site.

Google provides a few gadgets, one for showing members, another one for allowing members to post on your site's wall, a Review/Rate gadget and some others supporting the OpenSocial platform but developers can build their own gadgets too.

It allows you to see who else is using the same site as you are and what other sites are your friends using. You can connect with your friends on twitter, plaxo, google ( gmail) and orkut but other networks may be available in the future. So if you're visiting my blog and using one of those services you might want to become a member of this site and see what you're friends are doing.

How to implement on your blog?

If you want to implement Google Friend Connect on your blog, the process is pretty simple just go to http://www.google.com/friendconnect/ , click the "Setup a new site" button and follow the simple instructions.

It will ask you to provide the site name and home page url and then will provide 2 html files for download that you have to upload to your site.

I had troubles downloading the html files because they didn't actually contain any html but just javascript and firefox would interpret them and save them as empty files. If you have the same problem, get Firebug and look into the Net tab after you download the files. You should see the html response for each of those files and just copy paste into the files and upload that to your site.

Then pick one of more gadgets, customize them to match the look of your site and google will generate some html code that you can copy and put where ever you want on your site.

Let's connect!

You can see the google friend connect members gadget on the right sidebar after the "Recent comments" widget. Just click the "Join" button.

Other places where we can connect:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/mihaisecasiu

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Mihai-Secasiu/566029300

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mihaisecasiu

FriendFeed: https://friendfeed.com/mihaisecasiu

Stubleupon: http://symx.stumbleupon.com/

Digg: http://digg.com/users/symx

Twitter id comment field

wordpress, , , ,

I saw this post on problogger about how Darren implemented a new field in the comment form for his new blog about twitter tips powered by wordpress. Basically he used a plugin for adding and extra field to the comment form and then modified the comment template to show the link to the twitter profile page.

There are two problems with this approach. #1 Unlike the author name, email and web site, the twitter id field is not saved in a cookie so your comentators will have to fill it in every time they post a comment, this migh be annoying for some of them. the second problem is that if you're logged in and want to reply to a comment there's no way you can set the twitter id.

The first problem was almost solved by a new plugin named wp-twitip-id by Andy Baily specially created for setting up the twitter id field. I said almost solved because this plugin uses javascript to add the new field and in some cases ( depending on the template you are using ) javascript would not be the best way to do this.

Luckily you can use this plugin without javascript and add the new field manually by modifying the comments.php template file but then the cookie would not work anymore so it needs some modification to set the cookie from the php script instead of javascript .

Simply calling setcookie before the comment is saved will do the work, then when you display the form field just use $_COOKIE['atf_cookie'] to set the value of the twitter field.

If you like to modify some plugin code get the wp-twitip-id plugin, open wp-twitip-id.php look for addtwitterfieldmeta function and add

  1. span style="color: #ff0000;">'atf_cookie'

right after the line with this code: 'if($twitter){'

Then go into wp-content/themes/<yout_theme>/ edit comments.php  look for the URL field and add a new field after it like this:

<input name="atf_twitter_id" type="text" value="<?php echo $_COOKIE['atf_cookie']?>" />

You might have to add some other html code and css to make the field look like the others but that depends on the theme you are using.

For convenience I have attached the modified plugin but you still have to modify the comments.php file in your theme.
wp-twitip-id-091

Let me know how this works for you. Do you think the twitter id comment field is worth the effort ? Does it bring value to you it as a commentator?

This week on twitter 2008-12-14

General

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Core dumps

Linux, , , , , , , ,

I was working on qmail (patching it heavily ) and at one point I was getting a segmentation fault. Trying to trace it in a busy environment is hard, especially in qmail that is very modular and processes come and go away all the time.

So I thought a core dump could be the answer.The only problem was my system wouldn't dump the core of the processes where the 'segmentation fault' occurred. I have set the core size file high enough ( ulimit -c 10000000 ) in the qmail start script but still not core dump so I decided to do some research.

From core man page it seems like a core could not be dumped for a number of reasons:

  1. the process owner doesn't have write permission to the directory where the core file should be written.
  2. the core file size limits ( RLIMIT_CORE , RLIMIT_FSIZE ) are less then the size of the core that would be dumped
  3. the process was setuid and in this case dumping the core would depend on the setting in /proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable ( proc(5) )
  4. the file being executed doesn't have read permission

In my case #2 and #4 were not an issue so it must have been #1 and/or #3 .

To make sure #1 was not an issue I created a directory /tmp/cores, made it 777 to make sure any process can write to it ( not safe in a multiuser environment but works ) and then set /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern to /tmp/cores/core so now all core files would be in /tmp/cores instead of the process working directory as it is by default. It's also a good idea to make sure /proc/sys/kernel/core_uses_pid is set to 1 so the pid of the process will be appended to the core file name.

To fix #3 I set /proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable to 2 . I restarted qmail and there I had the core in /tmp/cores .

Twitter threads

General,

The best way to follow a conversation is to see it all in one place.

A twitter conversation is split over several time lines, messages are mixed with other conversations. This makes it hard to follow a conversation especially when you follow a lot of people.

With threading you would be able to see all messages in a conversation in a way that's easy to follow. It's also harder to be misunderstood this way.

Instead of replying to someone reply to their message. Thus twitter would be able to show threaded conversations. Of course twitter clients will need to be modified to support this new reply method.Actually both methods should be available.

There are a lot of people saying twitter is very good just as it is now and are against any new features. Others believe twitter groups are really needed.

For me threaded conversations would be the best feature I would like to see in twitter.

I'd like to see your opinion on this. Would you like threads? Let me know in the comments.

Twitter Updates for 2008-12-05

General
  • opendialect is such a dissapointment. I regret having to install mono just to try it #
  • Yahoo search: you could go to google, but why not stay here http://tinyurl.com/5vas76 #
  • Good morning everyone! seems like google reader changed it's interface #
  • Address-Book Additions boost Inbox delivery http://www.clickz.com/3631925 #
  • be careful when you buy something from godaddy. you never know what you agree to. #
  • @garyvee seems like the best option is to switch to a different service #
  • paypal email support is the worst. You have to go through at least two forms and you get a response ( if any ) after a week #
  • @steveweber before that one he also said 640k of memory should be enough. That's why later dos programs needed special drivers for more ram #
  • @adriana_iordan wow a ajuns super rapid. Nu credeam. Posta romana rocks 🙂 Enjoy! #
  • @shoemoney just a suggestion on your newsletter format. 3 columns +1 one for ads is really bad for reading. Please use only two for text. #

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