mark.bockenstedt.net » Plugin

WordPress Gets Admin Facelift

Mark — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:15:38 +0000

WordPress 2.7 was officially released yesterday. There are a number of pretty dramatic (yet exciting) changes on the admin side. Here are my favorites:

Upgrading becomes much easier
Threaded comments, and better comment layout in general
New admin look makes navigation quicker
Compatible with mu

This was really just a test post to make sure mu still works. I performed the upgrade here in about 10 minutes and it seems like nothing was adversely affected.

More mu Updates Coming

Mark — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:35:48 +0000

Look up – directly above this text. See it? That’s one of mu’s newest features. I decided that as a gesture of convenience, mu will now create a short link anytime you publish a post. Since it usually already does it anyway, I decided to make it automatic and give you the chance to display it wherever you want on your posts.

All you’ll have to do is make a small change to the posts table in your database to add a place for this link. When you publish a post, mu will grab the short link (from the service of your choosing) and hang onto it so your readers don’t have to waste time getting one themselves. Hooray convenience!

There will be two functions in the next release of mu, one that returns the text and one that displays it directly. The other treat in store for mu 0.4b* will be URL shortening using Cli.gs. I’ve decided to build it in and give you a place to enter your API key rather than make you figure out the API call by using the Custom option.

Look for the update next week – I’d like to make sure it’s working correctly over the weekend before I release it.

* There will also be a few small bug fixes included because I’m an idiot

WPTouch Skins Your Blog for iPhone Look and Feel

Mark — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:00:56 +0000

This morning I was alerted (by @trutter) of a WordPress plugin that greatly improves the UI experience for iPhone and iPod Touch users called WPTouch. When a user hits your blog with a user agent resembling that of these two devices, WPTouch takes over and transforms your blog into something that fits with Apple’s look and feel.

The plugin has a good number of options you can set, including disabling AJAX and fancy stuff to make it load faster (EDGE and even 3G users will appreciate this). There are a slough of other options regarding what’s displayed so be sure you spend some time on the settings page for the plugin.

State of the mu, July 15

Mark — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:04:34 +0000

mu is clipping right along now, and I’m trying to trim it down so I’m not relying on third party APIs. The reason I’m doing this is so I can avoid problems that I had with Plurk Updater. The only requirements mu will have are the cURL and XML-RPC packages for PHP. It’s my hope that mu will run as efficiently and elegantly as possible.

Here’s my current to-do:

Verify login upon entering account details
Report if an update doesn’t go through (using HTTP status code 200 as a benchmark)
Queue posts if service is down, or send to similar service (twitbin, etc)
Limit amount of time each service has to send updates
Allow user to publish post at a later date and send update at that time

I’ve had some issues today with duplicate posting, but I think I’ve got that pegged down. Luckily, I didn’t have to make many changes upon WordPress 2.6 being released. I’m going to shoot to have mu finished by month’s end, which feels like a long way off right now. At the very least, I’d like to get items 1 and 2 included in the initial release, and would like to see 5 included ASAP. Keep waiting patiently – as always, comments and suggestions are encouraged.

Tentative mu Feature List

Mark — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:00:28 +0000

I’ve been working on mu for the past few days and have it running pretty well. It’s been pushing out updates to my social networks on each post I’ve made for the past 3 or 4 days, so I’m convinced that part of it works. Here’s a set of features that mu will have:

Publish to a wide variety of social networks
Be able to queue your updates for when you actually publish your post (ie post scheduling)
Authenticate each service as you provide account info
Return error messages when farming out updates so you know if something went wrong
Error checking and time limiting for each update to occur (to keep the mean time to post down)
Smart farming of posts – ie if you send to ping.fm, it will grab your list of services and prevent duplication of updates

Through mu, you will be able to update the following microblogs: Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca, FriendFeed, ping.fm, Jaiku, and Pownce. Pownce may get the axe because I have to provide my API key in the plugin and I don’t want to send that to other people. Also, Jaiku is having problems with their API so that one might get cut also. mu should cover most of the major social networks. If all else fails, just send it to ping.fm and it’ll farm it out to all your services there.

There’s no timetable for mu yet, but I think it’s about a week or two away. If there’s anything you want to see added to mu, let me know in the comments.

mu is coming…

Mark — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:38:12 +0000

I recently created a plugin to send an update to your Plurk account (Plurk Updater). It was at that point that I decided that I really needed a plugin that allowed me to specify on a post-by-post basis if I actually wanted to send the update to either Plurk or Twitter. Thus, mu was born.

mu stands for “Microblog Updater”. It is a conglomeration of my Plurk Updater and Twitter Updater. I thought, why stop there? Currently, mu works with Twitter, Plurk and FriendFeed, and partially with Jaiku (they’re having API issues). I have aspirations to extend mu to work with Identi.ca and possibly ping.fm. This will make mu a powerful, all in one solution for updating all your microblogs without any extra intervention on your part.

One great thing about mu is that it will allow the user to build a list of default services mu will send updates to. If, while they’re writing the post, a user decides that the default list doesn’t suit the post, they’ll simply have to scroll down to the services box and check the services they want and don’t want. mu will be a true plugin, and there won’t be any code modification or hacking that needs to be done by the end user.

The other cool thing mu takes care of is update formatting. Each service has their own recommended format updates should appear in, and mu handles them all. Twitter’s format is different from Plurk’s, which is similar to FriendFeeds, but is different from Jaiku’s. mu handles the headache so you don’t have to. It just appears without you worrying about it.

If you have suggestions for additional services you’d like to see in mu, leave them in the comments.

Here’s a few screenshots of what mu looks like:

Options Page

Account details page:

Services Options (on edit page):

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