Category Archives: Technical

Technical

Crossposting to Blogger

I’ve recently opened an account over at Google’s Blogger to take advantage of their subscription services. I’ve been devouring a lot of excellent garden blog feeds lately, and I thought it time to share some of my gardening experiences from my WordPress blog.

I have a way to import all of my garden blog activities via a handy converter, which will address some of the garden posts. But the self cross-posting will be something of a challenge, since I only want to crosspost one category from my WP blog. I may have to develop a plugin specifically for this function since CrossPress currently does not support this option.

But since Blogger has an email-to-blog options (just like WP), I can test email-post plugins like Post Notification to see if that will suit my purposes.

Update: post to Blogger email won’t work because edited/updated posts show up as new, separate posts in Blogger. It appears I have hit a wall…unless I want to go into Blogger’s dashboard and delete the replicated posts. The solution seems to be an offline solution, like ScribeFire perhaps.

Technical

Testing 2 new WP plugins and pondering the mobile web

After a shocking discovery that my site’s feed was still live, I resolved to put an end to it by installing the “Disabler“. I decided to go with a plugin because I experienced some difficulty modifying the Atahualpa’s functions.php file. I hope Restricted Site Access will consider putting in an option for restricting access, if not, disabling feeds, since I think it would be an appropriate function.

I also implemented Print Friendly and PDF, to make it easier to print out posts and pages. It’s quite handy when I want to print out a wishlist or recipe, and I’ve been looking for an easy way to add a print button to my WordPress sites.

There is a growing number of hits on the sites that I manage by mobile handsets. I am considering “mobile-izing” my sites to become more accessible to the huge market of smartphone users. I have two options to modify existing WordPress sites: via theme and via plugin. Of course, creating a mobile theme for each site will be time-consuming, while using a plugin means certain restrictions on format and creativity. I plan on researching this more, but for now, I need to experience the various browser-agents on the 3 hottest smartphone platforms: Blackberry, iPhone and Android.

Technical

Force-correction of “WordPress”

I just noticed something. My WordPress install has auto-corrected every spelling of “WordPress” I have typed into a post, changing the “p” to an uppercase letter. Of course, I love this feature, since I’m a such a stickler for spelling and grammar. Apparently, a filter was added to WordPress 3.0 that auto-corrects all instances of the word. Of course, this “upgrade” isn’t without its detractors. Personally, I think it’s an effective means of keeping a brand name consistent and have no issues leaving the filter in place as long as it doesn’t impact the performance of my blogs. I hope they don’t remove it.

Technical

Disabling directory browsing

I had created a subdomain to route to the WordPress login on one of my sites, in order to make it easier to find the login page later on after I removed the link from the home page. However, created the subdomain created two things: a subdirectory within the WordPress install directory, and made it browsable. So if I plugged in www.mydomain.com/login, a browsable index page came up. Since this sort of behavior opens up the website to malicious visitors, I had to find a way to plug up the hole.

Fortunately, there was already an answer out there to the solution. Because I installed WordPress into its own directory, and not the root, I merely had to make some adjustments to the .htaccess files.

For both files located at the WordPress root and the login folder root, I just needed to add the following lines at the end of each file:

# BEGIN Disable Dir Browsing
Options All -Indexes
# END Disable Dir Browsing

I believe this code can be applied to any directory that needs its contents hidden from browsing, as long as an .htaccess file exists.

Technical

Google Friend Connect and Blogger Dashboard

I’m an avid follower of Google technology. I try to find Google productivity solutions when it comes to graphics media, document management, as well as email. Sometimes, however, Google fails me…as in the case of their badly-realized Google Buzz. While it was a promising initial venture into social media (like Orkut), the lack of any solid privacy controls forced me to dump Buzz and delete my public profile altogether.

Google has something of a negative reputation when it comes to private information (though not as horrible as Facebook). Because of the numerous services they offer, Google has been inconsistent in handling personal information. Personal info that has been kept hidden in one service could be wholly exposed in another Google service. But attempting to try out a new service could also be curtailed if you don’t make public certain personal info.

Buzz caused me a great deal of frustration. Another great concept called Google Friend Connect has become another source of aggravation. While I felt that the idea had merit (using an OpenSocial standard), the execution falls short of working. Initially, I attempted to use Friend Connect to show my support of Blogger-hosted sites, mostly related to gardening. Because I wanted to keep it separate from my main Google account, I logged in using a Yahoo account, then changed it over to an email address from my own personal domain. (Lacking the option to use a private domain login was a precursor of my Friend Connect woes.) Of course at this point, I was attempting to “follow” several blogs, little realizing that the list of sites was only accessible via the gadget on those sites.

According to the documentation I read, this list of blogs that I followed would be available on my Blogger dashboard. WRONG! Because I created a separate ID to follow these blogs, that Blogger dashboard actually did not exist. I had to manually create a new profile on Blogger to see my dashboard. Once I created the Blogger profile, I thought everything would start working as intended.

WRONG again! Apparently Google Friend Connect and the Blogger dashboard don’t communicate with each other, despite all the documentation I found on the web stating otherwise. I tested this out when I “followed” a new blog through Friend Connect, then check the dashboard to see if the blog added. Nada. After 3-4 blogs failed to show up on my Dashboard via Friend Connect, I was disgusted. I then manually added the blogs with Blogger’s Reading List “Add” tool to force them to show up. I had to perform this step with every site listed in my Friend Connect dialog.

Next, I tried it the other way, following blogs through the Dashboard–but then they failed to show up under my Friend Connect list. At this point I’m thinking: how utterly useless! I figured after the countless hours I spent trying to solve the mystery, I decided to just use the Blogger Dashboard from now on until Google can work out their Friend Connect issues.

Meanwhile, it seems Blogger has been experiencing service issues, so perhaps that may explain the problems I’ve been experiencing with Friend Connect. Maybe.