Tag Archives: plugins

Technical

Plugin hassles

I’ve been test-driving some social networking plugins such as Lifestream and the Facebook Dashboard Widget, and I’ve come to the conclusion that some of these things are just too user-unfriendly. As much as I like Lifestream, it appears that Facebook closed their API so that I can’t grab my status feeds from them. What does this mean? Well, it’s not the plugin’s fault that a well-known social networking site decided to shut off public access to feeds. But given that it is one of a few sites that I regularly check up on, would it be too much trouble to have an RSS feed work from it? At this point, I’m thinking I should just use blog RSS feeds, such as the one by Blogger, or a proprietary widget, from MySpace for example, to fill my sidebar.

Lifestream doesn’t work actually, it just fails to reload my dashboard page whenever I attempt to add a feed, so I’ve dropped it.

I found another annoyance: it seems that the newest Sidebar Login plugin is wreaking havoc with my sidebar formatting. I’ve rolled back to 2.1.7 to correct the issue, since I don’t have time right now to root around the code to fix it. Besides that, I dislike the gravatar image that was added in 2.2.1. It would be more appropriate in a personal site, but seems out of place in a multi-user portal site.

Technical

Crossposting to unify social networking sites

I’ve been researching ways on pulling together my online presence into my WordPress site and I’ve found some interesting addons that may at least link up MySpace and Facebook (and other well-known networking sites).

Since I know Ynygma is into Facebooking, I thought the Facebook Dashboard Widget might be an interesting enhancement to the WordPress experience. If you’re interested in crossposting, then perhaps the Socialite addon is worth a look. ShareThis accomplishes this task with a larger list of networking/bookmarking sites to choose from. I’m still in search of an addon or widget that will pull MySpace info into WP but because it’s known to be the most proprietary of the networking sites out there, chances are slim that an addon will do what I want it to do. If anybody finds something with this kind of functionality, then please let me know!

Technical

Import into WordPress 2.7.1

I’m in awe of the newly redesigned WordPress 2.7.1. The import of old posts went smoothly. Installing plugins is now such a breeze! The mass ‘port of the old blog into the new site is largely complete. Thanks to the following MySQL snippet that I used quite heavily, I’ve cleaned up most of the links referring back to the old host and old domain. Gotta love MySQL.

UPDATE table_name SET column_name = REPLACE(column_name,"original_text","replace_text")

Next on the to-do list: galleries!