Holy Shmoly!

Tweet Tweet dives into the past

Donncha — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:25:07 +0000

I overhauled my Tweet Tweet plugin for WordPress yesterday so it would work with the new Twitter OAuth mechanism. This morning I made it possible to download your older tweets, up to the max limit of 3,200 tweets that Twitter allows.

It’s still a work in progress but I want to get a new release out as soon as I can for current users who are using the basic auth that doesn’t work any more. If you’re feeling adventurous give the development version on the download page a go and tell me what you think!

99% of the OAuth code was ripped from Alex King’s Twitter Tools which in turn uses Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth.php library and OAuth.php from oauth.net. Thank you all for doing the heavy lifting required!

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WIP: the Super Cache admin page

Donncha — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:20:33 +0000

A small update, I’m slowly working through the WP Super Cache admin page in an effort to make it better. You can in fact download the development version if you want to follow along.

What you see above is my first pass. An effort to make the first options section match the look and feel of the standard Settings pages in WordPress. It’s all likely to be mixed around and moved about before the next release, so please, dig in and lend a hand!

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Nokia 5800 Long Term Review

Donncha — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 09:33:09 +0000

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is a smartphone and portable entertainment device by Nokia. It was introduced on October 2, 2008 and released on November 27, 2008. Code-named “Tube”, it is the first touchscreen-equipped S60 device by Nokia. The version being s60v5. It’s part of the XpressMusic series of phones, which emphasizes music and multimedia playback. The touchscreen features tactile feedback. (Wikipedia)

I’ve had a Nokia 5800 for almost a year now. I was really excited when I bought this phone last year. My first touchscreen smartphone! It took some getting used to, having mostly been a Nokia S40 user. It didn’t take long, and in fact now I try to press the screen when I use older phones!

The phone itself does all the usual things and frankly, there are many in-depth reviews out there. Here are a few:

I love this phone. It’s the best phone I’ve ever owned. It’s not perfect by any means but the pros outweigh the cons!

I love the on-screen keyboard for entering texts. It will switch from portait to landscape mode when you turn the phone on it’s side. When I first bought the phone I could use predictive text in both portrait and landscape mode but the latest firmware upgrade changed that. In landscape mode I can’t use predictive text now. That sucks.
The GPS works reasonably well though. Using Windows or Mac OS X software you can download maps for your area to the phone. Unfortunately the GPS chip in the phone is Assisted GPS. It makes a network connection almost every time it needs to find it’s location. I actually bought a data add-on simply because the phone seemed to “leak” data for no apparent reason but it was probably because I had loaded Nokia Maps.
Nokia recently made their navigation system free of charge and it works, sometimes well, sometimes not. Unfortunately it sends us driving in round about ways on occasion. Our journey may be directly down a road but the map told us to cross the river, drive for a bit and then drive across a bridge further up!
The camera is decent enough. It has a flash too. There’s a plastic cover over the lens on the back and unfortunately it cracked. I bought a cheap cover on Amazon but now the light leaks from the flash so I usually disable it when I can.
Reception is very good. Phone calls don’t drop very often, and texts go through all the time. Data calls drop occasionally, and will drop back to Edge if required. No “grip of death”! (har har, bet you’re all sick of that now aren’t you?)
My favourite apps would have to be Gravity, a Twitter application, and Opera Mini for browsing. Opera Mini loads the mobile version of Gmail and Google Reader quickly and display them with little lag. There’s also the free Youtube app which is excellent but I prefer to use a computer for watching videos. I also have numerous free apps and games installed, almost all from the Ovi store.
The Ovi store is Nokia’s application store. It’s basic, but it’s quite good. You can search for apps, and sort and display by different criteria. Only want free apps? There ya go! Installing is a sinch, but it would be nice if they made reviews more accessible. You have to click through to them.
Battery life is pretty good too. If you’re browsing the net and making phone calls it’ll last well over a day but add GPS and suddenly battery life drops like a bomb. If it has to hunt for a signal that hurts too unfortunately.

So, there it is. The Nokia 5800 is an excellent phone. It’s not perfect but I can heartily recommend it.

My next phone? I already bought it. It’s the Samsung Galaxy S, an Android powered smartphone. While the 5800 is an excellent phone it’s showing it’s age. Using the new phone is like moving from Windows 3.11 on a 486 to Windows 95 on a Pentium. Hmm, time to update my analogies?

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Who’s abusing your website?

Donncha — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:58:23 +0000

I wanted to know what IP addresses were hitting my website. I’d done this before and it only took a moment or two to recreate the following commands. Still, here it is for future reference.

This code:

Excludes “wp-content” and “wp-includes” requests.
Uses “cut” to cut out the IP address.
Sorts the list of IP addresses.
Uses “uniq” to count the occurrence of each IP.
And finally reverse sorts the list again, by number of occurrences, with the largest number at the top.

You’ll probably find Google and Yahoo! bots near the top of the list, but I also found the “Jyxobot/1″ bot was quite busy today.

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Oink!

Donncha — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:05:23 +0000

Remember Oink! the comic from the ’80s? Ah happy memories. There are two issues archived here, and the Wikipedia page on the comic is a fountain of knowledge.

It didn’t last long but I’m pretty sure I bought the very last issue. This comic strip rings a bell..

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Lego The Dot Conf

Donncha — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 20:38:44 +0000

I think I have to agree with Damien. This is the best trailer for a conference ever!

It’s for The Dot Conf in Dublin on July 22nd. I won’t be going but there’s a great line up of speakers!

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The MU forums are moving

Donncha — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 09:41:18 +0000

The MU forums will shortly be closing up shop.

WordPress 3.0 integrated everything that MU always did so it’s better to consolidate the forums too. There’s a MultiSite forum on WordPress.org and any queries about upgrading or problems using WordPress 3.0 should go there.

The old forums aren’t going anywhere but later today or perhaps tomorrow I’ll be making them read-only. You’ll still be able to browse the forum, and Google will still index the wealth of information already there but posting will be disabled.

So, thank you to everyone who contributed to the forum over the years. You helped make WordPress MU great.

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WordPress 3.0 Domain Mapping 0.5.2

Donncha — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:53:43 +0000

I’ve just released WordPress Domain Mapping 0.5.2. This plugin allows you to map any domain on to your WordPress 3.0 or WordPress MU website.

New in this release:

WordPress 3.0 support.
Added “domains” page for superadmin to add domains to any blog. The user’s domains page can be disabled by the superadmin too.
Added support for “www.” prefix in front of domains.
Allow dashboard to redirect to mapped or original domain.
Better support for SSL
Translation file added for localization.

For security reasons remote login is now disabled if the dashboard is redirected to the mapped domain. There is a tiny chance of a man-in-the-middle attack during redirection, but it’s just as likely to happen when you’re logging in and sending your username/password to the login form. Call me paranoid.

I would like to thank Ron and Andrea who were a huge help developing and testing this release. Andrea has written a great post on creating a network in WordPress 3.0 plus instructions on upgrading from WordPress MU. Great stuff!

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WP Super Cache 0.9.9.2

Donncha — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:38:28 +0000

WP Super Cache 0.9.9.2 has just been released! This version works with WordPress 3.0 and adds a number of new features and bug fixes:

Cache Preloading will cache every post on your site.
A cache tester that will check if your homepage is cached.
Much better support for mobile plugins.
Mod rewrite rules can now be updated from within the admin page.
Lots and lots of bugs fixed. See the changelog for more details.

Preloading creates lots of files on your server so if you have many thousands of posts please be aware of this. Filesystem limitations may cause problems if you use a flat permalink structure. For example, ext2 or ext3 only allows 32,000 directories in a directory. If you have more than that number of posts you may run into problems.

The plugin does not preload category or tag pages but because your single posts will be cached you’ll find the load on your server will be reduced. Uncached pages will be served more quickly and your visitors will have a quicker and better experience on your site.
You may also see an increase in site traffic if your server was previously underpowered!

Update! I just released 0.9.9.3 to address the (mostly minor) bugs that were reported overnight. If you don’t notice anything wrong there’s no need to upgrade.

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Blairs Inn Smile

Donncha — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 14:19:19 +0000

Duncan of Blairs Inn was giving out free samples of their delicious beef stew along with samples from other local restaurants at the festival in Blarney today.

Delicious stuff, and Blairs Inn is a great place to go for a meal too. Only been there once but we had a great meal there. Recommended.

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