hwa2u.com

As you all probably know, I used Twitter Tool by Alex King to retrieve my tweets from my Twitter, and post it here. However, ever since the plugin been updated to version 3, the previous version of Twitter Tool stopped working, at least for my site. I’m not sure why is this happening, by right it shouldn’t. But I didn’t bother to upgrade it, because the new Twitter Tool is relying another plugin, which is the Social plugin to accomplish all the Twitter job.

You see, I’m trying to make my blog not to rely too much on third party tools, services, to keep it independence. Unless I have no choice to do so, or the third party service/plugins is worth for it. So I decided to take the matters into my own hand, by develop a WordPress plugin to replace it.

Introducing Twitter Pull by hwa2u.com, a Twitter plugin for WordPress that will pull tweets from your Twitter account every 10 minutes, simple as that. The plugin use Twitter OAuth to authenticate with Twitter so even if your Tweets are protected, the plugin will still be able to pull tweets, cool huh?

Apart from pulling tweets, the plugin can pull pictures from tweets as well, and post it nicely in WordPress, take a look at this tweets from my Twitter. The pictures will be downloaded from Twitter and save it in a folder defined by user.

Other than that, the plugin also has configuration to allow you to filter mentions or retweets to be pulled, that including words or sentences defined by user, pretty neat huh?

So now the question, when am I going to release this awesome plugin? Sorry to say that, I never intended to release, yet. I’m still testing the plugin out, there are a bunch of features I want to include, such as able to retrieve geo location, better error report to user etc. At least until I satisfy with the product then I’ll be releasing it.

For now, if you really want to try the plugin, feel free to email me, I might consider to host the code in GitHub so you guys can download it, or you may suggest me the features you want to include.

I just finished my 6 days leave, not really a good one because half of the leave I was sick, I was having a serious migraine. 🙁

But anyway, the other half of the leave I manage to wrote a plugin for my website, it’s a WordPress plugin that allow my blog’s header image to be rotated everytime it refresh, I called it WP Header Image Rotator.

The plugin is actually quite simple, all it does just print the CSS background into the header of my blog, and that’s it, but of course the purpose of the CSS is to display the header image.

So far the plugin is working well, but if you notice anything wrong with my header image, be it CSS issues or missing header image or anything, please let me know, and of course a print screen will be much appreciated. 🙂

A little bit of updates for my Twitter Image plugin, now the images are not a resized of the original image, it’s appear as a thumbnail now, so the loading time should be slightly better.

As usual if you encounter any issue, feel free to let me know.

Got a new plugin for my blog, it’s the WP Cumulus by Roy Tanck. 😉

WP Cumulus is a plugin that collect your tags and display it in a very nice rotating 3D Flash sphere, it allow you to predefine the amount of tags you want to display. Other than tags, you can also display your blog categories, or even both!! Clicking on the tag or category will take you to the appropriate page.

A lot of customization you can do with WP Cumulus, like the width, font color, background color etc, so you don’t have to worry that WP Cumulus will break your theme.

You can see the WP Cumulus in action at my sidebar.

I got a brand new shout box at my sidebar, I’m not using my old ShoutBox plugin anymore because it’s too old. Anyway my new shout box plugin is called WP Wall by Vladimir Prelovac, but still I’m going to call it ShoutBox anyway.

Certainly this one is better than the old one, it’s running on AJAX and easy to customize, and the best part is it doesn’t use it own database, instead it using the WordPress build-in comment, so every shout out will be saved as a new comment.

So if you guys want to comment anything and it’s not related to any of my post, please do so in my shout box, thank you!

New gallery is up now! This time no more Lazyest Gallery screw that it’s too old already, I’m now using the NextGEN Gallery by Alex Rabe. 🙂

Guys! After more than a year i disabled my ShoutBox, now it’s back!!! 😀 But i disabled my Recent Comment.

The reason i bring back my ShoutBox is because sometime when people just want to say something to me, let’s say hi, they will go to any topic and post a comment there, which will ended up as spam, so i decided to put a ShoutBox so people can say whatever they want to me as long as it’s make sense. 🙂

Actually, the SboutBox is an improved version of the WP-ShoutBox by Ryan Mack, most of the modification i made are for the back-end, which is the admin part, other than that my version of ShoutBox is validated as XHTML Strict!! 😉

It’s true that the greatest success for WordPress is the plugin development, in fact i think that it’s the plugin which make WordPress become so success, thanks to those plugin developers for their hardwork.

However, one bad thing about WordPress plugin is that until now there are still no place to collect all the WordPress plugin, or a database to put all the plugins so WordPress user will easily find the plugin they want, although there is wp-plugins.org but the lack of user interface and not up to date plugins make people would rather search plugins by them self.

Many works had already done to promote WordPress plugins though, such as daily plugin update by Weblog Tools Collection and A Month of WordPress Plugins by Lorelle where he spend the whole month talking and reviewing about WordPress plugins. These works will more or less promote WordPress plugins until a certain level but still we need a place that’s more particular and more general.

But fear not! Today WordPress.org had upgraded their extend section and now it act like a plugin directory for WordPress, now you can find the latest and most popular WordPress plugin there!!

So if you are WordPress plugin developer, please add your plugin there, hopefully this will bring up all the WordPress plugins.

Upon i upgraded my WordPress to version 2.1, i encountered a few time where my WordPress theme reset to default, the one by binarybonsai.

At first i thought it’s a bug in WordPress 2.1 so i went to the support forum and try to find post with similar problem, if this really a bug then it should be a lot of people talking and complaining about it but strangely not, So i dug even deeper and found this, a post by Scott Burkett explaining what cause the problem.

Apparently most of them who face this trouble has this plugin installed, WP-Mobile by Alex King, don’t get me wrong it’s not the plugin fault, the plugin works great and do what it suppose to do, but it’s the user who didn’t read the instructions well, that’s me. 😳

While most WordPress plugins will require only the user to upload all the related files into the wp-content/plugins folder, but WP-Mobile require you to upload some other file to the wp-content/themes folder.

Anyway here’s what Scott Burkett explain about the problem:

It turns out that I had not properly followed the instructions provided by Alex in the plugin archive. Instead of following the instructions, and copying the files into the places he specified, I just unzipped them into the plugins directory and activated it. That was the whole problem – I needed to copy his “wp-mobile” theme over into the wp-content/themes directory. WordPress was trying to find it, and couldn’t, so it reverted automatically back to the default theme.

So next time read the README file carefully, and make sure you understand it! Imagine that if i report this to WordPress as a bug. 😯

WP Grins 1.3 by Alex King just released today! The old version doesn’t work in WordPress 2.1 but this one does.

WP Grins is one of the earliest plugins that i installed into my blog, it create a line of click able smilies below your editor so that you can put WordPress smilies by clicking on them, very convenience though, instead of memorizing all the BBcode.

One of the biggest changes in this version is that it’s now become a “pure plugin” like Alex King said, before this you have to do a little hack to your WordPress files for the smilies to appear in your editor, but now all you have to do just activate the plugin and the smilies will appear below your editor. 😉