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.

Just finished some enhancement for my Twitter layout, the design is slightly more appealing, and I personally believe it’s much more cleaner, no messy lines anymore.

I added a Twitter bird as background to indicate that the content are actually tweets. And lastly, I also added a link to my Twitter account, feel free to follow me.

Hope you guys like the new design, let me know if you have any comments.

Just updated my WordPress mobile theme, not using the Carrington Mobile theme anymore.

I’m using the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin by Crowd Favorite, and because of how the WordPress Mobile Edition works, it allow me to use any standard WordPress theme for my mobile theme.

I’m now using the mobile theme by BlogOhBlog. It’s a very simple theme, straight forward and easy to customize, and I customized the theme as much as I need.

The reason I want to change to new mobile theme is because the Carrington Mobile doesn’t seems to fit very well on a phone screen that’s smaller than iPhone screen width, which is 320 pixels in width. Beside, I don’t really like the grey color of the theme.

You can take a peep at my mobile theme by pointing your mobile browser to http://blog.hwa2u.com. Any comments, bugs or suggestions are most welcomed. 🙂

Here I am again!! After more than a year I didn’t updating my blog, except for the one with my tortoise passed away, it’s a remembrance post for my poor little Betty. 🙁

Anyway let’s continue with my blog updates! As you can see we have a totally new theme here, nothing special about it still dual pane with sidebar on the right side, just the way i wanted it always. 😉

For your information this theme is actually from TechJunkie 1.0 by Theme Lab, however the CSS is heavily reconstructed by me, and also some minor changes.

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!! 😉

The latest WordPress, WordPress 2.3 named “Dexter” is now out for grab, and below are the main juice of WordPress 2.3 taken from WordPress blog.

1. Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.
2. We’re using the new jQuery which is “800% faster”.
3. Behind the user-facing tags system is a really kickass taxonomy system, which adds a ton of flexibility. It’s probably the biggest schema upgrade since version 1.5.
4. The importers have been revamped to be more memory efficient, and you can now add an importer through a plugin.
5. Through hooks and filters you can now override the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, the feed parser, and tons more than you could in 2.2.
6. The new $wpdb->prepare() way of doing SQL queries.
7. Finally there were over 351 tickets in Trac closed for this release, with over a hundred people contributing. This is the polish, the hundreds of tiny bug fixes and features that make WordPress what it is.

And here are some of the new features offered from WordPress 2.3.

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your posts, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you whats the latest and greatest you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

You might want to pay a visit to WordPress codex for more details and instructions on how to upgrade or install WordPress 2.3.

Just upgraded my WordPress to version 2.2.2! Very nice figure. 🙂

Anyway! Please go to WordPress download section to download the latest version, for the instruction on how to upgrade your WordPress, you can go here, or you here for fresh installation instruction.

WordPress had released their latest branch of WordPress 2.1 and WordPress 2.0, this release is a security update and also fixed several issues, including the XSS issues, one major XML-RPC issue.

Head over to their download page to download the latest version of WordPress, and if you are upgrade from previous version, here are the upgrade instructions. 🙂