TweetImag.es I still find it hard to believe that there is sill no easy, official way of retrieving a twitter user’s avatar, luckily there are a few people out there building simple services to fill the gap. I just found tweetimag.es via a tweet from @laterstars, and it looks like it should meet my needs for now. I’ve also updated the ‘Twitter Avatars in BuddyPress’ function I posted to use this service, as the previous service seem to have some stability issues.
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(500) Days of Summer (2009)
ReviewGood movie, even if it is slightly depressing. However, I ended up watching it for two reasons, one because I wanted to, and two because I’d spotted this post that talked about a recent Toyota Camry Hybrid (snooze…) ad here in Australia that basically rips of an entire sequence from the movie. Having now watched the movie I can safely say that, yes, whoever Toyota Australia hired to make their latest commercial has no sense of originality at all.
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2012 (2009/I)
ReviewCompletely met all my expectations. It was long, the special effects for the disaster sequences were grand and spectacular, and it had ordinary characters and a mostly rubbish story. Roland Emmerich should probably stop with the “end of the world theme” now… actually, he probably should have stopped after ‘Independence Day’ - at least that one had aliens. That said I’m slightly more interested in the rumoured TV continuation of the story now that I know how the movie ends.
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Enabling Twitter avatars within BuddyPress
ArticleFirst up, the first step in this process is to install the Twit Connect plugin which you can do by following these instructions, then you can proceed with enabling Twitter avatars.
First up, the first step in this process is to install the Twit Connect plugin which you can do by following these instructions, then you can proceed with enabling Twitter avatars.
This is just a quick filter that I wrote while I was setting up help.deanjrobinson.com last week after I discovered that the twitter avatars weren’t working because of a different function/filter being used by BuddyPress.
I make no claims that this additional function is perfect, but I haven’t come across any problems with it yet, and I only knocked it together quickly. If you find anything wrong with it, or have any suggestions as to how it could be improved/simplified please let me know.
This new function based on one of the original functions that comes with the Twit Connect plugin which enables twitter avatars on regular WordPress blogs, just a with a few tweaks.
What you need to do is add the following code to the functions.php in your current BuddyPress theme. You can download a plain text copy of this function here (it’ll probably more reliable than copy-and-pasting from this page). Remember to backup your functions.php file before making any changes… just in case.
UPDATE: Appears some people who added this function the functions.php file in the default BuddyPress theme were seeing some error messages (I have not yet been able to recreate this error, but more than one user has reported it). Ideally you shouldn’t be modifying the default BP theme directly, you should be doing it via a child theme (find out how), so this code should be then added to the functions.php in your child theme.
7th March, UPDATE I’ve updated the function below (and the downloadable version above) to use http://tweetimag.es for the static twitter avatar URLs, it looks like it might a more reliable/consistent service.
<?php
function bp_twc_get_avatar($avatar, $id_or_email='') {
global $comment, $twc_user_login_suffix;
if(is_object($comment)) {
$user_id = $comment->user_id;
}
if (is_object($id_or_email)) {
$user_id = $id_or_email->user_id;
}
if (is_array($id_or_email)) {
if ($id_or_email['object']=='user') {
$user_id = $id_or_email['item_id'];
}
}
if (get_usermeta($user_id, 'twcid')) {
$user_info = get_userdata($user_id);
$twav_suffix = '';
if ( $id_or_email['width'] ) {
$twav_size = $id_or_email['width'];
if( $twav_size < 32 ) {
$twav_suffix = 'm';
} else if ( $twav_suffix < 64 ) {
$twav_suffix = 'n';
} else {
$twav_suffix = 'b';
}
} else if ( 'full' == $id_or_email['type'] ) {
$twav_size = BP_AVATAR_FULL_WIDTH;
$twav_suffix = 'b';
} else if ( 'thumb' == $id_or_email['type'] ) {
$twav_size = BP_AVATAR_THUMB_WIDTH;
$twav_suffix = 'n';
}
$out = 'http://img.tweetimag.es/i/'. str_replace($twc_user_login_suffix,"",$user_info->user_login) . '_' .$twav_suffix;
$avatar = "<img alt='Twitter Avatar' src='{$out}' class='avatar avatar-{$twav_size}' height='{$twav_size}' width='{$twav_size}' />";
return $avatar;
} else {
return $avatar;
}
}
// Check if Twit Connect exists (since its without it this function is pointless)
if( function_exists( 'twit_connect' ) ) {
add_filter( 'bp_core_fetch_avatar', 'bp_twc_get_avatar',10,4);
}
?>
I will add an explanation of what its doing if people are interested/curious.
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Invictus (2009)
ReviewMorgan Freeman in one of the roles that he just *had* to play (we now just need to get him to play Kofi Annan). Don’t know how historically accurate the movie is, but its a great inspiring story none the less. I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure what it was going to be like with an American (Clint Eastwood) directing a movie about South African rugby, and some of the rugby scene weren’t totally convincing, but this wasn’t just a movie about rugby.
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G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)
ReviewMeh. Plenty of action, explosions, destruction, minimal acting talent, m.i.a. plot. A movie Michael Bay would be proud of. So many parts felt like they were just cheap rip-offs of other movies, which would be fine if this were a Wayans brother’s comedy spoof… wait, Marlon is in this movie so does that qualify them? Gets tiny kudos for one twist I didn’t see coming (yes just one, the rest was very predictable).
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Want Help? Come get some!
ArticleI’ve grown tired of doing support via blog comments or emails, so it’s time for a change. Introducing HELP! my new BuddyPress powered support site. You can now get support for all my WordPress plugins and themes, plus Hahlo, nextga.me (once its finished….) and other projects all in one spot.
I’ve grown tired of doing support via blog comments or emails, so it’s time for a change. Introducing HELP! my new BuddyPress powered support site. You can now get support for all my WordPress plugins and themes, plus Hahlo, nextga.me (once its finished….) and other projects all in one spot.
In the past I’ve had trouble finding a “good” solution for support. I’ve tried various forum packages, with each being abandoned because they were either insufficient or superfluous to my needs… that and every forum I’ve run has been hit by low-life spammers selling v1agr4 or offering to transfer $99,000,000,000 to me from their Nigerian bank account.
Following these ‘failures’ I tried hosted solutions like GetSatisfaction and UserVoice, again they didn’t really meet my needs, and I found that I was still left fielding support questions in blog comments and via email. In the case of support for Hahlo I stuck pretty strongly to GetSatisfaction (even if I didn’t check it as often as I probably should have). Recently GetSatisfaction have announced changes to their pricing plans, which ultimately means the free account (which I’ve been using) would appear that its losing a bunch of the more useful features. I should clarify that this change isn’t the only reason I’m moving away from GetSatisfaction, the main reason is that I wanted something I had more control over, and that I could also use for supporting my WordPress Plugins and Themes etc.
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Surrogates (2009)
ReviewI’m a big Bruce Willis fan, but I’d hoped for better. I’m not saying I hated it, but there was something that just wasn’t quite right about it. Maybe it was the bad haircut on Bruce’s ‘surrogate’, maybe it was the ‘convenience’ of some of the solutions to the problems they encountered, maybe it was the ending. I’m not sure. I didn’t mind the few twists that were thrown in but they didn’t entirely make up for the ‘gaps’. Almost seemed like a mash-up of “I, Robot”, “The Island” and “The Matrix”, but not necessarily of the good bits from them…
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Daybreakers (2009)
ReviewYeah, so. There was plenty of promise and potential, but little substance in-between the exploding vampires. It gets one star for vampires, another one for making them explode, one star for vampire Sam Neill (who’s maybe taking the whole “red meat we’re meant to eat it” thing a bit far…), one star for being made in Australia, and two more stars for being about vampires that drink blood and don’t make mix-tapes and go on dinner dates (or whatever the fuck the vampires in twilight do). That’s six stars, which is pretty good. But. You then lose a couple of stars for letting Australians make it (in Australia, with Australian actors putting on accents - except when they forgot they were meant to be putting on an accent…), and another for the lame ending, and another half-star because I want to and it kind of deserved it.
••••
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
ReviewI really enjoyed the ‘basterds’, and I found there was actually much more to the movie than I was expecting, and that was a nice surprise. I was just expecting a movie full of Brad Pitt collecting Nazi scalps (based on what I’d previously seen in trailers). It is a Tarantino movie so there was always going to be a good helping of blood and violence, it just wouldn’t be a Tarantino movie without these essential ingredients. Very enjoyable if a bit of gore, dark humour and Nazi-scalping is what you’re looking for.
