At least until I finish setting my ‘proper’ donation page I thought I should at least put this up somewhere since the code has been sitting on my desktop for a couple of weeks.
So if you like Redoable, Twitt-Twoo or any of my other stuff, and your feeling generous, then why not donate a little towards the future developement of my themes and plugins.
I tried to add the code to this post, but it doesn’t seem to work, so I’ve manually added it to the sidebar for the time being.
Twitt-Twoo v1.1 has now been released, it is recommened that you download the latest version which you can find here: Twitt-Twoo v1.1 Released
As I’ve talked about in the past couple of weeks, I have been working on my latest Wordpress plugin. Twitt-Twoo is essentially a very simple little plugin to allow you to do a very simple thing, update your Twitter status directly from your blog’s sidebar.
There was already at least one plugin available which added similar functionality to the Wordpress admin. While this was good I wanted to be able to change my status without having to go into the admin area first. Plus I wanted to add a couple of other things. There was also a plugin available that would place a widget with your current status in you sidebar. It displays your status and when it was last updated. Again I liked this, but I wanted more.
Twitt-Twoo brings together both these functions into one easy to use plugin. AJAX is used to update your status so that no page load is required. Just click the ‘edit’ link, enter your new status and click ‘update’. Easy as that. And don’t worry about that little edit button, because it will only be available when you are logged in, just like a normal post edit link. Users of Facebook will be very familiar with this style of status updating. I guess Facebook’s status was the true inspiration for this plugin.
You even get three ways to add Twitt-Twoo to your blog. If you are using Wordpress Widgets, once you activate the plugin you will have new Twitt-Twoo widget available to you. If you are using K2, or a K2-derivative such as my own Redoable, then there is a sidebar module available. Or if you prefer to manually change the code of your sidebar, then you can do that too.
So what does it do? Twitt-Twoo is pretty simple.
For more details, and installation tips visit the Twitt-Twoo homepage.
Twitt-Twoo v1.1 has now been released, it is recommened that you download the latest version which you can find here: Twitt-Twoo v1.1 Released
Downoad Twitt-Twoo 1.0 Now!
Downloaded 447 times
Ok, so it wasn’t exactly a week of testing, but I tested it yesterday afternoon and last night, and figured that it couldn’t be any worse than what I currently had. So I’ve just finished changing all the download links over to the use the different ‘tags’ that Wordpress Download Manager uses to display its links.
I have made a few small changes to the plugin as wll, mainly where it stores the files on my server, and some of the text it displays with the downoad links, nothing major just a few tweaks to suit my needs.
It also gave me a chance to fix up the download counts that have been messed up by the not-so-reliable nature of the last plugin, and the numbers were somewhat surprising.
As of now the main download counts are:
The numbers for Redoable 1.1 alone work out at roughly 150 downloads everyday since it was released. Not bad at all.
Please let me know if you come across any issue with this new download plugin.
If you run a site like mine, where you provied files for download and you want to be able to accurately track the number of times a particular file is downloaded, then you will probably use some sort of download manager plugin. Note the keyword there is “accurately”…
Since around the middle of January I’ve been using the iMP Download plugin (I would provide a link but the site seems to be broken at the moment), and while it is compact and has all the features I want, its not particularly reliable as many of my visitors have experienced.
For starters there is something very wrong with the way it is counting downloads. I have almost reach 6000 downloads of Redoable 1.1, but if you look at the iMP download count it says 2,300-odd. This can be partially explained by the addtional download links I’ve provided and the various sites that are directly linking to the download. But even when the iMP Download links were the only ones around the count was still way off.
Another problem was that if a user clicked the iMP download link, and for some reason cancelled the download, or the download didn’t work, the next time they clicked on a download link it would just redirect them to the homepage. Very annoying, I tested this out myself as well.
To counteract the problem I put additional direct links to the download files, and thats been ok while I’ve been searching for another download manager. After a bit of searching this afternoon I came across the Wordpress Download Monitor Plugin, it seems like a good alternative and I’ll bee testing it out over the coming week or so. If all goes well I will be removing support for iMP Download from Redoable and recommending this new plugin.
If you use a plugin other than these two that I have mentioned, and want to share your thoughts about what you like and dislike about download manager plugins and which one you think is best.
So I’ve spent all weekend working away on my latest offering to the Wordpress community. Twitt-Twoo is a plugin that will allow you to update your Twitter status right from your sidebar, it also provides a link to your Twitter ‘home page’, a link to the RSS feed of your Twitters.
You can add it to your sidebar manually, or using the sidebar widget, and if you’re a Redoable user there will also be a sidebar module. It also comes with a shiny little icon.
Twitt-Twoo will be available once final testing is complete.
A couple of weeks ago I signed up for a twitter account, and since then I have been trying to work out the best way that I could utilise it with my blog, and more specifically with Redoable.
Having just read Alex King’s plans for his own twitter plugin, there doesn’t seem to be much that his plugin won’t be able to do once it is released. There are also a few other plugins out there that interact with twitter in various ways.
Twitter Updater will update your twitter to reflect any changes you make to your blog when you make them. Twitter Update Status lets you update twitter from within your Wordpress admin area. And there are couple of different plugin that let you display your current twitter comment.
But as yet I haven’t found one to do what I want in a twitter plugin. So today I started work on combining features from a couple of exisiting plugins, and adding a bit of ajax to allow updating directly from your sidebar wehn you are logged into your blog.
This is something that Alex King has said he might include with his plugin, but instead of waiting I’m going to have a crack at it myself. I don’t need all the archiving, auto updating stuff, I just was to display my twitter and update it easily.
For those who have used Facebook, they should be able to understand the concept behind my thinking. In Facebook you can set your current ‘status’, sort of like your status in Jabber or MSN, and you can do it just by clicking a little edit button, typing your status and hitting enter. Done, easy as that. And thats what I want to bring to Wordpress with ‘Twitt-twoo’, my twitter plugin.
Having a website crash is annoying, having it be down for a week is very, very annoying.
I have spent the last week trying to work out what had killed my blog (for the second time in a month). Initially I thought it was connected to the file server issues that Dreamhost was having, and their first support response suggested the same. But when they eventually got their issue solved my blog didn’t come back to life.
Its was strange because all my other Dreamhost hosted sites were working, and even my support forum was working and its under the same domain as this blog. The next suggestion was that it could have been the WP 2.1.1 exploit…but I hadn’t install 2.1.1. Anyway I upgraded to 2.1.2 in the hope that it would fix the problem…no.
Next step, and the one that I wanted to avoid, was to backup everything and do a fresh install of Wordpress. While in the process of backing everything up, I noticed that the wp-content/cache folder was rather large (about 59 mb)…which didn’t seem right considering my whole site is only about 10MB.
So….I delete the 800-odd cache files, and guess what. Now my blog works again. Shit hey? I have left wp-cache disabled for the time being, at least until I’m sure that I have the absolutely latest version. It would appear that the Dreamhost file server issue was not the problem afterall. Although the timing has to be more than just coincidence, perhaps the file server problem corrupted something in the wp-cache folder, thus brining the blog down.
Either way I’m back (again), lets hope this ends the bad run of problems experienced in the past month.
