Posts Tagged ‘Wordpress’

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On microblogging (FriendFeed, identi.ca)

Posted on 9/8/2008, 2:50 am, by Colin Charles, under General.

FriendFeed seems to be getting all the attention these days. There is now even a WordPress plugin, FriendFeed Comments that will help integrate your FriendFeed comments and more, with every post you make. This can be useful, as there are many times that people discuss a blog posting on Twitter.

Discuss is a broad word. Can you really say much in 140 characters? FriendFeed doesn’t have that limitation. And I’ve recently found out that I can make use of it in twhirl.

So I’m cleaning up my FriendFeed to ensure there is no unnecessary duplication. This means dropping Jaiku and Tumblr from the list of sites I share… However, I’m adding some “value”, by adding my Google Reader Shared Items Page (which I’m using more and more these days). So if FriendFeed proves useful, I might just use that wonderful WordPress plugin (nothing similar for Twitter from what I gather).

From what I understand, at least FriendFeed doesn’t go down often ;)

FWIW, it also seems that identi.ca works with twhirl so I’m on that now too (as in beyond just parking my account there). I’m byte there. And byte on FriendFeed. See you on these new services too…

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Malaysia Airlines embraces the blogosphere

Posted on 15/7/2008, 10:36 pm, by Colin Charles, under General.

Anyone that knows me, knows that I am not a big fan of Malaysia Airlines. However, I have to hand it to them, with their new blog, titled Living Malaysian Hospitality (eating, breathing, sleeping MH; MH, their airline code, is now being themed as Malaysian Hospitality, something I think is utter bollocks from their service quality, or lack thereof).

Powered by WordPress 2.5.1, the blog is well-themed, and has been going on since April 2008. For a government-linked company (GLC), I am impressed that they’re embracing modern web technologies, and starting to speak to their customers. They’re giving the company a visible face, and going by the buttons, are not afraid to support Digg, del.icio.us, myspace, and Facebook. They are even hosting videos on YouTube!

They’re brave enough, to print customer letters (from our guests). So far, its all rosy, and they naturally reserve the right to publish only articles that put them in a good light, but Idris Jala has stated: “We want to hear from the customers, whether good or bad.”

This in my opinion can open up the floodgates of complaints, which can then help improve services eventually. There are 30 bloggers at present, and while the blog will not be published in real-time (it takes 24 hours for “approval” – pretty good for a corporate blog), I’m wondering why “Both comments and pings are currently closed.”

Congratulations on opening up MAS, and I sincerely hope that comments will be opened up soon as well. Remember, the whole idea of a blog is not a one-way conversation, which in itself isn’t a conversation. Note that your great competitor, AirAsia’s Tony Fernandes, already writes comments on random blogs…

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mod_auth_mysql patched to work with phpass

Posted on 1/6/2008, 1:48 am, by Colin Charles, under MySQL.

Do you use mod_auth_mysql, the Apache module that allows authentication of users to happen through a MySQL database?

If so, the nice folk at Automattic (makers of fine blogging software like WordPress) have released a patched version that works with phpass.

With this, you can now have single sign on (SSO), with authentication against a WordPress blog (or bbPress forum). Note that WordPress (in 2.5 and later), doesn’t use MD5 hashes to store passwords any longer; instead they are salted and hashed with the phpass library. The Automattic folk use this to provide SSO for Trac and Subversion.

Read Barry’s announcement, and grab the patched mod_auth_mysql.

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wordpress 2.3 – wordpress.wp_post2cat error is Sitemap plugins fault

Posted on 2/10/2007, 1:27 am, by Colin Charles, under General.

I updated WordPress yesterday, so am currently trying out 2.3, Dexter. No major dramas, all, really thanks to the Automatic Upgrade plugin, which I’ve been using recently (second WordPress version it’s upgraded).

One annoying bug, was seeing: WordPress database error: [Table 'wordpress.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]. If only I’d read the release notes before hand, I’d have realised the Google Sitemap plugin was to blame (there’s also a relevant forum post). Disabled that (for now) and all is well. There’s some slick in-built tagging, so I’m using the web interface to write this (something I haven’t done in a very long time).

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