K-Squared Ramblings

Working on a Twitter Tools Filter for #fb Tags

Since the normal Twitter/Facebook link stopped working, I’ve switched to Selective Twitter Status. Instead of importing all your Twitter status updates to Facebook, it only pulls in the ones that end with the hashtag #fb. I’ve thrown together a plugin that hooks into Twitter Tools and filters out that tag when building a daily or weekly digest. (It was complicated by the fact that the README didn’t provide any real detail for the relevant API hook.) I tested the function outside of WordPress, then set it up to run on Thursday evening.

Good: It worked! Every instance of the #fb tag was removed, and everything else stayed.
Bad: Twitter Tools posted four copies of the digest.

Well, Twitter Tools does that sometimes. I’ll frequently see it post 2 or even 3 copies, and while I’ve determined it’s not related to WP Super-Cache, I haven’t gotten around to seriously debugging it. So I don’t know if it has anything to do with my plugin. Actually, it probably doesn’t, since it runs within the digest-building code.

For what it’s worth, Friday posted only two copies of the digest. I only found one item worth saving, though. (Well, two, but I expanded the other one into this post.)

I guess it still needs some testing. When I’m sure it’s working properly, I’ll post the code.

Tweet Cleanup in Progress

Following through on my thoughts on blogging with Twitter, I’ve started going through and cleaning up the imported Twitter digests made over the past 10 months. Some of the things I’m doing:

• Rewriting titles to be more meaningful than “Line Items for YYYY-MM-DD”
• Rewriting post slugs for the same reason. (WordPress will remember the old URL and redirect it, so it won’t break incoming links.)
• Adding tags and categories
• Reformatting single-item lists as very short posts.
• Reformatting links and expanding shortened URLs (which I’ve been doing for a while now).
• Pulling the “Powered by Twitter Tools” link from the shortest posts, generally those with only one or two items, so that it doesn’t end up dominating the related-posts data.
• Removing redundant items. No need to keep, for instance, a link to an article when it’s followed by a post with detailed commentary on the same article. Or a link to a phone photo that’s followed by a post embedding the same photo, or one of the same subject taken with a better camera.
• Removing really trivial items. Though I’m not always sure where to draw the line.
• Fixing, replacing, or just dropping dead links.
• Update: Uploading photos to show them inline instead of linked. Especially when the original link is dead.

I’ll be updating a few posts at a time for the next week or so, but it should be manageable once I’m caught up.

Meanwhile, I’ve separated my LiveJournal from my Twitter account. There’s no sense in maintaining two archives of ephemera, so I’ve decluttered my LJ: Any “Line Items” that didn’t have comments are gone, and the few that did now have proper titles, tags, userpics, etc.

Flash 500

Over at Speed Force: 500th post and a Flash drink #

Banner Update

Finally updated blog banner to something that was actually taken in the same state (old one was Hawaii) #

Please Check This Site on Your Phone!

A quick request, if I may: If you have a web-capable cell phone, would you please try to view this blog in it and let me know how it appears? I’m testing some plugins that should optimize the page for desktop, low-end mobile, and high-end mobile devices.

Please look at the main page and at least one post, then leave a comment below (still on the phone if you can) with the following:

• What phone are you using? (RAZR, iPhone, etc. Specific model if you know it)
• Can you load the site at all? (If not, what error do you get?)
• Does it look like..
  1. The desktop version of the site (photo banner across top, full sidebar, complete posts on front page)
  2. A bare-bones page (plain background, mostly text, headlines only on main page, “Powered by Wordpress. WordPress Mobile Edition” listed at the bottom of the page)
  3. A sleeker-looking list (grayish background, each post headline in a white rectangle, calendar image next to each headline, headlines on main page that expand to excerpts, dark banner across top, “Powered by WordPress with WPtouch” listed in footer)
• Are you using the built-in web browser, or something you installed (Opera Mini, for example)?
• Did anything not work?

If you can’t post a comment, please try one of the following:

• Bring up the site on your computer to leave the comment.
• Send me a Twitter direct message to @KelsonV.
• Email me at kelson - [at] - pobox - [dot] - com.

I’m mainly trying to make sure that the detection code is working right, since I’ve got 3 different plugins (WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Edition and WP Super Cache) working together to manage it.

Thanks in advance!

Running on WordPress 2.7 Final

I have now updated this blog (and Speed Force) to WordPress 2.7 Final — using the built-in updater. It takes a while, but it’s entirely automated once I tell it “Install” and enter my FTP info.

The built-in plugin installer is very convenient as well.

The Flash 10 upload bug is fixed!

As with Speed Force, I’ve dropped the plugin I was using for avatars in favor of the built-in feature. It still generates Wavatars for those of you who leave your email address but don’t have Gravatars, but it seems to generate them differently, so you get a new and different monster.

All my plugins work as far as I can tell (official plugin compatibility list), but there are a couple of glitches:

WP-Super-Cache doesn’t seem to be deleting expired pages on schedule. And the spot for the convenient clear-cache-now buttons for that and WP Widget Cache doesn’t exist anymore, so if I do need to clear them out I need to go to the plugin’s settings page — which is what I had to do until a month ago anyway, so no big deal.

Also, Twitter Tools doesn’t seem to be able to pre-check the “Notify Twitter about this post” checkbox. But the important stuff works.

I’m still getting used to the new admin layout, but the only thing that really bugs me is there doesn’t seem to be a quick way to get to scheduled posts from the dashboard.

Other than that, so far so good. As always, let me know if anything seems broken.

Jumped to WordPress 2.7

Figured I’d give WordPress 2.7 RC1 a shot. Probably should have waited for the final release, but I figure if they’re confident enough to roll it out on WordPress.com, I might as well try it. Plugin Compatibility seems decent.

As usual, let me know if you see any weirdness.

That Welcome Message (WordPress Greet Box Plugin)

I’ve been trying out something new here and at Speed Force over the last two weeks: a customized welcome message to readers who come in from certain web services, particularly social networks where I’m also set up. Twitter users see a link to my Twitter profile, for instance, and LiveJournal users see a link to the syndication feed for this blog. In theory, it should only show you the welcome box once (or once a week at the most), depending on whether you allow cookies.

I’d actually tried out a similar idea when I first launched Speed Force this summer, but the implementation I used did all the processing on the server, so it wasn’t compatible with caching. (It also only detected two built-in sites and one custom site, and I didn’t feel like hacking it up to add more.)

So when Weblog Tools Collection mentioned a new plugin called Referrer Detector, I figured I’d give it a whirl. It didn’t quite work right with my setup at the time. I fixed the bugs I could, and reported the issues to the author, then tried out a similar plugin — which, as it turned out, had inspired him to write his own — called WP Greet Box. It also had a few hiccups, and again I reported the issues I’d encountered. Both plugins went into a period of heavy development over the next few days.

I’ve settled on WP Greet Box, which seems to be more flexible than Referrer Detector (though the latter seems to be getting more attention). The author has also been very responsive to both problems and suggestions.

Twittering

I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of weeks as an additional update channel and sort of an adjunct to my blog, Speed Force (you can follow it at SpeedForceOrg), and I’ve actually realized that yes, there is a point to it. It’s good for the random thought that only takes a sentence or two, but seems like it doesn’t quite warrant a full blog post.

So I’ve added a second account for general stuff, (i.e. not just comics & Flash) as an experiment, at KelsonV, and I’m tying it to this blog using Alex King’s Twitter Tools. Let’s see how this works out…

Update: Okay, so I’ve got K2R announcing posts to Twitter. I’ve got Twitter feeding to Facebook using the Twitter app on Facebook. And I’m building daily digests on K2R using Twitter Tools (which is supposed to handle loops) and to LiveJournal using LoudTwitter (thanks, andrea_wot).

I looked at ping.fm per rialtus’s suggestion, but from what little I can see without signing up, it only does instant updates, and it looks like it’s push only — i.e., I’d post to ping.fm and it would go out to Twitter, LJ, Myspace, Facebook, etc., but I’d still need something else to pull blog headlines.

So, if I’ve got all this set up right:

Twitter → Facebook
Twitter → LJ Daily Digest
Twitter → K2R Daily Digest (except for stuff that came from K2R)
K2R Headlines → Twitter
K2R Headlines → Twitter → Facebook
K2R Headlines → Twitter → LJ Daily Digest

Six Years

I was just commenting on The Comic Treadmill’s 5-year anniversary, and I realized: K-Squared Ramblings turned six last month. (September 14, to be exact.) I’ve been so busy with Speed Force that I haven’t posted much here, and didn’t even notice the milestone.

Let’s run the numbers:

• 6 years and not-quite 1 month
• 1708 posts including this one
• 2,863 comments including pingbacks and replies
• 52 categories
• 9 convention reports (6 San Diego Comic Cons, 2 Wizard World LA, 1 WonderCon)

Top-viewed posts for the year:

• Comic Con! (2003) – thanks to Google Image search and the Joker and Harley Quinn pictures.
• Songs Not to Play at a Wedding – thanks people looking for recommended wedding songs and the occasional StumbleUpon round.
• Creative Computer Names – for some reason people like to search for the phrase “computer names” a lot.
• Philosophy of Time Travel – It seems like everyone who sees Donnie Darko decides to look up the book title, and they all seem to land here.
• Victimized Hero – mostly people looking for the Flash/Wonder Woman bondage cover (or just “wonder woman tied up”). Never underestimate the power of Rule 36.

WP 2.6

I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.6. I probably should have held off a bit, but there were some things I really wanted to be able to use, like the new Gears support, version history on posts, Opera-related fixes (too bad Gears doesn’t work with Opera yet), and improved image management. And the theme and plugin APIs are supposed to be “pretty much identical,” so there wouldn’t be much risk of breaking anything.

Call it an impulse.

Fun facts from the Dashboard: This is the 1,649th post on K-Squared Ramblings. Hard to believe. Also: there are currently 2,744 comments. Admittedly that includes local pingbacks, but still, that’s a heck of a lot of comments!

Judging by the comment IDs, roughly 40,000 spam comments have been deleted since this blog went online. Fortunately, most of those are handled automatically by Spam Karma. And just think, that’s not counting however many Bad Behavior blocks before they even get processed!

Busy

Sorry things have been sparse around here lately. I’ve been focusing on Speed Force, trying to make sure it gets solidly established.

I’ve got a backlog of photoposts to make, plus a bunch of drafts that I should probably dust off and finish. So there should be some new stuff coming soon.

Announcing SpeedForce.org!

I’ve just launched SpeedForce.org, a companion blog to the website, Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning.

Since I started adding news items to the front page of Ride the Lightning, it’s started to get a bit crowded. I thought about converting it to a del.icio.us feed, but then I realized it really ought to be a blog. There hasn’t been a major Flash-focused blog out there since Crimson Lightning shut down, so I figured I’d step in and fill the gap. And I could use the domain I picked up last year!

I’ll be posting Flash-related news there, including a weekly round-up of Flash comics, as well as articles that might not fit into the existing site structure, and (eventually) reviews as well. Some stuff that I would have posted here will end up on the new site. Certainly Flash news, but I may start shifting more comics-related commentary over there as well.

I’ll be refining the look and features over the next couple of weeks, and cross-linking it more into Ride the Lightning. I might keep the current theme with a few tweaks, or I might try to match Ride the Lightning, or I might build something else entirely.

So please, check it out and let me know what you think! I’m open to suggestions as to content, design, etc. And of course bug reports.

Avatars!

Since Gravatar was bought by Automattic, the service has been a lot more stable. I had already re-enabled them on this blog before WordPress 2.5 came out with built-in Gravatar* support.

Not everyone has a Gravatar, though, so many comment threads just show the default icon, over and over. Not only does this look boring, but it misses out on the whole point of using an avatar: providing an easy at-a-glance visual distinction between each author.

When I first used Gravatars on this site, I set it up to use a giant first initial as a fallback. Now, I’ve been trying out two plugins that will automatically generate avatars for people who don’t have their own:

• Wavatars builds up cartoony faces using geometric shapes. Interestingly, it’s by Shamus Young, author of the screencap-based webcomic DM of the Rings and writer of Chainmail Bikini.
• WP_Identicon sounds like a Transformers faction, but produces a geometric pattern as inspired by Don Park’s Identicon, which built a similar image based on a visitor’s IP address. The same author also has one that generates cartoon monsters, which appears to be one of the earliest implementations of this concept.

These plugins will use a Gravatar if available, or else generate an image based on the commenter’s email address (if supplied). That means each comment by the same person should use the same image. Other blogs using the same plugins at default settings will come up with the same avatar for each commenter, as well. The images are stored in a cache, so each only has to be generated once.

Once I made sure both plugins worked, I showed the results to Katie. We ended up settling on Wavatars, since faces are easier to recognize than patterns. (Though the patterns are really cool!)

You can try out the automatic avatar by leaving a (relevant, please!) comment on any post. Or you can run over to Gravatar and set up an icon of your choice!

*What’s a Gravatar? The intent is to be a Globally Recognized Avatar. You upload an image to Gravatar and associate it with your email address. Then any site with Gravatar support will be able to display your image next to your posts. Right now it’s mostly used in blog comments, but it could easily be worked into forums, wikis, etc. The Gravatar Blog mentions other uses they’ve seen people apply it to, such as plugins for Thunderbird and the Mac OS X Address Book

Note: I did notice one important drawback to the WP_Identicon plugin: it’s very inefficient at generating the images. When I first visited posts with long comment threads, like Another One Bites the Dust (174 comments) and Songs Not to Play at a Wedding (87 comments), WP_Identicon took over a minute to generate all the icons and maxed out the server’s CPU. Sure, the images are cached, so it’s only really an issue when you first install the plugin (unless you get a lot more people commenting at once than we do here), but to compare, Wavatar on an empty cache finished the same posts in just 4 seconds and 2 seconds, respectively.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.5

I’ve upgraded to the just-released WordPress 2.5. The new admin interface is very nice, especially the ability to upload more than one image at a time (though I think they might want to test uploading a single picture a bit more [edit: Maybe it's specific to Firefox 3 beta 4---on uploading one image, it shows the control panel three times instead of just once.] [edit2: Maybe it's on the Firefox beta, but the Linux version of Flash Player. It works just fine on the same version of Firefox on the Mac.] [edit3: It's definitely the Linux Flash Player; I tried it with Opera on Linux and had the same problem.]).

I’ve adapted my theme to use new built-in support for Gravatar and optimal titles instead of the plugins I was using before.

All the stuff you’ll see appears to be working just fine so far. A couple of minor glitches with some admin plugins (WP-Amazon takes two clicks to show or hide instead of just one), but no biggie.

There was one issue during the upgrade. I’ve been using XCache for WordPress to improve site performance. I was asked for the XCache admin login & password during the database upgrade. I couldn’t remember them, so I renamed object-cache.php and hit “cancel” on the password prompt, but it seems to have upgraded everything fine.

The one really annoying thing is that the Bad Behavior anti-spam plugin conflicts with the new media uploader (it’s already on the WordPress 2.5 Plugin Compatibility list). There are two issues. First, “Shockwave Flash” is apparently used by spambots, so it was listed in blacklist.php (code 17f4e8c8). Second, it seems Flash is mixing and matching HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1. If I remove it from the blacklist, it trips condition a0105122, which indicates an Expect header appearing in an HTTP 1.0 request. Removing that test allows it to upload, but the test catches a lot of spam…

Edit: I tried out the visual editor again, as it was billed as “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” Sadly, it does mess with your code. It disappeared an image in one post, and it still replaces semantically-neutral <i> tags with <em> tags, even when you’ve entered them manually. <em> is for emphasis. When you italicize a book title, you are not emphasizing it. By replacing one tag with the other, it adds inaccurate semantic meaning. This is just as incorrect as using <h5> to get small text instead of using it for a level-5 heading.