The reason it’s called Selective Tweets is that it lets you choose which items to transfer, instead of just blindly dumping everything from Twitter to Facebook. You do this by adding the #fb hashtag to the end of each tweet that you want to also appear on Facebook.

On the downside: after the message is copied, that extra hashtag is just clutter. You can’t do anything about removing it from Twitter itself, but you can filter it out of your digests on your WordPress blog!

All you have to do is install and activate this plugin (after installing and activating Twitter Tools), and it will use the Twitter Tools API to filter out the #fb hashtag instead of linking it.

Download it: ktv-twitter-tools-skipfb-1.0.zip

• Requires Alex King’s Twitter Tools.
• Requires PHP 5.
• No configuration needed.

I had intended to also filter it out of the sidebar, but the Twitter Tools API doesn’t seem to provide a way to do that.

If I ever do future versions, I’ll track them here: Twitter Tools Skip FB Plugin.

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.

Update: Check out Version 1.0.

I also ran the main page through the mobile-readiness evaluator at ready.mobi, and noticed that most of the issues it cited with the mobile edition of the site were really simple changes. Some were basics like fixing unbalanced HTML, and others were recommended practices like including a DOCTYPE and making sure that headings were nested properly. So I whipped together a patch for WordPress Mobile Edition 2.1a. (It’s labeled as 2.1.1 in the readme, but it shows up as 2.1a in the list of plugins.)

Changes:

• Add XHTML Mobile 1.2 Doctype.
• Fix unbalanced <small> tag.
• Fix mising <ul> tags around list of recent posts.
• Avoid empty class attribute on comments.
• Add type attribute to style element.
• Change non-standard value attribute on <meta> tag to content attribute.
• Reassign headings so that h1, h2, h3 appear in order.

Download:

wp-mobile-validation.patch

The patch should be applied to the wp-mobile folder that you place in your themes folder.

Update: This has been completely superseded by more recent versions of the plug-in, which use Carrington Mobile instead.

No configuration needed – just install it and activate it.

Yeah, I could have just pasted the code into my theme template, but I like to keep functional changes separate in case I ever decide to switch to another theme.

At present it will only show on individual posts. It won’t show on pages, or the front of the site, or any sort of archive page.

You can see it in action on Speed Force.

Download:
ktv_comicbook_powerup-0.1.zip

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.

Update (Feb 14): I’m now back to using Spam Karma 2, but with a plugin that uses Akismet as one of the score components. This seems to be working well, as SK is able to block the ridiculous stuff (100 porn links in one comment, etc.), and Akismet is able to catch the trackback spam that’s been passing SK2 by temporarily including an inbound link.

The big problem I had with Akismet was that aside from the age of the target post, the blocked comments weren’t sorted or filtered in the admin interface. I was having to look through ~30 comments a day for false positives. Spam Karma will show only the borderline comments by default, and uses a table structure that makes it easier to skim.

This way, though, I get the proverbial best of both worlds.

Update: Actually, today’s posts seem OK. The plugin seems to just send the blog ID and post ID. I’ve been trying to figure out how the central server is retrieving the permalink and title. It doesn’t look like Bad Behavior is blocking it. And it doesn’t seem to be using the RSS feed, since posts that are still on the front page (and presumably still in the feed) are also showing up as numbers. *grumble*

Update 2: I just noticed that all of the number-only posts show the same placeholder graph showing “Region A” vs. “Region B” for 2003-2005.

Update 3: It’s a problem with WordPress’ XMLRPC interface, and affects other uses (like connecting with Flock). I’ve got a workaround, though (see comments).

Update 4 (May 10): Thanks to the pingback below from dot unplanned, it’s confirmed to be a bug in PHP 5.2.2. With any luck, the workaround will cease to be necessary when the next PHP bugfix is released.

Just replace this:

function add_tags_textinput() {
	global $postdata;
	$tags = get_post_meta($postdata->ID, 'tags', true);

with this:

function add_tags_textinput() {
	global $post_ID;
	$tags = get_post_meta($post_ID, 'tags', true);

The problem is that it will show existing tags, or let you add a new tag, but it will lose tags when you edit a post. It’s not able to retrieve the tags to fill in the form field, apparently because $postdata isn’t returning the ID it expects.

I’ve submitted the fix to wp-plugins.org, so if the author is keeping track of tickets there, the fix should show up in the next version of the plugin.

Update Jan. 3: The plugin author has released version 0.5 with a slightly different fix (plus a few other improvements), and it’s now compatible with WordPress 2.0.

Either way, the new comment notice went out, and the recipient sent me a spam complaint. I apologized and removed him from the update list, but it moves “accidental spam” from a theoretical risk to an observed problem. I’ve disabled the subscription plugin until I have a chance to figure this out.

The good news is that Subscribe to Comments 2.0 is out now, so I should be able to upgrade when I get a chance. The bad news is that it doesn’t seem to have added a confirmation step, meaning it’s still (effectively) opt-out. Sure, you have to opt-in to get it in the first place…but the fact is that anyone can opt you in just by giving your email address instead of their own.

On Tuesday I added IO Error’s Bad Behavior. This plugin looks at actual HTTP requests, identifies known spambots and looks for signs of cloaked bots—those that claim to be a browser like MSIE or Mozilla, but don’t act like it—and prevents them from even getting in the door. The advantage here is that you can save processing time and bandwidth on all kinds of bogus requests, not just comment spam, but address harvesting bots, referrer spam, and so on.

Maybe it’s coincidence, but Spam Karma hasn’t seen a single spam attempt since I installed Bad Behavior.

Of course, blocking bots won’t catch the occasional person who posts comment spam the old-fashioned way: by surfing to the page and filling in the form. And eventually bots will do a better job of imitating real visitors, just as phishing attacks have moved from crude, badly-spelled notes to sophisticated forgeries with real logos and disguised links. Spam Karma will still be needed for those.

But the combination looks very promising!

<?php code goes here ?>

On some servers—maybe even your own—you can shorten this to just the opening <?. The following line in php.ini will disable this “feature,” and many web server administrators do so to simplify things like generating XML with PHP:

short_open_tag = Off

When this option is set, PHP will ignore <? and assume it’s simply part of the template… along with all the code following it. If you’re lucky, it means a bunch of PHP code gets sent to the web browser. If you’re not lucky, it results in invalid syntax, and PHP grinds to a halt, spitting out a blank page and a PHP Parse Error.

So please make sure you always use the full opening tag so that your plugin will be compatible with everyone’s system. If you run your own server, set that option in php.ini so that if you miss one, you can catch it before you post it.

• WayPath for WordPress: List related posts on other blogs. Nice, but cluttered and slows things down. If we keep this, we’ll need to get caching to work. Active, seeking comments.
• Spell Check: Only for posts so far. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to actually work. Disabled.
• Link Relationships: Adds next/previous post elements for search engines and browsers that support them. Painless to install, simple and elegant. Active.
• Staticize Reloaded: Cache each page so that the server doesn’t have to regenerate it every single time. Very nice, but unfortunately isn’t compatible with HTTP compression right now. Disabled.
• Live Preview: Add an instant preview to comments. A bit of tweaking to install, though I managed to modify it to play nicer with WP’s plugin API, but very cool! Active.
• Random Posts: Add a list of random posts to the sidebar. Simple and possibly interesting. Active.
• SameCat: List posts in the same category as the current one. Combined with the Related Entries plugin, this provides a good set of links to similar posts. Active.

Other ideas I’m looking at (some of which I’ve seen plugins for):

• Comment threading (Katie suggested this, but the last time I looked for plugins the only one I found required serious database changes)
• Email notifications
• Polls
• Category and author icons
• True-a-Day sidebar

So, any opinions on the new features? Any suggestions for others? In particular, any thoughts on the WayPath feature? I’m not sure whether it’s worth keeping around or not.