Clazh » Wordpress

Post Wordpress To Twitter Automatically, With Short URLs, No Plugin Required

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:09:45 +0000

Updated: Found a Fix for the missing post id at the end of the url using $postLink = urlencode ( $postLink ) ;

Updated: Got rid of the Custom Metadata, used the modified date and the created date of the post to check if its a new post or an old one. Now you don’t have to worry about updating your old posts.

Updated: To Make the title text more Twitter friendly.

I been trying to cut down on the number of Plugins used. Firstly to make maintained easier, secondly to simplify and reduce to the bare minimum without using Plugins, thirdly to hone up my WordPress skills. The latest plugin I got rid of was the WP to Twitter Plugin. Initially I started off trying to modify how I wanted it to work. Basically I wanted to cut off Bit.ly as a URL shortner and use my own blog as a URL shortner to send people directly to my site and keep the traffic on my site without the need for a middle man. I figured this out after I saw how Amit Aggarwal was tweeting his links to his site.

Short URLs in WordPress without Bit.ly or URL Shortners

We all know that WordPress generates long Permalinks for your site, it automatically converts your titles into those long URLs called permalinks that you see. Example http://www.clazh.com/this_is_some_random_post, If you switch off Permalinks in WordPress you’ll see that links to your posts will be of the form http://www.clazh.com/?p=401 if you look at it you’ll notice the last bit has a number attached to it, each post has a unique ID associated to it. The trick is to make use of this ID to and create a URL for our posts, so when people click on this shortned link they’ll be automatically taken to the Permalink associated with that post its as simple as that.

A Simple WordPress To Twitter Function.

First we’ll write a really simple function that uses CURL to post to the Twitter API. Just copy paste it into your functions.php file in your WordPress theme directory. In case you don’t see the file in yours themes folder just create one and paste the code inside it. To check if CURL is enabled on your server you can paste this function into a blank PHP file and call the function like this twitterUpdate("some random post", "http://clazh.com", true); with some random inputs. Make sure you uncomment the last few lines where it says to uncomment to test for CURL support.

Note: In the rare case your host does not support CURL you can always make use of fsockopen for PHP 4 or the much easier stream_context_creat for PHP5

function twitterUpdate($postTitle, $postLink, $isNew)
{
	// Enter Your Twitter ID Here
	$username = 'Twitter_ID';
	// Enter Your Twitter Password Here
	$password = 'Password';

        # text into a twitter friendly text
	$code_entities_match = array('--','"','!','@','#','$','%','^','&','*','(',')','_','+','{','}','|',':','"','<','>','?','[',']','\\',';',"'",',','.','/','*','+','~','`','=');
	$code_entities_replace = array('-','','','','','','','','','','','','','','','','','','','','','','','','');
	$postTitle = str_replace($code_entities_match, $code_entities_replace, $postTitle);

	// Check if New or Updated Post
	if($isNew)
		$postTitle = 'New Post: ' . $postTitle;
	else
		$postTitle = 'Updated Post: ' . $postTitle;

	// Calculate Twitter Msg and keep it under 140 Chars
        if(strlen ($postTitle) > (140 - strlen ($postLink)))
		$postTitle 		= substr_replace($postTitle, '...', (140 - 3 - strlen ($postLink)));

	$message = $postTitle . $postLink;

	// The twitter API address
	$url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml';
	$curl_handle = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$message");
	curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
	$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
	curl_close($curl_handle);

	// Uncomment the lines below to check if
	// CURL is enabled on your Web Server
	// check for success or failure
	/*
	if (empty($buffer))
		echo 'message';
	else
		echo 'success';
	*/
}

WordPress Function that Triggers Post To Twitter

Next we’ll write a simple wordpress function that triggers whenever you update or publish a post, we will also added a custom metadata to the post check if its a new or old post. Copy paste this code below the twitterUpdate function in your functions.php themes file.

function postToTwitter($post_ID)
{
	// Create your Short URL replace with your blog url
	$postLink = ' http://clazh.com/?p=' . $post_ID;
	// encode the URL to fix Post to Twitter issues
        $postLink = urlencode  ( $postLink ) ;
	// Get the Post Object
	$get_post_info 	= get_post( $post_ID );
	// Get the Post Title
	$postTitle = $get_post_info->post_title;
        // Get the Post date
	$postDate 		= date('U', strtotime($get_post_info->post_date));
	// Get the post Modified date
	$postModified 	= date('U', strtotime($get_post_info->post_modified));

	// Check if the post is new or modified
	if($postModified == $postDate)
	{
		twitterUpdate($postTitle, $postLink, true);
	}
	/*  If You want to fire everytime You update
	      a post remove these comments around the else.
	else
	{
		twitterUpdate($postTitle, $postLink, false);
	}
	*/
}

// Post to twitter when you publish or update a post
add_action('publish_post', 'postToTwitter');

So thats about it, just paste these two blocks of code into your functions.php and change the required parameter, you can play around with the code and modify it to change the message being posted to twitter.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | 15 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Featured, Tutorial, Web-Design, Wordpress Tags:

Notable Free Premium WordPress Themes

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:59:03 +0000

Time for showcasing a few notable Free Premium Quality WordPress Themes that caught my eye. With a little a bit of creativity and extra work you could modify these themes to get yourself a free high quality theme.

LeoPress Leopard Inspired WordPress Theme

LeoPress is a free three column WordPress. The design is inspired by Mac OSX Leopard.

Download Link: Here

Preview: Here

Lemon Twist

A green coloured two column WordPress theme from farfromfearless. Theme was developed for the authors own site and later release to the public to download. The panels in the side block are collapsible, it also has a large footer in the front page to showcase your flickr images and latest posts.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Probama WordPress Theme

A politically inspired theme supporting Barack Obama. The home page is a two column WordPress theme with a large footer, for single posts and pages the layout switches to a single column layout. The menu supports sub pages and are shown as drop down lists.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Neoclassical Three Column WordPress Theme

This a clean Three column WordPress theme with great typography.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Massive Mobile

If you want to display your site or blog in a more user friendly way on the iPhone or PSP you can make use of this free theme.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Free, Templates, Themes, Web-Design

CoolWater Two Column Free WordPress Theme

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:32:03 +0000

This is another beautiful free CSS XHTML web template by Styleshout that I really liked and decided to convert into a WordPress Template. The WordPress theme design is called CoolWater. As the name suggests this theme is really clean and has a bright punchy look and feel. The Theme is a two column theme and has support for widgets and is supported for wordpress 2.3 and above. The template is released under a Creative Commons license, Please leave the original designers link intact.

Demo: Click Here to look at the demo.

Please link to this page do not link to the download link directly.

[download#6#image]

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Free, Templates, Themes, Web-Design

FreshMedia Free Two Column WordPress Theme.

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:04:03 +0000

Its been a while since I wrote about WordPress Themes. I saw a beautiful CSS and XTHML Template provided by styleshout.com for free. So I decided to convert it into a WordPress theme and release it. Let me know if you find any bugs. The theme is released under the a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. Please leave the original Web Designer link intact as he has requested on his site. The Theme is a two column template with a large footer and has support for widgets both in the sidebar and the footer.

You can view the demo here.

[download#5#image]

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 16 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Download, Free, Templates, Themes

Reduce Comment Spam To Zero Without Akismet

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:32:17 +0000

My blog used to get around 100-300 spam comments/trackbacks a day while Akismet was doing a great job, but as time went by it became very tedious to go through the comment/trackback spam to make sure no legitimate comments were caught. Using a combination of three WordPress plugins and without the help of Akismet I have managed to reduce the comment spam to almost zero. I am also listing a few other plugins.

Plugins for Comment Spam.

Simple Spam Filter for WordPress.

Get Simple Spam Filter from here. Most of the spam caught by Akismet is pretty obvious spam i.e.

Contains 5 or more links to external sites
Contains nothing but links
Contains [url=http://www.example.com]example[/url] style links (my blog does not support bbcode style links)
Contains a word that matches a short list of common spam words (for example, viagra or cialis). See the pluginâ€™s source for the full list.

Simple Spam Filter helps you combat this kind of obvious spam. Its has a setting page where you can tweak it to suit your likings.

WordPress Comment Spam Stopper.

This a very simple Plugin that asks a very simple question that bots are too stupid to answer. I have found it even more effective if you change the default question. Get this plugin from here.

Comment-Policy WordPress Plugin

This is a alternative to Comment Spam Stopper. Instead of asking the users to enter an answer, you ask the user to agree to your comment policy by having a required field CheckBox. Since its JavaScript based most bots won’t see it. Get the plugin from here.

Plugins for Trackback Spam.

Extended Comments Options for WordPress.

While most of the plugins above will take care of comment spam. I found that I was getting tons of Trackback spam, since Trackbacks are not validated by WordPress. Using this plugin you can disable TrackBacks or Comments for your older posts. I have disabled trackbacks for posts older than a month. You can get this plugin here.

Simple Trackback Validation Plugin.

If you don’t like the idea of disabling trackbacks for your older posts you can use this plugin to validate trackbacks.

checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to.
This reveals almost every spam trackback (more than 99%) since spammers do usually use bots which are not running on the machine of their customers.
retrieves the web page located at the URL included in the trackback. If the page doesnâ€™t a link to your blog, the trackback is considered to be spam. Since most trackback spammers do not set up custom web pages linking to the blogs they attack, this simple test will quickly reveal illegitimate trackbacks. Also, bloggers can be stopped abusing trackback by sending trackbacks with their blog software or webservices without having a link to the post.

You can get the plugin from here.

Antispam Collateral Condolences.

The last plugin does not combat spam but notifies a commenter in case his/her comment is caught in the spam queue or moderation. I highly recommend this plugin get it from here. Â

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 15 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Featured, Wordpress Tags: Download, Free, Plugins, Wordpress

Yes WordPress Is Blog Not A CMS Get Over It

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:48:18 +0000

I’ll repeat it WordPress is not a CMS, its a Blog. Its a different issue that it is flexible enough to be used as a CMS. The reason I am using it is because I want a blog not a CMS and I love it because because its the best Blogging software out there. If you want a example of CMS Software then checkout Joomla or Drupal I fail to see what all the brouhaha is about. So we have a small time competing product built on Microsoft technology marketing itself as better than WordPress anything wrong with that? pointing to C-NET, the New York Times, Ford as examples is inaccurate, they use WordPress mostly for their blogs and do you think they are running the default WordPress setup? The codebase might be WordPress but they would have hired a bunch of developers to modify WordPress and extend it. I read through Graffiti’s marketing pitch and I don’t find anything overtly offensive or controversial with regard to WordPress.

Of course Graffiti is built on .NET and truth be told any good developer can make either PHP or ASP.NET code perform. However, we think there are more long-term advantages in Microsoft’s platform and better tools. So for developers familiar with ASP.NET its full power and capability are available to you.

Those are the words from their site. They don’t seem to bashing PHP directly or too much.

I particularly like the comment below by Ian

Hello folks, greetings from “the dark side”!

I have never tried WordPress but at first glance it appears to be fond of MySQL and PHP, both of which make my stomach turn.

Are you suggesting that I should migrate across to an unfamiliar platform in deference to using a solution which runs on my favoured “stack” of Windows, SQL Server, and ASP.NET? Or are you just taking issue with their advertising message? Iâ€™m not being facetious or rhetorical, Iâ€™m genuinely curious.
Personally speaking, I have found this early beta release of Graffiti to be an excellent CMS platform and more than adequate for my requirements of a personal blogging platform on the MS stack.

Best wishes,
Ian

So would anyone like to point out to me how PHP is technically better than ASP.NET. Both Technologies have there advantages and disadvantages. The only reason why ASP.NET seems to be gets bashed is because it made by Microsoft.

Itâ€™s not about what platform you prefer to use (Iâ€™d rather slit my wrists than use IIS, ASP.NET, or SQL Server, for example), but about your approach to how to sell your product. The majority or websites on the â€˜net today run on Linux boxes, usually running PHP and MySQL (or some other database solution and scripting methodology running on a *nix box of some sort), so to dismiss that vast amount of installed user bases and developers so simply and simply to state that one solution is better than another is to miss the whole point entirely.

Otto needs a reality check

Its not a religion people its just technologies. Shame on Matt for linking to a complete non-issue. WordPress is good at what it does but it can’t be everthing, there will always be people marketing themselves as better than WordPress.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 21 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Wordpress Tags: Open Source, Programming, Web-Development, Wordpress

Upgraded To WordPress 2.3

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 10:46:40 +0000

I have upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3 I was reluctant to upgrade since I was using a lot of features and functions from the Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin in my theme. Today I sat and cleaned up my theme code and tested it out. If you come across any bugs let me know. Do you any of you have any suggestion to which Plugin I should use for tag management? Two features in WordPress 2.3 that I really love are the Automatic Plugin Upgrade Advisor and Canonical URLS. I’ll be polishing and upgrading the site and my free themes in the coming days.

BDV-17067-BDV

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Wordpress Tags: Download, Web-Design, Web-Development

My Web Design Got Ripped

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:32:57 +0000

I got a mail from someone named Charles that my Blog Design had been ripped. I wrote it off as hoax, but for a second I was scared that my site might have got hacked or hijacked like David Airey site recently. (Please help him by supporting him in his fight against the domain squatter).

hey just a heads up, your site got ripped. Its out in the world wide web now.

In the evening while catching up with my RSS feeds I noticed a bunch of strange links showing up in Technorati and I found a bunch of sites using my theme. Unfortunately for the ripper I am not upset, why you ask? I was going to release the theme this Christmas as a free download but was waiting for the WordPress.com guys to launch the Wordpress marketplace. Since my theme had been approved to be listed on it when it opens up, I was asked not to make it available for download till they launched. Its been almost a month and the Wordpress.com guys haven’t got back to me yet. The theme would have made a really good Christmas and New year gift since a huge number of people had requested and begged me to release it. If you guys can be a little more patient I’ll make it available right after the market place launches.

Currently since I haven’t released the theme it is copyrighted and using it without my permission is illegal. I will be releasing it under a GPL licence after which you are free to do whatever you wish with the theme.

As a side note can you help my friend Kanak his comments seem to be going into the spam queue any solutions?

A belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 42 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Design, Web-Design, Wordpress Tags: Templates, Web-Design, Web-Development

WordPress To Launch Theme Marketplace, All Themes To be GPL

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 04:29:38 +0000

About 4 weeks back I was contacted by Toni Schneider CEO of Automattic. Automattic was thinking of launching a WordPress Theme marketplace for WordPress.com. At that time they wanted to keep to it under wraps. Now Matt himself has confirmed this.

I thought it was an excellent idea especially to give exposure to WordPress theme designers. But there was one confusion i.e. wanted all the themes to be GPL. Below is my response to this. I didn’t get any response to my feedback. Not sure if it has something to with the fact that I objected to a GPL for Premium themes.

We’re thinking of making it a requirement that the themes be original (never published before), GPL licensed (to help other designers and keep the copyright issues simple) and not have any credit links (since they are paid). Any thoughts on that?

How can a theme be premium and GPL at the same time? Once it is GPL everyone has access to it for free. If its free why buy it? I wouldn’t sell a Premium theme with a GPL licence. Also if I am correct you mentioned that the theme is CSS based i.e. using the SANDBOX Theme. Which means It is very easy to grab the CSS source code hence It just doesn’t make sense to GPL the theme.
Credit links need to be shown irrespective of whether the theme is free or premium. Not only is it the right thing to do this is the way most Freelance designers get more clients and spread the word about themselves, it also acts as a copyright.

A comment from malan and a post from Matt blog got me rethinking.

blah! this will KILL any and all free WP themes. great job WordPress.

From Matt’s blog.

Beyond the obvious guidelines of browser compatibility and general not-sucking, weâ€™ll require submissions be original, link-free, not published before, and GPL-licensed. (That also means that all themes in the marketplace will be available FREE to WordPress.org users. That may force some to switch from .com to .org, but thatâ€™s fine.)

I was in the process of releasing my current Theme “Azure Sky” as a free theme. But I had seconds thought of releasing it as a paid theme since I had put so much time and effort into it. I think if I release the theme on WordPress.com it solves both my problems i.e. I get paid for it and it also get to release it for free for WordPress.org i.e. people hosting WordPress themselves.

I am think I am willing to experiment and see how this marketplace works out. As long as the effort that I put into a theme is compensated for.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Design, Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Templates, Web-Design, Web-Development

Top WordPress Blogs And Upcoming Indian Tech Blogs

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:57:02 +0000

Artur Kim has complied a list of Top Blogs that blog about WordPress based on their Page Rank, Alexa and Technorati Rankings. My blog is at positioned at number 10. I want to thank my readers who have made this possible. Mani karthik has also compiled a list of upcoming Tech Bloggers in India. Here my blog was ranked at Number 1.

This blog has come a long way. While I have slowed down a bit on the posting frequency I will continue to post quality content. If any of you would like to do a guest post here on my blog do let me know what you are going to blog about and use the contact form to contact me.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Wordpress Tags: Marketplace, Open Source, Wordpress