drivelocity.com » plugin

Updated to WordPress 2.8

drivelocity — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:11:50 +0000

After upgrading some other blogs to WordPress 2.8 and having only a few minor problems, I’ve decided to upgrade drivelocity.com too. Unfortunately, it took several tries to get the automatic upgrade to work, but it finally took, and everything appears to be working correctly. Please let me know if you see any problems.

The only real issue I’ve come across is with the Tabbed Widgets Plugin. The one site I use it on currently only displays one of the four tabs that I have set to display. So, it looks like I may need to disable it until it’s upgraded to work correctly with WordPress 2.8. Others are experiencing similar problems – the author is aware of the problem and says that a new version is in the works.

Tweet This Plugin Error

drivelocity — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:17:08 +0000

I’ve been using the Tweet This plugin for a little while now. I’m not sure of the results, but I liked the idea of it. Unfortunately, I’ve had to deactivate it today as it was generating errors while attempting to add new posts. Here is the error I received:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/xxxxxx/public_html/drivelocity/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/tweet-this.php on line 30

I’ll update if I find a fix for it. Perhaps it’s a known issue and will be fixed in an update… If it’s a conflict with another plugin, it will remain deactivated, as others have greater priority.

Tabbed Widgets Plugin

drivelocity — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:34:26 +0000

The theme I use for drivelocity.com is nice in that it has some built-in functions like the tabs for Latest Posts, Latest Comments and Tags. I wanted something similar on another blog, but the theme didn’t have it built in. I tried copying the code from this theme over and wasn’t able to easily get it to work the way I wanted. So I looked for a plugin…

I came across the Tabbed Widgets plugin, which allows you to add a widget to your sidebar and set that widget to have tabs or accordion style links that expand to show other widgets. For example, on the other blog, I had the Recent Posts and Tag Cloud widgets enabled on the sidebar, but also wanted Recent Comments and to reduce the space that they were taking up. Tabbed Widgets allowed me to put those three widgets into one, like you see at the top of the right sidebar on this site.

The Joys of Twittering

drivelocity — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:40:57 +0000

I’ve voiced my opinion of Twitter and how I’m sure nobody cares that it’s an hour before lunch, I’m starving and I have no idea what I have to eat at home. But, with a new current events based project I’m working on, Twitter seems to be a good match.

Here are some tools I’ve found to work well…

Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress – This is just what I was looking for. It can automatically post tweets from WordPress posts, or vice versa. It can also list recent tweets on my sidebar and allows me to post to Twitter from my blog’s sidebar.
Tweet This plugin for WordPress – If you want to make it easier for people to retweet your blog posts, then this is the way to do it. This plugin will add a “Tweet This Post” link below every post, so Twitter users can easily pass it on.
Twitterbar Add-on for FireFox – This enables FireFox users to post to Twitter via the browser’s address bar. I thought I would need this, but as long as I can access my site, I can post from the sidebar. But without the Twitter Tools plugin, this would probably be very useful.
TweetDeck Desktop Client – If you’re behind a firewall, like me, and can’t access Twitter.com, or many of the other related sites, this is the solution. It gives me full access to Twitter without having to go to the site. There’s also Seesmic, which is quite popular as well.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a Twitter client that is compact enough to run off of a flash drive… There was one on PortableApps.com, but it no longer works. I’ve also looked into Mitter, provided by Google, but there are several other files required for it to run on Windows. Any suggestions?

Automatic Links

drivelocity — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:20:53 +0000

As you may know, when people post URLs in comments, WordPress automatically appends anchor tags and makes them clickable. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, this is not an option for URLs posted in posts and on pages. I ran into this problem when working on another blog and posting several pages of URLs. I didn’t want to go through and link each one, so I found a plugin that will do it for me. It also gives you the option of making the links NoFollow.

The Automatic Links plugin will convert all URLs and email addresses into active links, so you don’t have to do this manually. This literally saved me hours of work and an enormous amount of frustration. Again, I don’t know why this isn’t even a standard option in WordPress, but I think it definitely should be.