Tag Archives: PHP

My continuing experiences and thoughts concerning Twitter, Twitpic, and Audiotwit.

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After a few more days of using Twitter, I decided to try Twitpic and Audiotwit that I had noticed others using.

Twitpic

This just seems to be a basic service for storing and commenting on images that sends out a tweet when you add a new photograph or comment on one. It has no provisions for creating albums or anything like that. Since I have my own photo gallery, I have no real need to use this as a place to store images. Same reason I don’t store images at my MySpace page or using something like Flickr. I will admit that the main page that shows where new images are coming from is kind of cool. I did upload one picture and here’s my twitpic page.

Audiotwit

To use this relatively new service, it appears, you send a reply tweet to @listensto with the artist and song title of what you are listening to.  An example tweet would be “@listensto Metallica – One“. Then, it creates an Audiotwit page for you at (username).audiotwit.com.  In my case this was mrheadrick.audiotwit.com. It then adds a Lyrics link next to the song to look-up the song’s lyrics.

Winamp Now PlayingSince I was using the Winamp Now Playing Plug-In version 2.1.2 together with a PHP script I wrote to generate now-playing images and a song history on my entertainment page, I wondered if there was a Winamp Twitter plug-in and there was one to my amazement. While it did work, it had problems dealing with some characters, such as “&” where it would just chop-off everything after the “&”.  The RSS feed of the audiotwit page is also a bit buggy.  “&” causes problems with the feed and the feed itself does not validate with Feedvalidator.org.  During all this testing, I decided I better create another twitter account just for this purpose and keep all the “now listening to” spam out of my main twitter account.  (Update 8/11/2010: @mrheadrick_np was the account I made at the time; however, it got flagged to not show in searches and hasn’t been used in months and has been deleted. The audiotwit page at mrheadrick_np.audiotwit.com still exists for the time being.)

During this time I had also discovered that many others used the phrase “listening to” to announce what they were listening to. There’s even a search link at the Twitter search results page for this phrase. At this point I decided to stop using the Winamp Twitter plug-in which was a bit limiting and use my Winamp PHP script to send a tweet via the Twitter API using both “@listensto” and “listening to” methods.  After some searching around, I used the improved script by Scott Sloan I found here and adapted it to my own needs.

So now, mrheadrick_np.audiotwit.com and this “listening to” search will show what I am playing. The feed you see in my blog is the feed that the “listening to” search produces, which does not have problems with “&” and other characters being in the artist and song titles.

Twitter

I also added a Twitter widget to my main website. I used the HTML version and modified the CSS to create the appearance I wanted.

Having done all this, does anyone else really care what I’m doing or have been up to or what the most recent songs I’ve listened to are? Beyond family and close friends (most of which do not use Twitter), there might be a few, such as those from Surmunity, but I suspect most could care less. Several of the people that are following me on Twitter I think are doing so more to increase their own page ranks and points of entry for the various search bots to find their websites and content than to really follow what I am doing or saying. Some strangers that follow me, especially those with goobldygook usernames, are clearly doing so for spamming purposes. These I block when I come across them and many of these type of accounts are usually suspended by Twitter. Even so, I still think Twitter is kind of cool. :)

Blog has been upgraded to WordPress v2.7

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I have updated my blog to WordPress v2.7 which was just released. Once again I did have to edit the /wp-includes/vars.php file to force $is_apache to true (see below) since the SERVER_SOFTWARE variable comes back as WebServerX instead of Apache. Other than that the upgrade went smoothly.  :) 

// Server detection
 
/**
 * Whether the server software is Apache or something else
 * @global bool $is_apache
 */
//$is_apache = ((strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Apache') !== false) || (strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'LiteSpeed') !== false)) ? true : false;
$is_apache = true;
/**
 * Whether the server software is IIS or something else
 * @global bool $is_IIS
 */
$is_IIS = (strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Microsoft-IIS') !== false) ? true : false;

As always, I did perform a complete database and file backup before upgrading.  I also deactivated all my plug-ins before hand as well. I did have to reapply some code modifications that I made related to the RSS Feed widget; however, I’ll make a separate post about all that! :)

Blog has been upgraded to WordPress v2.5.1.

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WordPress has recently released WordPress 2.5.1 which I have completed upgrading my blog to. It contains one critical security patch as well as a number of bug fixes. Surpass Hosting also upgraded their server over the weekend to use PHP 5.2.5 by default and MySQL 5. In doing so, the server software now reports back as WebServerX again and not Apache. So, I had to edit the /wp-includes/vars.php again to force $is_apache to true. Following is the server detection part of the script:

// Server detection
 
/**
 * Whether the server software is Apache or something else
 * @global bool $is_apache
 */
//$is_apache = ((strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Apache') !== false) || (strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'LiteSpeed') !== false)) ? true : false;
$is_apache = true;
 
/**
 * Whether the server software is IIS or something else
 * @global bool $is_IIS
 */
$is_IIS = (strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Microsoft-IIS') !== false) ? true : false;

The only difficulty I had was with the RAZ-Captcha plug-in. I was getting a fatal PHP error which was causing the Login and Registration pages to not appear:

PHP Fatal error: Cannot use object of type WP_Error as array in /(deleted)/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/raz-captcha/raz-captcha.php on line 590

I have disabled that plug-in for the meantime. I may look for a new plug-in to do image verifications on the Login and Registration pages. If I get ambitious, I may try and fix it myself but I doubt it, LOL.

Blog has been upgraded to WordPress v2.5.

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WordPress has just released WordPress v2.5, which I have completed upgrading my blog to. I have also upgraded my plugins to their latest versions using the new plugin update feature and it worked great!

As always, I did have to modify the /wp-includes/vars.php file in the server detection section to force the apache detection to true so that it could modify the permalink structure:

// Server detection
 
/**
* Whether the server software is Apache or something else
* @global bool $is_apache
*/
//$is_apache = ((strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Apache') !== false) || (strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'LiteSpeed') !== false)) ? true : false;
$is_apache = true;
 
/**
* Whether the server software is IIS or something else
* @global bool $is_IIS
*/
$is_IIS = (strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Microsoft-IIS') !== false) ? true : false;

The reason is that Surpass Hosting’s value for $_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'] is WebServerX. I also updated my theme to include all the updated code in the default WordPress theme which mine is based off of. All in all a fairly painless process. :)

Should I add additional programming content to my blog, or my website?

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I have been thinking of adding some PHP programming content (full blown scripts to achieve this or that to modifications of other scripts to achieve something) to my website and I am trying to decide where I should put it. I can either add them within the context of my Programming page, which is in a current state of extreme lameness, or as a WordPress article or page.

I think the thing to do is to put the main content within the context of my Programming page and then write a blog post about it that links to it. Yeah, that’s the ticket! :)

Now, when will all this happen? I have no idea. One of the problems with placing things like this online is the expectation that you will provide support for it when people try it and have problems. I do tech support all day at work and when I get home, I’m generally not in the mood. I think the fact that I won the “Coder” award in Surpass Hosting’s Surmunity forum has inspired me to do this. I had no idea I had won until I was asked about the prize. LOL. So, stay tuned for this!