Mobypicture plugin v2

By Gilles | Published: Thursday, April 2, 2009

Working on a major update of my Mobypicture WP plugin. The previous versions were based on the code of the My Twitpics plugin but for this version I am coding it from scratch. Things that will be new in v2.0 compared to version 1.1:

  • Mobypicture image title will be shown on mouse over (done);
  • Support for multiple instances of the widget (done);
  • Support for user and group media streams (work in progress)

The source of the data will still be derived from the Mobypicture RSS feed. Once I get this version working I will start looking into a way to use the API instead of RSS to get the source data.

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Fixed broken RSS feed

By Gilles | Published: Sunday, March 29, 2009

After checking the status of chillez.com on the ismyblogworking.com website  it reported blog ‘broken’. Shoot! It appeared that my RSS feed returned an error. First hit in Yahoo (yeah not Google – that’s whole different story) prompted a link to a WordPress Support topic hinting to the solution: blank lines before or after <?php ?>.

So I installed the WordPress plugin ‘Fix RSS Feed’ and let it do it’s thing. It returned a huge list of files containing blanks at the top or bottom of the file and fixed them all. This was kind of scary but apparently it did not break anything. It does backup all the files it is going to change as a .bak file, I have to clean this mess once I am convinced the backups are no longer required.

Damn, still errors, but now referring to a XML error. This time I noticed the output of ismyblogworking.com suggested to have my RSS feed validated by FEED Validator. Yes! Validation pinpointed the error; the little bugger appeared to be a blank in the theme functions.php. The blank was not found by the Fix RSS Feed plugin because it was in the middle of the file, right above the code I inserted to show a menu-link. Mystery solved!

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Mobypicture plugin v1.2beta

By Gilles | Published: Friday, March 27, 2009

moby_whaleToday I received the request from Mathys whether I could include support for Mobypicture groups in the plugin. I have been toying around in the code and got a working version. I am not yet satisfied about the way I achieved this but hey it is a start. Check it out here.

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To-do wishlist – Update

By Gilles | Published: Monday, March 23, 2009

As previous visitors might have noticed I switched from the 2-column dark theme to a 3-column light theme. The dark theme is still a beautiful theme but it had a kind of ‘warez-look’. This light Child Theme Byty is based on the Thematic framework. I will use this one to further develop my site.

Regarding my to-do list,  a few items are resolved now that I have changed the WordPress theme:

  • Shorten the height of the header. Don’t know why a lot of themes (and website) use such a large header. I agree you need some space to show off your logo and flashy site/brand name but it doesn’t mean you have to spoil valuable pixels. E.g looking at a site on the smallest Macbook or any netbook with a browser which has the adress toolbar and tab-browsing enabled, only has so many pixels available for showing content…
  • Add second sidebar and maybe even make the width dynamic instead of fixed.
  • Replace the ‘Previous’  and ‘Next’  page indicators with real page number (already experimented with 2 plugins but they require some tweaks to fit my theme.
  • LifeStream plugin works nicely with auto-grouping of events but somehow it does not display the  events in a group in chronological order. Weird but true. Have to look into that and try to fix it. Maybe even going to try to have the event timestamp displayed when showing details.
  • Add search. The build in WP search widget looks ugly in my theme.
  • Add About page and/or show ‘About-info’  on homepage. I tried the WP build in free-text widget but didn’t like the outcome.
  • And looking at a preview of this list; ad color to the bullets or something else to juice up a list.
  • …

To be continued.

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Plugin download stats

By Gilles | Published: Saturday, March 21, 2009

It’s been 9 days now since I have uploaded the Mobypicture plugin to the WordPress Plugin Directory. It is fun to see that it is downloaded over 70 times now. Next step will be extending the plugin with a settings page to allow the insertion of a command like [mymobipictures] into a page or post. This will provide a more friendly way to insert the variables (like number of pictures, size, etc.) and eliminate the need for running PHP in a post or on a page.

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