(Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social Development

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WordPress – Plugin Auto-Upgrade Mishaps

WordPress 2.3 introduced the Upgrade Automatically Feature for plugins. In the plugin list there is a notification for plugins that have updates and they are easily updated by supplying ftp login information.

This was a great addition to WordPress. No longer did I have to check and see if a plugin had been updated, download it, extract the zip file and upload the files to my webhost. It was such a tedious process that my plugins did not get updated very often. Now, I can just click “Upgrade Automatically”, type in my login, and the plugin gets updated. Yesterday there was a problem auto upgrading Google Sitemaps but it was easy enough to correct manually and this is the only problem I have had with this feature.

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I am not a WordPress Exclude Categories Stealth Ninja

Ok, so I admit it. I thought I had the exclude category code all worked out but I ran into a couple of problems. One was anticipated as a possible issue with my RSS feed but the second was completely self-induced and caused by trying too many things simultaneously and not paying close enough attention.

But, first, I will start with one small success. The digest post was not sent to Twitter late last night. I guess by suppressing the post based on it’s category from appearing on the front page that Twitter Tools didn’t notify Twitter of a new post. It’s also possible that since the post came from Twitter that Twitter Tools does not automatically send it back to Twitter, which might put you in an unending loop. I read something about this on the homepage for the plugin but was not entirely clear on it. I also found out that, at least for me, Twitter Tools sends the post at around 11:40 and publishes it at midnight. I was actually still up and watched it happen.

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Exclude WordPress Categories for Hidden Twitter Tools Digest Posts

Last week I wrote an overview of the WordPress plugin, Twitter Tools. In the article, I discussed the option in Twitter Tools to send all of the your daily tweets to WordPress as a digest post. While I like the idea of using WordPress to archive twitter, I don’t want a daily post of my tweets listed on the front page or in the archives as I consider it to be content padding and really boring for most readers. Since you can assign a category to the daily post digest, I researched the wordpress code needed to exclude categories from the front page and from archives and then spent part of this morning testing and implementing it on this site.

This ended up being more complicated than I anticipated. The template used on this site references the categories in numerous locations and I had to add code and make changes to this template in the following locations; front page, archives page, category list in sidebar, list of recent posts in sidebar, and list of recent posts in the footer. Below I will outline the steps and the code needed to send your daily twitter postings to your WordPress blog but to not have them displayed.

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Twitter Tools – Managing Twitter Via WordPress

How do you notify Twitter of your new blog posts? Do you add the post manually, use Twitterfeed, use Twitter Tools, or do you use something else? Personally, I use Twitter Tools for WordPress. Not only can you set it to send your new posts to Twitter, but it also contains a number of other useful features.

Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin created by Alex King that assists me in using my Twitter account from within WordPress. Below is a screenshot of the settings. The settings are accessed in WordPress via Settings > Twitter Tools.


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Broken Link Checker – WordPress Plugin

I have another website, eleblog, which is a site for elephant news and information. I have been running it for almost 6 years and as of today it contains 3,895 posts. Each post is simply a link to an elephant related news topic, such as poaching, culling in South Africa or breeding in zoos. I do not write articles or offer opinions, although obviously I love elephants and am upset and angered by many of the articles that I read. I am simply going through all of the elephant news and posting the best articles.

eleblog

Since I am linking to news, many of the articles are temporary and I quickly have dead links on my site. When the site was smaller, I would go through links for the month once a month and delete all posts with broken links. For example, in April of this year I went through all of the posts for April of every year; April 2007, April 2006, April 2005, etc. As the site grew larger, this started taking more and more time and I could not keep up. It is also a boring task so it was hard to motivate myself to work on it. In the back of my mind I kept thinking that there must be a wordpress plugin or an external program that could check the links for me and provide me with a list of all broken links so I could delete the posts.

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Contact

Email: kim.woodbridge@gmail.com
Twitter: kwbridge
Phone: 215-534-6557
Form: Contact Me

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