So some of you might have noticed that my feeds are completely out of whack. Well since the upgrade to 2.3 some plugins that say they are 2.3 compatible aren’t working. However, I’m not completely sure it’s the plugins causing the issue because I’m getting similar errors this very second while writing this post.
The auto save produces this error every time I write a post, no matter what I do:
WordPress database error: [Table 'name.prefix_categories' doesn't exist]
SELECT c.cat_ID AS ID, MAX(p.post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `prefix_categories` c, `prefix_post2cat` pc, `prefix_posts` p WHERE pc.category_id = c.cat_ID AND p.ID = pc.post_id AND p.post_status = 'publish' AND p.post_type='post' GROUP BY c.cat_id
I shouldn’t be getting these errors after the complete re-install I did this morning. I’ve been meaning to export the entire site through the export function WP provides and then loading that backup into a fresh installation for while, but this morning I was fed up so I just did it.
The syndication plugin is getting some similar errors that I can’t entirely explain how it happens, but the plugins I’ve used (I think) are creating posts with a dummy category name which is the same as the intended category. That makes me think the plugin just isn’t supported yet fully, even if it says it is on the plugin page but that doesn’t eplain the similar errors I’m getting on auto save.
I really don’t know what to do other then wait for 2.3.1 and hopefully some more updates from the plugin authors. For now all RSS readers wont be receiving my pownce posts, you’ll need to subscribe to them separately and will have to comment on Pownce.
This might be a good thing if it forces Jared, Nathan and Nate to create Pownce accounts in order to comment, that way I don’t have to pull in these posts at all.
To continue on with yesterday’s post about creating a tumbleblog with Google Reader I decided there’s other ways to aggregate my shared items so just now I just created what I’m calling a my Web Mix Tape, it’s simply a Yahoo pipe that aggregates all of my feeds and throws them into one RSS tumbleblog.
At the same time I thought it was appropriate that I added the feed generated for the pipe to my site and I’m using my latest plugin Add RSS for browser detection.
So go check out Web Mix Tape, I know it’s supposed to be cheesy.
And while you’re at it try to fix the issue of the pipe taking out the embed tags for video. I might switch feeds if I can’t figure it out because right now I wouldn’t read that feed when I could just read my shared items which embeds video perfectly.
Tumbleblogs are all the craze right now and I’ve heard a lot of people trying to figure out new ways to get one other than simply signing up and tumblr.com. For those who do not know what a Tumble blog are,
A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. – Wikipedia
So a tumbleblog or tumblog can be easily described as just an aggregator for all of your online identities and interests.
While I had a Tumblr blog I never really saw the benefit of having just another site act like a blog and without comments but now I see their purpose; to aggregate and share of your online identity. And I noticed that I’m already doing it through Google Reader.
 How I created my Tumbleblog:
First off you have to use Google Reader
Second you have to start “sharing” your items
If you find an article you want to share, simply press the share button at the bottom of the item or press shift-s and the item will now be marked ’shared’ and will be added to the site Google will create for you.
To get to your new tumblog:Â
Click on “Shared Items”
and your url is here
Google provides many other options to broadcast your shared items for you including RSS and an option to add it to your existing site.
What about other items? Specifically your own or items that aren’t in RSS.
To handle all of my own items, I subscribe to my own feeds (it’s a good idea just to make sure your feed is working properly) and then mark them for sharing.
For all the items that aren’t already in RSS, I use del.icio.us to bookmark those pages and mark them with a tumblog tag which I subscribe to through RSS and mark them the same as the rest through GR.
Pretty basic I know but know you have a simple tumbleblog and just because you don’t think it’s appropriate for yourself others might. I love subscribing to people’s shared items, I just wish people would make them more available.
Add RSS Detection
I’ve uploaded Add RSS to Wordpress Extend and updated it to version 1.5.
Description: Add RSS Feeds to your template header for Firefox and other browsers to detect automatically. Plugin facilitates adding your comments feed, per-post comment feed and allows for custom RSS feeds to be added. Feeds are not excluded to local RSS feeds of your site. Forexample you can add your Twitter or Pownce feed just as easily as adding a comments feed.
It’s a very basic plugin but I’m going to bet a lot of people would benefiting from it’s ease of use, especially the option to add per post feeds. And it works with any wordpress theme which is a plus.
AJAX CSS Switcher
I’ve also added CSS AJAX CSS Switcher (I’ve changed the name) to the repository and I’ve updated it to version 1.5. Hopefully this release will help the ailments of the last version which had problems with the version of prototype in wp-includes.
Description: This Wordpress Plugin allows you to add CSS switching to your theme without any reload. It also stores the users selection for future visits. This plugin uses UDASS The Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher.
“The Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher combines the power of Server Side processing and DOM scripting to swap style sheets on the fly with the power of Ajax. If JavaScript? is disabled – UDASSS degrades gracefully to improve your website accessibility. Needless to say, it is very sexy indeed.”
I created my first Yahoo! Pipe and I’m impressed with how easy it was. My first pipe involves manipulating my Pownce feed with a few regex expressions to include the post link and the comment count in the description of the item. And most noticeably I’ve taken out the “DANCAMERON:” from the title.
The reasoning: I’m using feedwordpress to pull my pownce messages to create posts on this blog. This is so my RSS readers can go straight to a post with the ability to comment rather than force them to Pownce where they’d have to sign-up to comment. For my regular readers that don’t use RSS you can just go here.
If you check out my pipe know that I still have a lot of work left. I first want to make it work with the atom feed straight from pownce, I went the simple route and used the feed from feedburner since it was converted to RSS2 already. More important then that I want to get the link within my pownce messaged to show on the post (Pownce allows for “link” messages as well as standard messages) then I want to create a published app so anyone can use it.
Update:
I’ve gone ahead and published it and the new link is here. Now anyone can use it to sanitize the atom feed and I’ll be adding more later.
After the comment on how I added additional RSS feeds for browser detection I went ahead and made the least necessary plugin I’ve ever released. Maybe Movable Anything is unnecessary for more users but this plugin might take the person longer to download and install than just modifying their header file in their template, even though it has an options panel.
For those who do not want to edit their header template I scraped this plugin together in 30 minutes. Add RSS is:
Add RSS Feeds to your template header for Firefox and other browsers to detect your additional RSS feeds. Feeds are not excluded to local RSS to your site. For example you can add your Twitter or Pownce feed just as easily as adding your comments feed.
Updated version just uploaded, 3pm PST.
I went ahead and added a bunch of RSS options to my site:
Just click the RSS icon in your browser and you should see the options above.
Update:
If you’re wondering how, all I did was put the rss feed in the header.php file of my theme. Example,
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Main” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Comments” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/DanCameroncomments” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – No mini-posts” href=”http://dancameron.org/category/general/feed/” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Pownce” href=”http://pownce.com/feeds/public/DANCAMERON/” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0 – Google Shared” href=”http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/17910337670127747913/state/com.google/broadcast” />
It looks like Pownce screwed up my feed last night and feedWordpress pulled in a lot of someone else’s messages as a result. That’s why my site this morning looked pwned.
That’s my assessment anyways, what I can’t figure out is why feedburner didn’t cache those mystery posts within my pownce feed. Maybe it’s feedburner’s fault and not pownce or feedwordpress. Otherwise there is a security hole in feedwordpress that’s allowing posts to come through. I doubt it’s that but I’ll keep my eye open.
Update: It’s non of the above. It’s Twitter Tools which I deleted and uninstalled and did about everything else I could possibly do to get rid of the thing.
I do apaligize for the duplicates yesterday. After migrating to Pownce and shutting off twitter tools to pull in posts Twitter Tools went crazy. Every time I deleted the twitter posts they automatically were added minutes later without my doing. I’m thinking it was a cron issue because only after I deleted the cron value from the options table did it stop, but I did delete the plugin instead of just deactivating it and also deleted the tweets table so I don’t know.
Anyways for the people who do not prefer my mini posts (now from Pownce) I do have other feeds for you to use, depending on the category:
http://dancameron.org/category
http://dancameron.org/category
In my next theme I’m going to make these more clear for readers because this morning I received a concerned e-mail,
I’m interested in what you write from a web design point of view and would certainly resubscribe if you create a feed for entries only
Since I’m talking about Pownce as my mini-blog tool; I really don’t know how I’m going to manage it in the future. I do want the posts in my feed and I do want everyone to be able to comment, not just Pownce users. So for now I’m going to keep them the way they are. Currently they’re being pulled in by feedwordpress and then a post is created. This is actually the same way I used twitter tools with the only caveat that my site’s sidebar will now link directly to Pownce. My reasoning is my “fans” will read my RSS and will be able to get to the post on my site to comment, my guests on the other hand will just go to Pownce directly if they click a link in the sidebar and hopefully they’ll just followup at Pownce.
In the future I do want to seperate the two becuase I really want the ability to segmant out my actual friends so I can post whatever I want and send whatever I want without any questioning about it being appropriate. And Pownce does that for me. An easier transition would be for them to fix their damn commenting if you’re not logged-in/registered.
I mentioned a new theme and I want to say that I’ve been inspired by simplicity of some major blogger sites, namely Dave Winer’s site. The plan is to either get going on a new theme for the sandbox competition or wait until the entries are released so I can fork one of the entries. The later seems more reasonible at the moment however I don’t know what I’ll be doing on some Friday night at midnight in the coming weeks.
Yesterday I e-mailed TLAS about the conversation happening over on one of my posts. Without entirely reading the entire post they noticed a “mac fan” was criticizing them for their stance on Apple and how it clearly biased their Apple news reporting. Chris responded with,
Mac fanboys are all trolls, and well, I try not to feed the trolls.
He is obviously feeling insecure about his “Mac faith” so he needs to
attack us to rally the troops so that they can reassure him that his Mac
life style is worth basing his entire self worth around it. The sad part
is I feel sympathy for that poor man, he does not even realize thats
what he is doing. So I say let them spin their own wheels, they aren’t
getting anywhere and it’s fools like him that killed resexcellence.com.
He is the very type of person that nailed that coffin shut.Thanks anyways man! You rock,
You’ll notice he didn’t understand I was the “fool”ish “troll” that he had “sympathy” for. I had originally wrote it off because it seemed to me he was just lumping me with any mac fanatic and I wasn’t about to defend them. But it turns out that he just lumps any person in the mac community into this description.
I come to this conclusion after digging around at resexcellance and seeing Phill Ryu’s post about Bryan Lund.
I’m going to grab some of my comments form the original post here. The tweet was about how the show has a direct anti-apple stance. And with reading Phill’s post, remembering the marketing ploy and the comments about the issue it’s clear to me that TLAS motivations to keep Apple down is entirely personal.
