Since everybodyelse is doing a blog post about how they got started with WordPress, figured I might as well give up my story too. Hey, a blogger’s gotta blog. 😉
Originally, this was a story about WordPress. But I’m not posting it on my WordPress blog, because as I wrote it, I found that this isn’t a story about how I use WordPress, as such. It’s a story about how using and working with and on WordPress has impacted my own life. So it’s on my personal blog. This may reduce the number of readers, but whatever. 🙂
This is long. So, click through the more link to read it.
Hint, one of them is complaining about the debt, while the other one is using the free and open-source software package, WordPress, to create their website.
Guess which is which. No points if it takes more than one guess.
The Republican website seems to be running on ColdFusion, a software package that kinda went out of style in 2002-2003, but for which Adobe nevertheless keeps releasing version after version, hoping somebody will notice. Well, at least now I know they have one client, I suppose.
On the other hand, the Democrats site is clearly running on WordPress 3.1.3 (not the latest version, but they’re only half a day behind, and probably not even that by tomorrow), which is a free software package that runs roughly 14.3% of the sites on the internet, including all the major websites that the people who read my blogs read every single day.
Hmm… I wonder who’s more in tune with the times.
Disclaimer: I work on WordPress, but would be heavily biased against the Republican party regardless of who my employer was. #justsaying
I’ve been delaying this post for a while, but I recently got a new job. I’ve been hired by Matt Mullenweg, of WordPress and Automattic fame. My first goal will be to start the revamping of the WordPress.org website, which has needed some reworking for some time now.
I didn’t really expect this or see it coming, but I’m sure glad it did. Though it does mean leaving my position at AutoZone for the second time (I doubt they’ll hire me back a third time 🙂 ), it’s an opportunity that I’m extremely excited about and honestly simply could not pass up. I do like the people at AutoZone, and wish them the best. I have one week remaining with them, and I’m doing my best to ensure a smooth transition.
Since Matt is a distributed kind of guy, I’ll be able to work from a laptop, wherever I happen to be, and I plan to take full advantage of that. I’ve never been to a WordCamp, for example, but I’m planning on going to WordCamp Savannah this year in August. Well, actually I plan on going to Savannah for a week or two, while there’s a WordCamp going on. I love Savannah; me and friends used to go there for the week of St. Patrick’s Day every year. Did that for 7 years before the prices got too steep. Went back once for New Year’s Day a couple years ago, and I miss the place. I needs me some Crab Shack.
I’ll also be at the big San Francisco gathering next year, and I might be around other places from time to time. Because of that, I’ve decided to turn this blog into more of a personal journal. Expect changes to accommodate more of a photoblog, sort of thing. Most entries are probably just going to be photos with captions. If you’re not down with that, sorry. For my tech ramblings, head over to Otto on WordPress instead.
Addendum: For those who are curious, I am not going to be working for Automattic. I’m working directly for Matt. My title, however, is “Tech Ninja”. 😀
For those of you who read this site for my WordPress knowledge, code, rants, or what have you, I’m writing this to point you in a new direction. I’ve started a new site just for that sort of thing: Otto on WordPress. Despite the name, I plan on putting other things there too, including code and other geekery.
Partially I’m doing it because I feel that I want to post more personal information type stuff here. More stuff about Memphis and what I’m up to and photo libraries and such, and my friends aren’t much into that sort of thing. Partially I’m doing it because I’d like to build more of a personal brand.
But, mostly I’m doing it because the ottopress.com domain name was available and I liked it. 🙂
I won’t be eliminating all geekery from this site, but it will be significantly toned down. Maybe. Dunno yet.
So, I’d suggest going over there if you like my technical rantings and ravings, since those won’t be here anymore. Also, this site may not be busy for a while. It’ll take a while to get into the swing of things, and I may start pulling more smaller microblog type posts in here. So if you want to switch your subscription around, now would be the time, while I make the changes.
For those people subscribing only to my WordPress tagged posts feed (I know there’s a few), I’ve redirected that feed now. You don’t have to switch, though you may want to. And if you suddenly got a bunch of repeat posts, that’s why. I moved a few of them over there when setting up.
So there you go.
BTW, if you’re not subscribing to my feeds, but prefer to use Facebook or Twitter, then I’ve separated some of that all out now too.
It’s similar in concept to the Simple Facebook Connect plugin. In fact, it rips off quite a lot of the same code. But instead of Facebook, this integrates your WordPress site better with Twitter.
Now, there’s a lot of Twitter plugins out there already. And this plugin by no means competes with them (yet). This plugin can’t, for example, send a post to Twitter (yet). Nor can it pull posts from Twitter to display on your own site (yet).
What it does is to provide the framework for a more complete Twitter integration. Right now it can do:
Login via Twitter
Comment via Twitter
Not much, really. But it has the backend code necessary to make it easier to connect your site to a Twitter Application, and to make plugins surrounding it that won’t interfere with each other. That’s the same basic reason for the Simple Facebook Connect plugin.
So yes, eventually this plugin will send and receive stuff from Twitter. But for now, it lets you allow users to Login and/or to have users Comment using their Twitter credentials.
<?php
include "../../../wp-load.php";
?>
... javascript code ...
The reason for this sort of thing is that there’s some option or code or something that the javascript needs from the database or from WordPress or whatever. This PHP file is, basically, generating the javascript on the fly.
Usually, the case for this turns out to be something minor. The code needs the value from an option, or some flag to turn it on or off. Or whatever.
Problem is that finding wp-load.php can be a bit of a chore. I’ve seen extreme efforts to find and load that file in plugins before, including searching for it, examining the directory structure to make decent guesses, etc. This sort of thing has existed even before wp-load.php came around, with people trying to load wp-config.php themselves and such.
Note: This post has been moved to here. Please leave comments there instead.
The majority of the email I get from users of the Simple Facebook Connect plugin is questions regarding how to setup their Facebook Application. It’s really not that hard to do, but the plethora of options can seem somewhat intimidating. So here’s the basics of what you need to do.
I saw this morning that Jesse Stay had created a rather neat little chicklet for his FBFoundations plugin. I thought it was a clever idea, so naturally I stole it and added it to Simple Facebook Connect as well.
Of course, just copying an idea is no fun. So I had to improve upon it a bit for my version. 🙂
I ended up not using any of Jesse’s code, but I did (mostly) keep the format of his chicklet output the same, so as to try to be compatible with it for styling rules and such.
When writing the Simple Facebook Connect plugin, I investigated how the Settings API worked. It’s relatively new to WordPress (introduced in version 2.7), and many things I read said that it was much easier to use.
It is much easier to use in that it makes things nice and secure almost automatically for you. No confusion about nonces or anything along those lines. However, it’s slightly more difficult to use in that there’s very little good documentation for it. Especially for the most common case: Making your own settings page.
Simple 2 step setup for Facebook Connect. Just create the App via Facebook and paste in the API key.
Share button, with meta support.
User status widget
Comment using Facebook Identity (alpha, not operational, for testing only, will be working soon).
Like most things I announce early, it’s not fully featured yet. I’m modifying and adding onto it as I go along, so expect a lot of updates to show up in the plugin list if you use it.
And if you have ideas for how to improve it, please email them to me. 🙂
I’ve been delaying this post for a while, but I recently got a new job. I’ve been hired by 
