WP Book

An interesting application/plugin for WordPress is WPBook. This plugin installs on you blog allows your post to be visible on a Facebook page.  It only works on self hosted WordPress installs.

The installation is, from my experience of WordPress plugins, a little quirky. This is primarily because the WPBook requires that you create a Facebook application. This sort of thing is a little daunting for someone like me with no programming experience. However it is really more about creating the application within the developers section of Facebook, this creates an API key and another password or  key called a secret. You then enter theses details in the plugin section of your blog. You need to give your application a unique name so that it has a “canvas” name this is Facebook jargon for where they host their application.  So after a few trials and errors  I was able to create an application that now displays my deep and meaningful post on my Facebook page.

The guy who created it John Eckman can be found here http://www.openparenthesis.org/2009/01/19/wpbook-wordpress-facebook-plugin-goes-10

Goodreads on WordPress

My last post on this subject was about the apparent demise of Now Reading Reloaded plugin that I have been using to keep a track of my reading. It has been a great way to keep track. I means I don’t forget what I have read and saves me buying a book twice which I have done. The advantage was that all the data was stored on my blog.

I have decided to use Goodreads as a replacement. The obvious disadvantage is that the data is stored elsewhere. However the advantages are many, I can use my iPhone to  scan books to my Goodreads account and I have a widget that displays what I have read.  Continue reading “Goodreads on WordPress”

Upgrading WordPress to Version 3.1.1.

I have for the first  time since the introduction of the automatic upgrades to WordPress struck a problem I kept getting an error message “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted

The logo of the blogging software WordPress.
Image via Wikipedia

(tried to allocate 3096504 bytes) in /home/stefanra/public_html/blog/wp-includes/class-http.php on line 1426″

First I thought that it was an issue of not having enough memory on my blog, upgraded and no difference same error.

I posted on the official WordPress forum and within a day a helpful past with this link

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/253495#post-1017842

Seems that the error is related to how much memory php assigns to WordPress, I deactivated a small herd of  plugins (19 to be exact)  and voila successful upgrade.

Thanks to forums !!!!

 

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Jetpack for WordPress

Well I have been playing with another plugin for the blog this one written by Automatic the people behind WordPress. It add a range of features to a self hosted WordPress blog that are usually found on the wordpress.com hosted blogs. It does require the you link to a wordpress.com account but this doesnt seen to hurt, apparently we leave our digital footorints all over the web anyway so another isnt going to matter.

The feature that I really liked and wanted was a share button at he end of post and now I have it. It is easy to set up if you read the instructions which I didn’t on the first round.  It seems to work a treat now all I have to do is wait for the comments and recomendations to roll in!

Jetpack also adds site statistics to the blog,which be nice when I get lots of traffic. I now have a widget which pops in my last five tweets from Twitter thanks to this plugin. I also have a gravtar thingy that I set up. There are also a few other things like an intelligent spell chack and a markup language. The best bit is  that all of this is free

Thanks to WordPress and Automatic for this useful plugin.

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You have to love opensource

WordPress
Image via Wikipedia

I have been using a plugin called Now Reading. It keeps track of the books a read and displays them on the blog site in a sidebar. It also helps me keep track of what I am reading and write some reviews. It also  maintains a library  for me.

The Rob Miller who originally developed the plugin stopped at around WordPress version 2.7 and subsequently it stopped working.  He is appearently  too busy to keep on with the development and changes t0 WordPress. I would have liked to update the plug-in myself.  However when I look at code I don’t see poetry its more like random swirls.

Anyway as is the world of Word Press someone else has taken up the baton and is now running with it. Now I can again add books and they display nicely on my site. Thanks to Ben Gunnink for Now Reading Reloaded.  The really amazing thing for me was I downloaded  Now Reading Reloaded  , deactivated the old one activated the new one and voila all my data was there .

Three Cheers for open source. This I guess would never have happened if this was  a commercial plugin.

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New Ideas for WordPress

I posted the text below on the WordPress site under new ideas or suggestion for inclusion in new versions of WordPress.

I would like to see a feature that would allow the complete removal of unwanted or unused plugins. I for one trial many plugins on my blog and I don’t always have easy ftp access so removing the plugin directories whilst relatively easy can be a chore.

The new install plugin feature is great and being able to add new plugins on the fly is very easy. The same concept applied to removing plugins would be equally useful.

If I knew how to program I would write a plugin to do this. That’s my first idea for WordPress.

Plugin Management on WordPress 2.7

I must say that one  of the features that I really enjoy about WordPress 2.7 is the plugin management. Being able to add plugins on the fly without ftp access is fabulous. I don’t always access my blogs in an environment where I can use ftp easily so being able to add a new plugin whenever I like is great.

Also being something of an upgrade junkie I am also liking the automatic upgrade feature. I had used a plugin for this in the past but now that it is part of the core of WordPress more the better I say.

If I was looking for an improvement on this side of the operation it would be an easy way to remove unwanted or redundant plugins but this is less pressing.

This only one small innovation in what has been the most pleasing revision of WordPress so far.

Book Reviews

I have added a nice little feature which is seen in one of the side bars on the right hand side of the web page. I can now add the books I am , going to and have read recently. The plugin picks up the book cover and other detail by linking to  amazon.com . I haven’t set up a referral system which I can and get discounts based on people who buy after coming here. Given the low traffic of this site its probably not going to matter. The plugin was written by Rob over at Roblog.

I did look at another similar plugin in based in an open source library net work, but try as I might I couldn’t get it to work. By contrast this worked relatively easily.

Any way if you dare you can look at what I read.  I kicked off with Silesian Station which is  a crime novel set in Pre WWII Germany.

Another plugin

I have added another plugin that translates the original English of this blog into other languages. The plugin links to the google translating system and indeed can link to others. I have added a few languages , a couple for fun Japanese and Israeli only because I wanted to see what the blog looked like in a non roman alphabet.

I will see if there is any feedback , that is of course if there is nay one out there in the great beyond.

Just to get a feel for it this is snapshot of the post in Hebrew

Screen capture of translated blog
Screen capture of translated blog

Testing a new plugin for this blog

I have just installed a new plugin that allows my posts here to appear in my Facebook page. This post is a way of testing that idea to see how it works. It was very fiddly to set up as I have no experience with Facebook applcations. However it seems to be working now.