Otto on WordPress

I’m about half done with this, and just wanted to give an update to those people I know who are awaiting it.

I’m ditching the multiple-plugin thing. Too many complaints and too much confusion. Also, the plugin directory and updaters don’t support it well. So 1.0 will have a checkbox area where you can select the pieces you want instead.

It’s using the new Javascript SDK. All this stuff is currently working great.

Login works. Register needs some more work.

Automatic publishing now works for both Fan Pages and Applications! I just worked out how to make Application posts through the Graph API properly. Manual publishing isn’t quite there yet.

Widgets are largely unchanged, but will all be rolled into one sub-module.

Fan box got replaced by the Like box, which is the same thing with a different name. So I’m going to keep calling it the Fan Box in the interface.

The bookmark widget is going away, because it doesn’t work properly anymore anyway.

New widgets for the Facebook Social Plugins are working.

Like and Share will remain unchanged, although the Like now uses the XFBML to do its thing. Doesn’t really make a whole heck of a lot of difference, though.

Comments pull-back from Facebook is possible. I know how to do it. I’m debating whether or not to turn them into “full-fledged” comments or just display them separately.

Comments push *to* Facebook is also possible. Meaning that if somebody leaves a comment using FB and clicks the share checkbox, it will send it to Facebook (no popup) and also include the text of their comment (or an excerpt, at least). This is not done yet, but it’s actually quite easy to add now.

All dependence on the FB-Connect library will be gone. Ditto for their PHP library. I’m writing this with pure calls to the Graph API and XFBML. PHP 5 is still required, and there’s still an activation check for that.

One last thing: Upgrading from old versions to the new one will be a hassle. Things will just stop working properly when you upgrade. Can’t be helped. So I recommend deactivating SFC and all sub-plugins entirely before upgrading, then reactivating it afterwards. There will be a note to this effect on the WP plugins screen.

Google Apps has always been a bit of a black sheep in the Google account system. If you had an email on a Google Apps system, then it was kinda like a Google account, except not really. Some of the features were the same, some were not. What made it more confusing is Google’s tendency to create a separate Google account using your email address, which meant data sharing across the two was broken and tricky to work with. So most users ended up maintaining two separate Google accounts, which annoyingly had the same email address/username (unless you added GMail to one, in order to get access to Buzz, which then made it forced to have a gmail account as the primary email).

But recently, Google has been making efforts to pull these systems together into a more unified whole. They started off with the multiple account sign in features, which works, but is pretty lame. Having to choose which account you’re on throws all the complication back on the user.

A better way is to simply make all Apps accounts into full-fledged Google accounts. They’ve taken this step and now (some) Google Apps administrators can choose to integrate their Apps account into the larger Google account-o-sphere. I did this the other day, and while it’s taken a bit of effort, I’m now starting to pull all my information over into this new, fully-capable, Google account.

So this post is just a few notes on the process of migrating from two accounts to one, as I do it. Note: This is disorganized and random. I’m just making notes here. Read them if you like.

- Have two browsers open when you’re migrating things. I’ve been using Chrome and Firefox. Sign each one into a different Google account here: https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount

- Don’t use the multi-sign-in thing. It makes things really confusing.

- Change your passwords on one of the accounts. I noticed that when I had the same password on both of them, sometimes I’d log into a Google property and it would log me in using the wrong account. With different passwords, that stopped happening and I started getting in on the correct account, based on the email I gave, every time. Basically, it appears that the migration process changes your old GMail-account which was tied to your old non-gmail based address to use an account on gtempaccount.com. Using this, it can still recognize your old email address as being on that account, if the password fits. By having different passwords, it can’t do that and thus you get the correct account for the email you’re signing in as.

- YouTube accounts can be delinked from one Google account and relinked to the other Google account. Check the account settings page on YouTube. Yes, I know they say YouTube won’t work on the Apps accounts. It does. I did it.

- Google Voice accounts *CAN* be transferred to non-gmail based Google accounts. This link works: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cjlWRDFTWERkZEIxUzVjSmNsN0ExU1E6MA . Even though it says there that it will not work with a Google Apps account, it *will* work if you’ve migrated your Apps accounts into the general system. I did it, and if you do it, make a note saying that the account migration had been done. They transferred it over just fine. Took about an hour for me. Probably will take longer for them to get to you.

- Chrome Sync works on the new accounts, just go into Chrome, disconnect the sync, then reconnect it to the new account.

- If you use Reader, you can export your subscriptions from one as an OPML file, then reimport them to the new Reader account. Although your followers *seem* to transfer, there may be an issue there as I always get errors when commenting on shared posts.

- Google Talk works fine, but you need to sign it out then back in to the new account.

- AdSense can’t migrate. You’ll have to close your old AdSense account and create a new one on the new account.

- Strangely enough, somehow in this process, Wave got added to my Google Apps account. Which is weird, as I thought they killed that. Not that it matters or anything, just thought it was unusual.

- One HUGE benefit: The new Google Chat. A few days ago, they rolled out “call by phone” to Google Chat. You can call anywhere in North America for free through Google Chat on your GMail. While they didn’t roll this out to normal Google Apps accounts (yet), they did roll it out to migrated Google Apps accounts. I got it in my GMail today and used it to talk to my mom. She said the voice quality was fine. Afterwards, I signed into Google Voice and lo and behold, my GChat was available as a Google Voice forwarding account! So now if I’m on GMail (which I always am) and you call my Google Voice number, I can answer through the computer. How awesome is that?

This is not final. I will be updating this post as needed. I’m just posting it now so that people can benefit from it now.

If you don’t get immediate responses from me for the next few days, that’s probably because I’m not here. As you can tell from my new sidebar badge, I’ll be in Savannah, GA for WordCamp Savannah 2010. I’ll be around the SCAD River Club all of Saturday and Sunday, and also Friday (if they’ll let me hang out, I didn’t sign up for that). Looks like it’s going to be awesome, Jane has really pulled it together nicely.

I will be trying though, and the hotel claims to have internet, but this is going to be my first real road-trip for a WordCamp, so I’ll be mostly unavailable for quick answers like I know a lot of people are used to getting from me. Don’t worry, I will get to you. Eventually.

If you’re coming to Savannah, please make it a point to come and ask me anything you like. I’m looking forward to meeting people and getting to know the community better. My only meat-space connection with the WordPress community has actually been meeting (and working for) Matt, and he’s clearly a biased source.

So enjoy your week, everybody! I know I will!

And I WILL be having dinner at the Crab Shack. This is a requirement.

So I added the new Tweet button to Simple Twitter Connect yesterday, and was going through the documentation they provided for it. One thing I noticed was a mention of the “count API”.

Now, Twitter says that the count API is private, but come on.. Seriously? You’re sending count information to every Tweet button being displayed anywhere, how private can that really be?

Turns out it’s not private at all. It’s just hidden.

To get the tweet count for any URL, simply do a GET for this:

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=URL-TO-GET-COUNT-FOR

What you’ll get back will look like this:

twttr.receiveCount({"count":123,"url":"URL-TO-GET-COUNT-FOR"})

Some of you may recognize that as a JSON callback. Basically, they’re using part of their @anywhere system to receive the count and update the button accordingly. Not surprising, the whole tweet button is built on top of the anywhere code. But it’s kinda useless to us in this format, since we need to be able to define our callback appropriately instead of using theirs. No worries, just add a callback parameter yourself:

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=URL-TO-GET-COUNT-FOR&callback=bob

bob({"count":123,"url":"URL-TO-GET-COUNT-FOR"})

Obviously, they didn’t release this information because they’re concerned about scaling, and probably rightfully so. Still, if you want that count, you can get it. Just don’t abuse it.

Tried to install a local Apache this morning and couldn’t get it to start. Turned out Skype was the problem. Matt apparently encountered this years ago, but I never really started using Skype until lately.

Anyway, it still happens. But there’s a simple fix.

Go to the Tools->Options menu. In there, find the Advanced->Connections tab. Turn off the option to use port 80 and 443. These are there to allow Skype to try to get through firewalls. They also, incidentally, block Apache from starting since it can’t grab the port it wants.

Just a heads up in case anybody else encounters the problem.

Been getting a lot more of these sorts of problems cropping up in my email recently, so I figured I’d repost this in the hope that people will read it. The original post is now on the wrong site, so maybe here it’ll get more views.

—

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.

After creating your application, you’ll need to visit the Apps section in the Facebook Developer Home area. Here you’ll find your application, and the all critical “Edit Settings” link.

Firstly, never give out your Application Secret. If you give this out by accident, then use the Reset Secret Key link to get a new one.

Anyway, from here, you want to go into the settings. The settings area is divided into six main sections, but most of the settings are irrelevant. See, you’re building a “Connect” application, not a “Canvas” one. So most of these are meaningless for you. The following ones are what you actually care about:

Obviously, you want the name of your Application to make sense. I suggest using the same name as your website. You can even use your domain name here if you like. Just be aware that this name is what the Fans of your site will see in their Applications area.

The Basic Information section is important as well, fill it in as you see fit. I also recommend uploading good icons and/or logos for your site. Gives it that finished look.

Contact Information is obviously important as well, but don’t worry about all those extra URLs. They really apply more to Canvas apps. Of course, if you want to make special pages on your site for them and provide the URLs here, feel free.

The Authentication Settings page is surprisingly important. Those top two boxes need to be unchecked for a Facebook Connect application. Why? Because when they are unchecked, your Application becomes an “External Website” as far as Facebook is concerned. If you have either them checked, then your app’s Canvas section becomes active and you might have users trying to add it to their profiles and such, resulting in broken pages and a general bad user experience.

The Connect Settings page is probably the most important one. These settings must be filled in and they must be absolutely accurate. Specifically, the URLs must be the URLs that are actually used by your site. Capitalization matters. The leading “www” or lack of one matters. Whatever the URL your site is in the browser is what you MUST put into these fields. Anything less and your site will not work.

The Advanced Settings screen contains these three fields which you need to set in the same way I did. The email domain no longer exists, however. They removed that in favor of a different approach, so you can ignore that field.

Finally, after you have saved those settings, take the time to go back to the main application screen and click the “Edit Application Profile” link. You’ll be taken here, where you can set up the “look” of your application page on Facebook. This includes what tabs are visible, the stuff in the Info section, etc. You can add extra Applications tabs to this page and generally customize all sorts of stuff. None of that affects your site, but it does affect how the App Page looks in Facebook. The more polished it is, the more likely people will “Fan” your Application. And Fans get updates from when you publish posts to the Wall. Great way to drive traffic to your content.

Hope this helps! Mainly, I hope this reduces the number of questions I get about this process. Enjoy SFC!

For those of you helping me with testing out SFC trunk, there’s a new one in there for you.

The activity feed widget is one of Facebook’s recent addition to their social widgets. Basically, it shows who’s liked and shared your posts recently. The idea is to encourage liking, I suppose.

The latest plugin adds this to WordPress as a sidebar widget, as a shortcode (fb-activity), and enables it for direct theme usage with the sfc_activity_feed() function.

As always, this is trunk beta code here, so if you do use it, don’t expect it to be 100% yet. Still, it works well enough.

Get it here: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/simple-facebook-connect/trunk/.

I sort of snuck this into Simple Facebook Connect 0.18 for you all.

If you go to http://facebook.com/insights, then one of the new things they have is “Insights for your Domain”. Basically, this lets you hook the Facebook Insights system up to your own domain.

They give you meta info to add to your site so as to define who has control over that site. This lets them know who should be able to see the insights and such.

Well, if you use SFC, that information is already there for you. Just go over to the insights page, put in your domain, then “Link With” your SFC Application. No need to add anything else to your site, the base SFC plugin is adding that fb:app-id meta tag for you automatically (once you’ve configured SFC itself, of course).

Note that you may have to link it a few times before it actually takes. Facebook has to retrieve your webpage to verify the connection, and it seems to time out rather easily. Took me several tries and I kept getting messages like “Bad Domain” and such. But it finally worked.

Since I just added it, I don’t have any data yet to show you, but basically it will keep track of the “Shares” from your site, so those Share buttons will now give you some useful information and feedback on the Insights page.

Enjoy.

Additional: Note that since I wrote this post, Insights never actually updated or worked at all. Facebook basically dropped the ball and never actually finished this code or turned it on or something. I seriously wonder exactly WTF they are doing over there sometimes. Anyway, here’s the bug if you want to track it: http://bugs.developers.facebook.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10174

What with Android making more headway in the world, I’ve been seeing more and more QR codes lately. If you don’t know what a QR code is, then here is an example:

Scan this to buy Otto a beer. Seriously.

Android phones have this sort of thing built in, as it’s used for their version of the “app store”. iPhones can download apps to read them and act on them (NeoReader is a free and easy one to use).

Basically, QR Codes are like visual links. You take a picture of them using the application in question, and it either gives you some text or sends you to a website.

Anyway, while reading Google Reader today, I saw somebody mentioning “Portapayments”. A quick search and test showed me how it worked, but I don’t really care for their implementation. I prefer to roll my own, sort of thing. So here’s how you do it.

Make the Donation Link

Let’s assume you’re using PayPal. It’s quite possible to do this with any payment service that can provide you with a payment link, but PayPal is relatively easy.

First, log into Paypal, and go to their “Merchant Center”. There, you’ll click on “Website Payments Standard”. Finally, you’ll make a “Donate button”.

Fill in the bits, and you can ignore most of them. In this case, we’re making a link, not a button, so we don’t care how it really looks. Put in the fixed amount you want the link to be for, then make the button.

On the final screen, there’s a tab that says “Email”. The purpose of this is to give you a link you can email to other people. When clicked, it goes to PayPal with the info already filled in. All the user has to do is confirm the donation. That’s the link we need. Copy it somewhere for now. You can test it out too, if you like, to make sure it works.

Shortlink it

Now we’ll need to turn that into a shortlink. Why? Well, QR codes work better with shorter links. As the amount of information the code holds gets longer, it gets more pixels in it, and thus it gets harder for the readers to read. Thus we want to keep the amount of data in it as short as possible.

You can use any shortlink service you like for this purpose. bit.ly is the most common. I have my domain on Google Apps and I used their shortlink system to allow me to keep it under my own domain’s control that way. So my shortlink ended up being http://sl.ottodestruct.com/beer .

Note: There is an advantage to using a shortlink system you control entirely here. If you want to change the payment link, then you can do it without changing the shortlink. This is useful because changing the shortlink after you generate the QR code may not be an option. What if you make t-shirts with the QR code on it? That link that you put into the code needs to be pretty darned permanent and not subject to change. If you control where the link goes, then you can change the content at that link easily anytime.

Whatever you prefer, just make that shortlink.

Make the QR Code

Finally, the easy part. Take your final shortlink and put it at the end of this URL:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=192×192&choe=UTF-8&chl=

That’s using the Google Chart API to generate the QR code for you. The result is an image. You can put it on your pages however you like.

Example of my final image link:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=192×192&choe=UTF-8&chl=http://sl.ottodestruct.com/beer

So it’s pretty straightforward, really. When somebody scans that with any code reading app, then it’ll send them to Paypal to complete the donation for the amount you set in the first place.

Neat.

I was not aware that other people didn’t know about this until recently, but since it seems to be little known, I thought I’d write a post on the topic.

In WordPress, you should never start the custom permalink string with any of these %postname%, %category%, %tag%, or %author%. (Unless you know what you’re doing, of course. )

Meaning that “%category%/%postname% ” is a bad custom permalink string. So is just “%postname%” for that matter.

Why? Well, it has to do with how the WordPress Rewrite system works.

Rewriting Explained

See, when you request a URL from a WordPress site, WordPress gets the URL and then has to parse it to determine what it is that you’re actually asking for.

It does this by using a series of rules that are built whenever you add new content to WordPress. Generally the list of rules is pretty small, but there are specific cases that can cause it to balloon way out of control.

Normal Rules

Let’s say you’re using a normal permalink string, like my preferred “%year%/%postname%”. The rules that are generated will look like this:

/robots.txt (for the privacy settings)
/feed/* (for normal feeds of any kind)
/comments/* (for comments feeds)
/search/* (pretty url for searches, not often used)
/category/%category% (category archives)
/tag/%tag% (tag archives)
/author/%author% (author archives)
/%year%/%month%/%day% (with each of those after year being optional)
/%year%/%postname% (this is the permalink string you define)
/%pagename% (any Page)

The way that system works is that it compares the URL it has to each of those in turn, from the top to the bottom. When one of them fits, then WordPress knows what to display and how to do it.

Note that the order I listed those in is is significant. Each one from the top down is less specific than the previous one.  For example, “robots.txt” matches only that, while “/feed/*” matches anything starting with /feed/. And so on down the list. The %postname%, %category%, %tag%, %author%, and %pagename% will match any string, but the other WordPress % ones will only match numeric fields. Like %year% is always a number.

Notice that the last one is %pagename%. This basically matches everything, because %pagename% can be anything at all. Even hierarchical pages like /plugins/whatever/something will cause this to match. It’s the fall-through position. And then, if that page doesn’t actually exist on your site, then this causes the query to trigger the 404 condition internally, which causes your theme’s 404.php to load up.

Pretty simple and straightforward, really.

Problem Rules

The problem comes in when you try to use a non-number for the beginning of your permalink string. Let’s examine those last two rules closer:

/%year%/%postname% (this is the permalink string you define)
/%pagename% (any Page)

What if you used “%category%/%postname%” for your custom permalink string? Now those last two rules are these:

/%category%/%postname% (this is the permalink string you define)
/%pagename% (any Page)

That violates our main rule, doesn’t it? That each one should be less specific than the one above it? Because %category% can match any string too, just like the %pagename% can… With this set of rules, there’s no way to view any of the Pages. Not good.

So, WordPress detects this condition and works around it. Internally, this sets a flag called “use_verbose_page_rules”, and that triggers the rewrite rebuild to make this set of rules instead:

/robots.txt (for the privacy settings)
/AAA
/BBB
/CCC (one of these for each of your Pages)
/feed/* (for normal feeds of any kind)
/comments/* (for comments feeds)
/search/* (pretty url for searches, not often used)
/category/%category% (category archives)
/tag/%tag% (tag archives)
/author/%author% (author archives)
/%year%/%month%/%day% (with each of those after year being optional)
/%category%/%postname% (this is the permalink string you define)

Now we have basically the same set of rules, except for those new ones at the top. Every Page now gets its own very specific rule, and this satisfies our main condition once again.

Pages

But what if you have a lot of Pages? I once read a post by a person who had over 50,000 Pages on his site. That is a special case obviously, but consider our lookup system. We’re going through these rules one at a time. With our first method, our rule list was only 10 rules, maximum. With this new method, you add a rule for every single Page you make. Going through 50,000 rules takes a lot longer than going through 10. And even just building that list of rules can take a long time.

Basically you’ve created a performance issue. Your Pages now won’t scale to unlimited numbers. Your site’s speed is linearly dependent on the number of Pages you have.

This is a bad thing.

Conclusion

Firstly, it’s really not any better for SEO to have the category in there, or to have just the postname there by itself. And anybody who tells you differently is wrong. If you disagree with me, then no, I’m not interested in arguing this point with you; you’re just wrong, period, end of discussion.

Secondly, shorter links are great and all, but hell, why not use a real shortlink? WordPress 3.0 now has a ShortLink API that defaults to using ?p=number links on your own domain. These will actually work for any WordPress site, even ye back unto WordPress 2.5. WordPress 3.0 just makes it nicer and easier to use these with the Shortlink API (as well as allowing plugins to make this automagically use services like wp.me or bit.ly). So use that instead.

The conclusion is, in general, just don’t do it. Leave a number, or something static, at the beginning of your permalink string and you’ll never have any sort of problems. But if you really MUST do this sort of thing, then keep your number of Pages low. Don’t try it when you have more than, say, 30-50 Pages.

Addendum

Okay, so I actually simplified things for this post. It’s actually worse than this, as verbose page rules can add much more than one rule per page, as this post demonstrates (he gets 11 per extra page!).