ace’s blog

this may or may not work. I’m attempting to embed a wavelet into this post. I found a plugin named “wavr” that will allow me to do that.

Edit: here is how you figure out the wave id

[wave id="googlewave.com!w+5Nz5HFI2B" server="https://wave.google.com/wave/" bgcolor="#FFF"]

Holy sheep shit! I just fixed a known (to me) bug in the vox-crossposter WP plugin I wrote a LONG time ago.

All I changed was the character encoding from

$email_headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1'."\r\n";

to

$email_headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'."\r\n";

If you look at the second “known bugs” list at http://www.acedanger.com/vox-crossposter, you will see exactly what I changed. Now I need to get home so I can update the download link and the download from the WordPress Plugin site.

Edit: I updated the source that the download link points to.

I’ve been trying to make use of the Shared Items in Google Reader and show them on my blog. I’ve tried a couple of different RSS widgets without success, until this morning.

I found a widget that will display the feed correctly. It is called Google Reader widget and was written by James Wilson.

The problem with using the pre-installed RSS feed widget from WordPress was that the URL linked is malformed and if clicked, would take the user to a page that did not exist, resulting in an error page. For example, one of my shared items is a post that I wrote when we found out the gender of our new baby (which is a boy ). From the pre-installed RSS widget, the following URL is linked: “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/acedanger/~3/173558267/http://www.acedanger.com”; from  the new widget, the URL linked is “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/acedanger/~3/173558267/”.

The reason for the malformed URL is because of the formatting of the XML produced. The pre-installed widget is expecting the XML to be formatted according to the RSS 2.0 standard but  the XML produced by the Google Reader Shared Items feed is in the Atom standard.

That’s about as technical as I get. I know there is a difference but don’t care to be bothered with the details (not right now anyway).

Tags: googlereader, widget, wordpress plugin

My plugin was in a write up about WordPress plugins on the blog Mashable.  Here is a link to the entry: http://mashable.com/2007/08/02/wordpress-readers/.   How cool is that?!

I found it by looking through some of the incoming links to my blog.  I clicked on a link from an Asian site and saw a link to Mashable.com.  I clicked on the Mashable link and then did a search on the blog entry for “vox” and found my plugin listed!  That’s freaking awesome!

First and foremost, I want to thank David Chartier for the write-up he completed for the DownloadSquad regarding my WordPress plugin, the Vox Crossposter. I didn’t think the plugin was that big of a deal until users started to email me, asking me for help installing the plugin. I received a lot of positive feedback as well some suggestions for enhancements.

I have implemented a few of the suggestions and will continue to do so if I feel that the request actually enhances the plugin or if I get many requests for the same feature.

I was first contacted by David back in Jan 2007. I was very excited (and very surprised) to know that the plugin I wrote got someone’s attention who would be able to spread the word more than I have been able to. After a while, I forgot about the proposed write-up because after all, everybody gets busy! So fast forward to tonight when I just happened to check my email and what do I see? A wonderful message from Google Alerts (yes, I receive alerts regarding my own blog and yes, I do subscribe to it via Google Reader) :

As far as future development of the plugin, I am waiting on Six Apart to create an API for Vox like they have for LiveJournal or MoveableType.

Anyway, read about the development of and the pride I have in my plugin in my WordPress Plugin category. Thanks again David for the great write-up and the recognition.

I have been contacted by David Chartier of the blog DownloadSquad.com and was inquiring about writing a post there about the WordPress plugin I created to crosspost WordPress posts to Vox (I dubbed it the Vox Crossposter, pretty ingenious huh??)! That’s pretty damned exciting I think.

He also inquired about whether or not I would accept donations in order to help encourage me to further the development of my plugin. It was a difficult decision but I told him that I could indeed accept donations to continue doing what I really like to do: web development.

It is nice to get some recognition about the plugin. When I first started developing the plugin and posted it to the WordPress plugins page, I helped a few people install it and get it running. Occasionally, I will hear from a user of the plugin about a feature request. It’s nice to hear about people using the plugin, makes me feel like I can actually create usable things.

If there is a write-up regarding my plugin, I will post a link to it here.

If you are a user of the plugin, send me an email and tell me what you think, even if you hate it!

So I spent about [insert very large number here] hours working on my plugin yesterday because someone told me that it wasn’t working for them! “That cannot be true” I thought. So I emailed (many, many times) and messaged the blogger attempting to use my plugin and after those many hours, I fixed it! Thanks in large part to her sticking with me and my plugin and not throwing in the towel. So I dub the 0.3 version of the Vox Crossposter the LuAnn version!

What was the problem you ask? Well it seems that you don’t need to include all of the normal html tags in an html email that make up a typical html page: html, head, body, and the ending tags for them. I could swear I read somewhere that you were supposed to do that. Well, you don’t! Anyway, having all those tags worked for me and everyone else I have heard from that uses the plugin except for LuAnn.

So what do I get for my hours of coding and debugging? More fan mail! This is my second piece of fanmail. Here is my post regarding my first piece of fan mail, just in case you haven’t been paying attention (or didn’t care).

On another front, I’m busy waiting for a copy of a file to be made (and it is taking forever!). Who would have thunk that it would take several hours for 200 million records to be copied?! Not me! Here’s hoping that I never screw up like that again!

I added a sidebar option in WordPress that allows you to choose whether or not you want to crosspost the entry you are creating to Vox or not. Here is a screen shot:

Beautiful ain’t it?!

For my next trick, I’m going to look into a bug that is putting a funky character (Â) in the Vox posts. See this comment. I have figured out that when you put a second space (or more) in your posts, WordPress replaces the subsequent spaces with the HTML non-breaking character to ensure that the spacing is preserved (HTML collapses white space; it will only recognize a single space unless you explicityly use the ” &nbsp” character). I need to figure out why that’s showing up as a funky character when a post is publiched in Vox.

Big yay to Brandice for sending me my first piece of fanmail! Receiving positive feedback is nice; almost as nice as getting a paycheck.

Since I’m so proud of my WordPress plugin, I figured I’d go ahead and spread the word about it in the hopes of everybody in the world (that has a WordPress blog and a Vox blog) would use my plugin.
I’ve posted stories to Digg, Reddit, Netscape (not that anybody reads that crap anyway), Shoutwire and of course, WP-plugins.net.