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last.fm Weekly Plugin

gabriel — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:34:23 +0000

The last.fm Weekly plugin allows you to create weekly posts of the music you’ve listened to on last.fm.

You can chose to use either the artist or album feed.

Unlike some other plugins, this one does not use the scheduled cron function in WordPress. Since last.fm updates your weekly feed only once a week, after 12:00 Sunday GMT, there is no reason to check on every page load for a schedule. This means you will either have to use the manual update option for posts, or a standard *nix cron.

I’ve been working on this plugin for a little while now, more as a learning experience than anything else. It’s a very simple, yet hand plugin, based loosely on the last.fm Tumblr pipes project. I’ve started with a few basic options, and there is an About page that gives info on how exactly to use the plugin. I’m still working on a little more documentation, which will be included in the README file.

I have not submitted this to the WordPress Directory yet, now will this version ever be submitted. Version 1.1 will be the first official release.

I am writing a detailed post about how to start writing WordPress plugins, since it took me forever to piece together all the info from various sites.

Download last.fm Weekly

WordPress bug and CentOS

gabriel — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 16:38:31 +0000

Turns out, the Worpress 2.9 bug is actually caused by cURL. If you’re a centOS user, the version of cURL that is available from all the repos is 7.15.5. The current version from cURL is 7.19.7. The problem is, that there are lots of dependencies for later versions of cURL and libcURL to work on centOS 4 or 5, that are not found in the repos. For now, I’m sticking with 7.15.5, as upgrading to 7.19.7 did not turn out so well on my server. As usual, I feel a lot more comfortable with a Debian box, instead of this RedHat derivative, but that’s what my hosting offered. Once I get a little free time, I may actually try to get a more recent version of cURL working, but it won’t be this weekend.

I ordered a 1 TB drive for my 24″ iMac, and I’m going to be installing that this weekend. Should be fun.

WordPress 2.9 bugs

gabriel — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:59:48 +0000

As the WordPress team has already mentioned, there are several bugs in 2.9. There is a beta version of 2.9.1 available. However, I try not to run beta versions of WordPress. I am actually experiencing one of the bugs, missed scheduled posts. I use a scheduler to post tweets at the end of the day, and it has not worked since upgrading to 2.9.

If you’re like me, and don’t want to wait for a final release of 2.9.1, here’s a way to fix this bug:

Missed scheduled post bug fix

Just replace the 3 files supplied, be sure to make backup versions of the files before hand, and it should fix the problem for you.

WPTouch iPhone Theme

gabriel — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:08:37 +0000

The WPTouch iPhone Theme for WordPress is amazing. If you have an iPhone or iTouch, try out the site. It even has an option to turn the mobile theme on and off. The theme also makes WordPress look better on other mobile devices.