Now this is pretty cool. I’m trying out some mobile blogging!

Popularity of this post: 36%

So I was using the plugin called SideRSS (and FirstRSS) for a long time to put up the headlines from my other blogs here and also at the bottom of the other ones. Basically cross-posting like mad. One snag I hit was that in December, SideRSS got stuck and I couldn’t get it to update for the life of me even though my RSS feed worked perfectly fine. It was almost like it was cached and frozen without refreshing.

As a “fix” I statred using my FeedBurner RSS feeds instead of my own and SideRSS started up again just fine only to get stuck again a couple weeks ago. Here’s the weird stuff. My feeds were fine, Technorati could see every post, FeedBurner was fine and seeing every post, but SideRSS just wouldn’t change at all. I tried looking for the cache, but I have no idea where it is. I enede up removing the feeds completely (which I didn’t want to do).

Then I finally found SimplePie and installed it in minutes. I found that it uses a different core than the WordPress one and seems to do an exceptional job with the RSS. It turns out that using the templates, I have far greater customization options than before so I highly recommend it to anyone.

Thankfully, everything is working again.

Popularity of this post: 44%

One thing I find with Wordpress is that with each plugin you add, you have extra hours involved in making the code XHTML compliant. I still have yet to find a way around the YouTube video ad code problem that I mentioned in a previous post. Sigh. This time around I added a plugin to a few of my sites for Buzzfeed and sure enough…there were compliance issues.

First of all, the CSS styles for the images get located into the page code in the same place where Buzzfeed shows up. This causes a problem so I copied and pasted the styles into my own style sheet and then deleted that section from the template.php file located in the plugin folder. The next problem I ran into had to do with the item titles. If a Buzzfeed item was called “Jim’s Computer,” then the Alt tag for the image would go all screwy. This is because they used apostrophes all through the PHP plugin echo code.

Again you want to edit the same template.php file and look for the following section in the 3rd echo set:

alt=\”{$buzz[’title’]}\”

You want to change this to the following and then don’t close the file yet. We won’t be done.

alt=’{$buzz[’title’]}’

Notice I only changed the apostrophes to a \” on each side, but now it will work fine. If a feed item is “Jim’s Computer” then it won’t be a problem.

The final step is to find the “BuzzFeed” link at the top of this entire block of code and the “Add To Your Site” at the bottom. They forgot to add the closing anchor tags on these links which also screws up the compliance. Put them in right after the text I quoted above and then save the file and upload. Your site should be compliant now. Cheers!

Popularity of this post: 65%

Just last night I got some weird error trying to get into one of my sites. It was a WordPress 403 Error, except the page was telling me something about being a spammer and downloading tools to fix it. It said if I couldn’t fix the problem myself then I was to email the site admin and of course it gave me my own email address.

I was starting to think the worst and started searching Google to see who else this had happened to. I lucked out right away and found out that it was the Bad Behaviour Plugin that was a problem. To make a long story short, don’t panic, go to the link below and download the updated plugin, FTP to your server and you’ll be in.

Bad Behaviour 2.0.11 Fix

It explains more at the site of why this problem happened. I hope this helps if it’s happened to you.

Popularity of this post: 69%

I’m going on vacation next week and I’ll be working on a few things for the site like some posts and maybe a few other little tweaks. In all honesty, there’s not much more I want to do to any of the sites. I’ve thought about listing the more popular posts on the sidebars and that’s about it.

I did start some site tag linking in posts and I think tonight I’ll make it work across all the sites.

I’d also like to find some great writers and talk to you. No matter what you know, I’ve set up a great syystem that can be used by anyone so if you’ce got the writing itch, then contact me and we’ll go from there.

Popularity of this post: 68%