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: 30%

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: 57%

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: 73%

There’s been quite a lot of work behind the scenes and I have to say that I am really enjoying WordPress. Coming into it as a new user and complete novice, it was very easy to get up to speed and do the things I wanted to do.

At this point I have tested a great many plugins, but removed most of them after finding they didn’t function how I wanted. The other plugins work just great, although I’ve modified many of those in the core code for extra features I wanted to have.

For example, I’m now using the Share This plugin and while I found it to be excellent in comparison to Sociable (which I have too), it didn’t pop the links into new windows like I wanted. I tweaked the code of the plugin to now create a new window when links are clicked. I hate taking a user away from the main site.

I’ve also update much of the php to allow me to turn off various plugins and that feature will simply disappear from a page rather then cause an error with the site. I still have tiny things I’m adding or changing, but the core of things are just how I want them.

If anyone wants some info on how I’ve done something…drop me a line.

Cheers.

Popularity of this post: 66%

So recently I’ve been adding things to all the blogs as they come to mind, such as Flickscribe’s Top 5 movies from the weekend boxoffice or the quotes that are shown on all three sub-site’s home pages. I did a ton of minor changes as well.

I also cleaned up all the adsense code so that pages that don’t need to have ads (such as the contact form) don’t have them and incorporated a bit more adbrite stuff. We’ll see how it goes.

One big problem I ran into was regarding image uploading in Wordpress. Here is the problem I found:

1) make a post and load “image-person” and title it “image-person”
2) display it as a thumbnail with a link
3) publish that post
4) make a new post and load “image-dog” and title it “image-person”
5) publish post

What you will find is that if you go to the older post and click the thumbnail, you expect the image of “image-person”, but you get “image-dog” instead. This problem was most noticable on Popscribe now that I’m getting some images with the same name or title being uploaded.

I spent hours trying to figure out why the wrong post_ID was being sent to the attachment page or what the parent_ID or whatever in the database was saying. Instead, I found the answer was in the WordPress code itself and I’m sure the fix will be in the next update (2.0.1 is what I have now).

When an image is uploaded, it wasn’t checking that the attachment slugs (names) were unique, so it would load “image-person” and “image-dog”, yet the slug would be the title “image-person” for both files and WordPress would always pull the newer one in the attachment page.

The fix for this is here

It’s some code you can replace in the post.psp that will check the attachment slugs as a name check. Now you upload those same two files I mentioned before and you get “image-person” and “image-person-1″ so the attachment pages will work properly.

I’m just glad to have it fixed.

Popularity of this post: 52%