Catastrophe

  
If you visited this site from about 2pm last night you may have noticed the site was unavailable. In my rush to setup a new installation of Wordpress for another site, I accidentally deleted the SQL tables for my blog, meaning I lost nearly five years worth of posts!

Luckily I was able to secure a backup from Tim, which allowed me to try to restore 80MB of SQL in the smallest amount of time possible.

On a side note, I have installed the DISQUS comment plugin which means that if you have visited a DISQUS powered site before, you will be able to track your comments on wherever you have posted. It also allows you to vote up or vote down a comment, so if a topic gets heated, you can show how much you like or dislike someone’s opinion.

I seem to have a really achy back, too much hunching over a keyboard I reckon!

5 Social Wordpress Plugins You Should Use

I consider myself to be “involved” with the social media scene and look to make my internet experience simple but effective. I belong to many social sites which allow me to get the latest news or even share some of my own.

I run a self hosted Wordpress blog and use a few plugins to help keep my blog involved with social media as possible. Today I want to share with you a few simple suggestions that you may be able to use on your blog.

1. FriendFeed Activity Widget

The FriendFeed Activity Widget allows you to share your progress through your favourite social websites. If you don’t have a FriendFeed account, simply head over to their website, tie in all your blog, mirco-blogging, photo, video website credentials and alert your website readers to what you have been getting upto. You can see this widget in action on the sidebar of this blog.

2. Social Homes

Social Homes is a nifty little plugin that you could say runs along side the FriendFeed plugin. By entering your usernames on certain social sites, you can have a little widget full of relevant links to your other homes on the web. Again, look to the right and you will see this plugin in action.

Please note: I have added a few extra sites to this plugin, if you wish to use the version I edited, please contact me and I will email you the updated version. I have submitted this to the author and it’s a matter of where it will be used or not.

3. Twitter Tools

If you are a Twitter user, this plugin allows you to send and display tweets on/from your Wordpress blog. By adding your login info to the admin page, you can specify whether your blog alerts your Twitter feed every time you publish a new blog post.

I have disabled the sidebar display as my FriendFeed widget will only duplicate the Twitter information.

4. WP Greet Box

WP Greet Box is primarily aimed at blog owners who submit their content to social news sites. When a visitor lands on one of your pages, this plugin will allow you to tailor a greeting from where that particular user has come from. For instance, if your site was Dugg, this plugin would welcome visitors from Digg, asking them to Digg your site while they’re visiting. It also recognises Google, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Technorati and Twitter.

5. Sociable

This useful little plugin again targets the social news submitters out there. By activating this plugin, you can specify a range of sites that your visitors can submit your posts to. Instead of submitting all your own content, why not let a the people who read your site decide?

Here are a few suggestions to aid you in your quest for internet domination, if you know of anymore, please suggest them in the comments.

FriendFeed Sidebar Widget

You may have noticed over the past few days, I have been adding a few different buttons to the blog so you can interact with me around the web, not just on this blog. If you haven’t noticed, by all means cast your eyes right to the ten social media icons that will point you to some of my various social website hangouts.

I have also decided to head back to FriendFeed and synchronise all my information into one centralised feed. I have ported this information over to the sidebar of my blog using the very useful FriendFeed Activity Widget created by a talented designer by the name of Evan Sims. This plugin will collate activity and let you know what I have been interested in lately (yes, it could be considered stalkerish!).

If you are like me and a purveyor of social media websites, add me on Twitter, Friendfeed or even subscribe to the RSS feed to regular updates, it’s so easy your mother could do it!

Wordpress on the iPhone

I received my phone first thing Thursday morning and immediately set to work registering it on iTunes and charging it. It took most of the morning to get to grips with it’s design but once you get used to it you realize how truly clever this piece of kit is!

I’m sitting here at the breakfast table using the Wordpress app to type out a post,waiting to play football.

Email, SMS, Facebook you name it, I’m on it!

Illacrimo Theme Errors

Have you recently upgraded your Wordpress and found that you can’t logout, write new posts or change your theme? Does it result in a white page when you try to save?

I am not sure if this specific to the Illacrimo theme but to stop this happening, simply remove the following from the theme’s functions.php file (should be around line 24):

And that’s it! You should be able to go on your merry way dancing through the glades that Wordpress built!

Feature Updates

You may have already noticed that I have rolled out a few feature updates. Let me tell you a bit about them.

1. OpenID Support

OpenID is an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using little more than your personal URL. This means less usernames and passwords to remember and less time spent signing up for new sites. The plugin installed on m4tt.net allows commenters to use their OpenID to assure their identity as the author of the comment. It will also provide a framework for future OpenID-based services as OpenID functionality and it’s user base increases.

For example:

2. Post Rating

This plugin will allow users to vote for blog content on m4tt.net. It will allow me to gauge what readers of the blog are enjoying and also show in my sidebar what people are rating the highest for people like yourself to see. To use this feature, look at the bottom of any post on this blog and a rating bar should be visible for you to use.

Thanks to honest_ape for the inspiration.

3. RSS Updates

Some readers of this blog have had problems subscribing to my Feedburner RSS feeds. In order to allow people to syndicate with this blog and read my content in an RSS reader but not use the Feedburner URL, please bookmark or syndicate the following URL: http://www.m4tt.net/feed/atom/

Thats about it really! Any suggestions or comments, please do leave them using the forms provided.