Blog Maintenance

I did a little maintenance on the ol’ blog this week.  For one, I upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2 because they said it was an “urgent security release.”  Okay, I’ll upgrade.  It took a whole 3 minutes. I even used my Maintenance Mode plugin, which I love.

Some of the plugins I use also got a little lovin’ – Subscribe to Comments went to v2.1.2, Akismet went to v2.1.3, and Twitter Tools finally supported WP 2.3 with v1.1b1.  All of these updates were easy and quick. 

Now that Twitter Tools supports WordPress 2.3, my tweets gets created automatically when I post a new entry on the blog.   Another cool thing I added was a sidebar portion that lists my most recent tweets (this comes with Twitter Tools).

Note: out of the box, the way Twitter Tools displays tweets looks horrible.  So I did my own little custom CSS to make the first line kind of highlighted in a blue-green tint by using a background image per LI tag, and also modified the actual Twitter Tools code to display the time with the hyperlink FIRST instead of at the end of the line.  I was dismayed to see that the authors didn’t allow the end user to define how they wanted the tweet displayed.  To me, it’s much more important to see how recent the tweet is, and THEN see the content. But either way, the plugin should allow personalization and custom CSS without requiring manual code work.

This is the code I changed in twitter-tools.php (original line numbers shown):

if (count($tweets) > 0) {
      foreach ($tweets as $tweet) {
//       $output .= '      

The original line that comes with it is commented out (line 449), and the line I changed it to is now shown as line 450. This is based on version 1.1b1.

I also added this to my styles.php for the CSS to make it look more prettified:

/* twitter tools */
div.aktt_tweets {
        text-align: left;
        padding-left: 10px;
        padding-right: 10px;
}
div.aktt_tweets li {
        background-image:url('images/gradiated-3.jpg');
        color: black;
}

And just today I installed WP Syntax so I could finally MAYBE display code snippets in a post correctly.  Sheesh this is hard to do!  I tried the Preserve Code Formatting plugin but it didn’t work very well for me. Even with WP Syntax, tinyMCE still has problems with the greater than signs and stuff, and it converts them to the ampersand equivalents, so I had to turn off visual editing just to complete this post.

Hmm, since I’m composing this post “early” and scheduling it to actually show up tomorrow morning, I wonder if Twitter Tools is smart enough to not do a tweet? It probably isn’t. Shucks. I’m now exposed as a fraud. I guess that’s better than being exposed as a fraulein.

Oh, and Happy New Year!