bioneural.net » Internet

Open Share Icon from idea to Google

Bruce — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:27:23 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

You know a concept has merit when it's picked up by Google. Google have adopted the Open Share Icon (OSI), the product of a creative partnership that I'm proud to have played a part in. This is something to celebrate: you don't need highly paid professionals or deep pockets to pull off a good idea: you just need plain-old enthusiasm and an unmet need. Here is the story of how the Open Share Icon (OSI) came to be. The Google toolbar—now with OSI A proposal On 20 March 2008 I read that Shareaholic had been threatened by ShareThis.com over the use of the Share Icon in their functionally similar Firefox extension. After discussing this with David Hall and Icerabbit we agreed that next day I would write to Jay Meattle, entrepreneur at Shareaholic, to seek confirmation this was so—and to float the idea of his involvement in an alternative icon project. Having recently proposed and completed the design of the Geotag Icon we were game to be involved ourselves: If you needed assistance with the vector graphics, moral or other practical support, I know of at least a couple of volunteers ;-) Iteration after iteration Things moved quickly: we didn't wait for a response. David, Icerabbit and I exchanged an enormous number of design candidates within the space of a few days. Most of our designs involved hands: Our final selection came down to stylised "seeing hands", which we described in the design note I sent to Jay on 24 March as follows: We just couldn't help ourselves ...

Share Twitter locations using Google Maps

Bruce — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:44:25 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

With my tweets integrated into WordPress the next challenge was to integrate my Twitter location with my custom Google Map. This recipe uses a WordPress theme functions.php file and the excellent Geo Mashup plug-in for WordPress. One advantage of this method is that you don't need to add custom location tags to each tweet (as you do for example here using Pipes). This method simply reads the location as set in your Twitter profile until you change it (and tweet again). The code given here tested on Geo Mashup 1.1.3 and WordPress 2.7.1. Setting your location in Twitter You can manually update the text of your Twitter profile location on the web via Settings > Account > Location, but an easier way to do this is via a location-aware client such as Tweetie or Twitterrific for iPhone, either of which can optionally update your profile location in conjunction with a tweet: Alternatively if you want to update your location without tweeting use a client such as Sparrow for iPhone (which will simultaneously update Fire Eagle to the same location): Note, however, that the following code extracts your location from the Twitter user timeline so you do need to tweet before this method will reflect your new location. You should be aware of the potential privacy issues around real-time location sharing via services such as Twitter, Yahoo!'s Fire Eagle, and Google's Latitude. Best to keep your location approximate if you publish it at all. A function to get your location from Twitter Create the following function in the functions.php ...

Latest tweets using SimplePie

Bruce — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:17:14 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

It's taken me a while to warm to Twitter. I created the Quicklinks category on my blog for sharing things that didn't warrant a full post, but even that's too much effort sometimes—especially if it's just sharing a link. You might argue that's what bookmarking services like Digg and Delicious are for, but even then it's a multistep process. I've only recently become aware of just how well suited the Twitter API is to sharing links or updating your status message to multiple services with minimal effort. This post shares some PHP code to integrate your tweets within your WordPress blog, and code to simplify getting your WordPress posts into other people's tweets. The interconnectedness of tweeting A few examples: I use the Twitter updater plug-in to notify Twitter of new posts on my WordPress blog. Darkslide on my iPhone can post a Flickr image link via the iPhone Twitterrific app. Most of my links are discovered in my preferred RSS reader NetNewsWire, which can send these to desktop Twitterrific (News menu). The Twitter app for Facebook will update your Facebook status using your tweets. Twitter offer an RSS feed which can be used in conjunction with the SimplePie PHP library to bring tweets to your WordPress blog. This last example is the focus of this post. I will assume that you have already downloaded and correctly installed SimplePie for WordPress from here. A SimplePie template for Twitter Create a text file called tweets.tmpl containing the following: {IF_ERROR_BEGIN}{ERROR_MESSAGE}{IF_ERROR_END} {ITEM_LOOP_BEGIN} {ITEM_DATE_UTC}{ITEM_DESCRIPTION}# {ITEM_LOOP_END} Upload this file to the following directory on your server: /wp-content/plugins/simplepie-plugin-for-wordpress/templates/ Now for a little ...

Geo Mashup implementation guide

Bruce — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 23:06:46 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Geo Mashup is one of my favourite WordPress plug-ins (and no, that's not just because it adopted the Geotag Icon). It neatly integrates geographically-relevant blog posts with a custom Google Map displayed within your own site. The Maps API in turn allows those willing to dirty their hands with a little JavaScript the option to pull in geotagged content from external sources, including photos (e.g. from Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa Web Albums), content from other blogs (via GeoRSS feeds), and placemarks from Google Earth (uploaded KML/ KMZ files, even with network links). What follows is an implementation guide, sharing some usage tips and the code used on bioneural.net. The code given here applies to Geo Mashup 1.1.1 and WordPress 2.6.2. Geo Mashup 1.2 was released on 19.03.09. Some of the code here may require modification. Installing the plugin Download Geo Mashup here, expand the ZIP archive and upload the geo-mashup directory to /wp-content/plugins/ on your web server. Log in to WordPress as Administrator and activate Geo Mashup from the Plugins tab. Once active there will be a new Geo Mashup tab under Settings, and you'll need to visit this to enter your Google Maps API key (if you don't yet have one, click the Get yours here link). Don't worry about the other options at this stage. Creating a map page The tag reference gives you the choice of two types of tag to use with Geo Mashup. Shortcode tags are added to posts or pages on a case-by-case basis. Template tags on the other hand involve adding ...

Gearing up for SSL to WordPress with Safari

Bruce — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:19:01 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

A friend brought an impending WordPress security exploit to my attention, in the form of a CookieMonster. Your data might be at risk if you administer your blog from a public Internet connection (e.g. WiFi in a café). Securing your authentication cookies with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) provides a defensive countermeasure for your admin loggins, and WordPress.com users now have a checkbox to "Always use HTTPS when visiting administration pages". That checkbox is absent in self-hosted WordPress 2.6.2, but here's how to enable HTTPS and accelerate your admin sessions using Google Gears via Safari. Lock up all your cookies with a secret key You may have already defined a SECRET_KEY to secure the cookies that store information about your visitors, a feature introduced in WordPress 2.5. If you didn't do this visit key generator 1.0 and copy the output into your wp-config.php file after the opening PHP tag, so it looks something like this (don't use this one):

Publicizing WordPress post revisions

Bruce — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 09:26:22 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

WordPress 2.6 introduced post revisions, a form of version control that allows you to review or revert to previous editions of a post or page on your WordPress blog. The value of this feature has generated some debate, largely because it's "on by default" with no easy toggle to disable it. The thing is notification of post revisions is private, within the admin interface. So how do you make the date of last editing public? One of my pet hates is undated web content; if there's no date I'll often move on without reading the page content. Sometimes you can glean the date of first publication from a post permalink, as in this example (day and name, in Settings > Permalinks): http://www.bioneural.net/2008/08/02/first-track-logger-for-iphone-released/ There are two problems with relying on this method alone: Did you first publish on August 2 or February 8? There are different ways of interpreting dates; It's only the date of first publication, not the date the post was last revised. Clarifying the date of publication One option is to time stamp the publication date in your theme (as many WordPress themes do), which introduces a little more flexibility to deal with the first issue by specifying the name of the month to combat ambiguity: A simple code snippet for this would be: Published by on Consult the Codex for options that allow you to customize the display of date and time formats in your theme. Showing "last modified" dates I've searched the Codex and the Forums for a means of getting the date of the last ...

Resolving router issues with Be Unlimited

Bruce — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:02:48 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Be Unlimited provide ADSL2+ services in the UK, supplying a Be-branded Thompson SpeedTouch wireless router called the BeBox. The Member Forum is full of complaints about router instability and errant behaviour. My 780WL had been doing well for around 6 months, then started resetting itself sometimes several times within a short period, but at least daily. Sometimes after a reset I was left with no Internet connectivity. Eventually Be sent me a replacement router, which came with replacement problems. So how do you turn a flaky BeBox into a rock-solid Internet router? Just take the "Be" out of your BeBox. Be deny any blame Be offered me a variety of explanations and solutions for the frequent disconnection/ resets I was experiencing: The router firmware was corrupt (this was suggested by each of the 4 support staff I contacted—perhaps a stock response. I explained I couldn't replace it using a Mac—see below); Local errors my router reported were indicative of a problem between the router and my computer; Local errors my router reported were likely due to line noise (despite very good data rates it seems, and a clear Quiet Line Test—17070 option 2); The replacement router was disconnecting because I was using the wrong DNS server IP addresses (I was; Be's instructions for configuring the replacement router for a static IP were completely wrong; I got no connection at all until I was given the correct gateway IP address over the phone); Ongoing issues with the replacement router indicated that the problem was "something on my network", ...

Customizing WordPress feed content

Bruce — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:38:12 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

When I last looked at customizing feeds in WordPress, it was all to do with being able to offer a summary and full text feed simultaneously—making use of WordPress' flexible feed URL syntax and a .htaccess file. In this post I look at modifying the actual contents of the feed using a functions.php file (which may already exist as part of your current theme). Just as WordPress provides a number of hooks for adding or removing actions in your theme header (see here), so to do the core files that generate your feeds. Editing the core files is however discouraged (it makes upgrading a pain), and although you can build your own replacement feed templates an easy alternative is adding a few lines to your theme's functions.php file. As a perpetual PHP beginner I feel obliged to warn you that use of the following code is at your own risk. If there are any PHP/ WordPress experts reading this who can improve on my code please make yourself known ;-) Removing WP version info Somewhere, a while back, I read a tip about not including the WordPress version you are running in your template header—potentially allowing hackers to identify you as a target if you haven't kept up-to-date. It's easy to remove if present. For example, in the K2 theme just delete the following line from header.php: From bioneural.net:Mac-based web developers...]]> ... http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ Rendered in a feed reader humans will see this: The Creative Commons icon is hopefully recognisable and links to the correct license; the link to bioneural.net ...

Pages and searching in WordPress 2.5

Bruce — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:07:34 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

WordPress 2.5 lets you search across pages (non-blog entries) as well as posts. This is undoubtedly a good thing, but if your pages are liable to turn up in site searches you might want to make a couple of changes to stop page content from swamping your results screen and improve appearances if you use category icons. In WordPress search results post content is displayed up to the  tag: The rest of the post continues, but when viewed on the non-single/non-permalink web page such as archives, categories, front page, and searches, the post is shown as an excerpt to the more point. Pages don't usually have a more tag, because there is no excerpt or "teaser" destined for use in a feed. Thus when a page appears in a search results it will display in its entirety. Furthermore, because I'm using the Category Icons plugin, post titles will display alongside the category icon for ease of identification. Since pages don't usually have a category, they will show indented with no icon. Here is a search for "architect", showing an iconless page result occupying the screen: With the addition of  to the top of each page, and the use of an icon for Uncategorized content (assuming all posts are categorised) we get this: Much more usable and informative.

Mapping fun with GeoRSS and geo-discovery

Bruce — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:26:26 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net doi:tSglPpAB7a8nfM :

Continuing the recent geo-fixation trend evident on this site, this article shares the results of a slightly deeper delve into GeoRSS and looks at a great browser add-on that offers auto-discovery of geotagged content in webpages and in some feeds. What is GeoRSS? Wikipedia describes GeoRSS as "an emerging standard for encoding location as part of an RSS feed." It also encodes location in Atom feeds, and rather than the singular "standard" there are actually two variations (GeoRSS-Simple and the more advanced GeoRSS-GML). A third encoding, W3C Basic Geo, is depreciated but still in use (e.g. by Flickr; see below). I happen to use the Geo Mashup plugin for WordPress to geotag articles on this site. As well as adding appropriate metadata tags into the head of location-specific posts, the plugin automatically adds GeoRSS-Simple encoding to my feeds. The GeoRSS-Simple feeds are identified with this namespace declaration in the header: xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss" Each item in the feed will be marked-up with a coordinate pair separated by a whitespace and enclosed in a point tag. For example: 50.185676 8.464943 And that's it. So what can you do with it? GeoRSS in your blog feed In WordPress you can create a feed for any category or any tag just by putting /feed/ at the end of the URL. This is ideal if you have a dedicated category or tag for geotagged content. In my case I had geotagged content spanning several categories, so I decided to go back and add the tag "geotag" to all my geotagged articles across all categories. This ...