This release is just the same as 1.5b2, but fixes the duplicate custom field issue for people running WordPress 2.6+.

Hopefully this will be ready for a full release shortly, with only minor changes (if any). I guess we’ll find out soon.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and e-mail me a link to the thread.

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JabberWerx AJAX is a set of thin client JavaScript libraries that can be easily embedded into existing web sites and web applications to add rich push functionality (chat, live content updates, etc.) to them.

There are easy to drop in bits for one to one chat (tabbed), group chat and a library that allows you to push data updates to your page (think pushed stock or twitter updates). It’s a pretty good system to get up and running easily.

Most of us think of XMPP/Jabber as a chat protocol, and it does that very well (as anyone using GTalk can attest to); but it’s also got a very interesting place in the web 2.0 space as a real time data push channel. Using push instead of pull/poll can dramatically reduce server loads, and also gives you new data faster.¹

Building libraries and building applications are two very different things. With applications you need to make functionality available to your end users. With libraries, you need to build robust and complete solutions that will be used in ways you probably haven’t thought of yet; abstraction and building small, distinct components is key. It’s a fun and different challenge.

I’m very proud that my company, Crowd Favorite, was able to work with the great folks at Jabber to help bring this concept to fruition.

1. Steve has a great Q&A on this. [back]

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This release has a couple of bug fixes (from version 1.5b1) and a couple of new features:

• fixed a logical bug that made the “exclude replies” option work backwards (oops!)
• removed a try/catch for PHP 4 compatibility (oops!)
• added support for hashtags (linked to search.twitter.com)
• abstracted all API endpoints and URLs so that it can theoretically support any service that implements the Twitter API

Hopefully this will be ready for a full release shortly, with only minor changes (if any). I guess we’ll find out soon.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

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ShareThis is a plugin that makes it easy for your visitors to share your content to other people or online destinations and social web sites. You can see it in action by clicking the ShareThis link at the bottom of any of the posts or pages on this site.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the ShareThis Support Forums and the team will be happy to help you out.

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The new plugin makes it easy for you to enable Lijit search from the default WordPress search box, or you can add in the full Lijit widget wijit if you like.

I use Lijit search on alexking.info, where I aggregate content from all of the various sites and services I publish content on. The Lijit search performs a search across all of that content - pretty slick.

I’m pretty pleased with the overall user experience for the plugin. It nicely handles set-up for new or existing users, gives straightforward options and instructions, and even brings in your Lijit search stats with a new link on the WordPress admin dashboard.

Many thanks to the great folks we were able to work with at Lijit in building the new plugin. It was a pleasure working with people that care deeply about their users and are also technically astute.

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The overall look has been updated with a great new design from Bryan Bell, and a number of little features have been added and minor tweaks made since the initial launch.

I’ve got a few more screenshots here, but it’s a lot more fun to just go poke around.

Here is a partial list of the changes:

• New theme design.
• Welcome message for first time visitors.
• List of Hot Topics next to the Create box.
• New Browse the News navigation.
• Integrated ads from the Deck.
• More little JavaScript effect niceties.
• Numerous behind the scenes changes for performance.

The main focus of the refresh was to make it easier for new visitors to explore the site. To this end we exposed more links to Hot Topics, added weight to the Browse the News (formerly Newsfix) button, and configured the Browse the News drawer to stay open on Browse the News pages. This last change keeps the other news topics visible more often, giving people enticing things to click on. Hopefully the results will be good.

Thanks, as always, to Dave Pell for trusting us to work on his baby. We have a lot of fun building and using Addictomatic.

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• Weekly digests! This needs a good deal of testing, help us find bugs
• Ability to exclude @replies from daily and weekly digests and blog posts
• Updates to match Twitter API changes so that “in reply to” links are properly created
• A bunch of little things I’m forgetting now

Weekly digests is a rather complicated feature to build, and took a good chunk of time. Luckily, we had a development sponsor for this feature, who I will thank properly in the final release (once I receive permission to give them credit).

I realize that version 1.2 never got to a final release version, but we had an opportunity to get these features built, so I took advantage of it.

Finding time to test, package and release plugins has been a bit challenging of late.¹ Hopefully I’ll have more time to get things pushed out going forward.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

UPDATE: looks like some PHP 5 specific code (a try/catch) snuck in here. If your server uses PHP 4, I recommend waiting until the next beta release.

1. My business has been growing which has brought a number of interesting and time consuming challenges. [back]

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It’s a pretty cool system. When you log in to your WordPress blog with PhoneFactor enabled, you receive a phone call asking you to press # to authorize. When you do so, you are logged in. If you do not, then the login attempt fails.

Basically, this means someone needs to get your username, password and phone in order to log in to your WordPress site as you.

Crowd Favorite worked with the PhoneFactor team to build this integration on their API layer. This was a fun project for us - it’s always nice to enhance WordPress by integrating features from another service.

Besides building the integration with the API to authenticate via phone, we also built the PhoneFactor registration step right into the WordPress admin so that the user wouldn’t have to leave the WordPress admin when activating the plugin and getting it set up. I think it’s a much better user experience.

We integrated some instructional banners into the WordPress admin pages to let people know the next steps to getting things set up after activating the plugin. We also built in some more advanced user features like whitelisting IP addresses so that you don’t have to use PhoneFactor authentication if you’re logging in from your home machine.

The download and more information are available at the WordPress Plugin repository on wordpress.org.

Enjoy!

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This was a fairly straightforward build. We created several different designs, went through a few revisions, detailed the custom features that were needed, and got cranking on them. With OpenedHand being located in Europe, all development was remote and all communication was done via e-mail.

Unlike some projects where we implement a design and configure it on their production server, in this case we created the theme for them and handed it off to them to set up. They are quite technical, so the configuration and set-up was not difficult for them and I was pleased that they were able to implement what we delivered without needing to ask a lot of questions. That indicates to me that we did a good job packaging and providing installation notes - things that are always a little hard to self-evaluate.

The OpenedHand team also made a couple of minor changes on their own to what we delivered to them before they put the new site live. This was very gratifying to me as well.

When you build things, you try to do so in such a way that they are easily maintained and modified. When your client is able to make changes without needing to ask for help, that’s generally a good sign that you’ve succeeded.

1. They do some cool stuff, be sure to check them out. [back]

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• Web Developers - someone with good back-end skills, experience building modern web applications (AJAX, etc.), knowledge of scalability best practices, etc. Should have good knowledge of PHP, SQL, JavaScript, etc.
• Designers - should be comfortable with creating designs in a variety of styles, including “web 2.0″ and modern web application UI styles. Should have good knowledge of XHTML and CSS, with JavaScript and back-end development skills being a good bonus.

We’re in the fortunate position of being able to work on the “fun” side of the web. We do a lot in the social web space; particularly WordPress work, building custom applications and we have a few projects of our own we’re working on.

We believe in hiring smart people and utilizing their skills - we’re not looking for “just another web developer/designer” to implement things. If this sounds like you, please get in touch.

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Addictomatic is a search aggregator, a way to see results from lots of sources all at once. Want to see the latest on a presidential candidate? Or the newest iPhone rumors? Or perhaps an ego search? Addictomatic has you covered.

This isn’t a traditional search engine. It’s not designed to help you find answers about some error message or the cheapest flight to Aruba. Addictomatic helps you see what’s going on now on a given topic.

We’ve implemented a number of pretty nice features on the site. One of these is the ability to drag and drop the results boxes around to re-order them.

You can also click the little X to remove a source from a page, or you can drop down the Available Sources panel to remove and add sources.

When you make changes to the results page, either re-ordering the sources and/or removing the ones you don’t want to include, you get a nice bookmarkable URL as a result. That URL will bring you right back to your search, with the layout you specified.

In addition to being able to create new searches, Addictomatic also offers a collection of NewsFix pages that gather the top sources on a variety of topics. I’m mainly visiting the Election 2008 and Baseball pages of late, though I also enjoy hitting Thought 2.0 and Web 2.0 with some regularity.

Building this service has been an interesting experience on a number of fronts, but one of the most exciting has been discovering that it’s something I want to use myself. I liked the idea when Dave first explained it to me, but I wasn’t sure how much I’d use it. As it turns out, I now use it quite a bit - it’s sticky. Much like Twitter, it’s value is hard to explain but readily apparent once you use it for a while.

The design of the site was done by well known designer Bryan Bell, who did a terrific job. We received the Photoshop files from him and created the front-end XHTML+CSS+JavaScript and all of the back-end systems.

Many thanks to Dave for letting us help him bring Addictomatic to the web.

UPDATE: Dave’s blog post is here and Bryan’s is here.

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The tag auto-complete feature is very nice, and I personally like it quite a bit. However, some of our clients have thousands of tags and were experiencing unacceptable slowdowns with this feature enabled. If you are experiencing problems like this, Tag Uncomplete may help.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

We’re hiring! Want to build WordPress plugins, create WordPress powered web sites and build fun web based products and services? Join the team at Crowd Favorite.

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• Show a link to the tweet being replied to for @replies.
• Option to exclude @replies from the sidebar tweets list.
• Make all @usernames clickable.
• Check that the tweets downloaded are indeed the user’s tweets - sometimes Twitter has hiccups.
• Don’t broadcast edits to old posts. Note: Twitter Tools always included code to only broadcast a post once. However edits to posts created before Twitter Tools was installed would be sent to Twitter because there is no “only when a post is first published” hook (that I’m aware of) in WordPress. Now a timestamp is saved upon installation to try to work around this.
• Ability to send blog posts to Twitter on a per-post basis (checkbox added to post authoring screen).
• Option to use jQuery instead of Prototype - useful if you like to tweet from your sidebar. The jQuery library is a smaller download than Prototype.
• Added post author setting.
• Added post tags setting.
• Added an option to make digest posts display tweets in either chronological or reverse-chronological order.
• Make URLs clickable in blog posts created from tweets and digest posts.

Note: after you install this version of Twitter Tools, you’ll need to go in and update your settings to take advantage of these new features - until you do, things will not work properly.

As you can see, there are many changes in this version, so I’m releasing this as a beta instead of a stable version. I’ve done about 5-6 hours of testing on it and I’m using it here, so I obviously think it’s probably safe for production, but it has not been widely tested… if I had to bet, I’d say there are still a few things still to be discovered. You’ve been warned.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

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• Since many people don’t RTFM, I’ve added some code that (hopefully) only tries to show the mobile theme if everything is installed correctly.
• If it’s not installed correctly, it will show an error message accordingly in WP 2.5+.
• Experimental: a link to explicitly enter the mobile interface - requires cookies.

This plugin creates a PDA friendly interface for your blog. You can see it in action by visiting this site in a mobile browser. If your mobile browser is not automatically detected, get your browser details here and let me know.

This plugin could use some CSS now that mobile browsers are supporting them better. Send me your submissions if you’d like to contribute.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

UPDATE: Version 2.1.1 is now available and should work better than version 2.1.

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This plugin allows you to set up shortcuts that expand into longer text when you save a post/page. For example, if you link to my site often, you might create a macro of ak. You type ##ak into a post/page and when you save it will expand to <a href="http://alexking.org/">Alex King</a>.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

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