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 bit of a surprise as that code hadn’t changed in years. Turns out, it was the browsers that had changed.

I had moved the theme browser from my site (to reduce server load) to my hosting account at Joyent a long time ago, and set it up on the domain managedtasks.com. The frameset page and the top frame were hosted on alexking.org, while the bottom frame - the theme viewer - was on managedtasks.com.

This combination stopped working because the browsers changed their cookie security settings. If you have your cookies set to “only accept cookies from sites I visit”, then your browser was rejecting the cookie from managedtasks.com (because the URL in your browser was alexking.org).

If this cookie wasn’t set, the proper theme was not displayed; hence the theme browser being broken .

I’ve moved it all onto managedtasks.com now, and everything appears to work again.

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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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This plugin gives you the ability to remove the link a commenter left as their URL without removing the entire comment. A link to do this is added to your new comment e-mail notifications and to the comments list in your admin area.

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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This plugin shows a license with terms of your choosing in your comments form. You can edit the terms of your license in the options page. You can see it in use on my site wherever there are comment forms.

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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This plugin logs 404 hits on your WordPress powered site and will notify you of them via e-mail or in an RSS feed.

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: The RSS feed was broken in version 1.2, version 1.2a is now available to fix this.

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I’ll try to get updated versions out soon - I’ll update this post with status as the plugins are updated.

• 404 Notifier - tested, version 1.2 is WP 2.5 compatible
• Articles - untested
• Category Overload - untested
• Comment License - tested, version 1.2 is WP 2.5 compatible
• Delink Comment Author - tested, version 1.2 is WP 2.5 compatible
• Link Harvest - untested
• Old Post Alert - tested, version 1.0 is WP 2.5 compatible
• Popularity Contest - broken in 2.5, fix found
• Share This - tested, all tested versions are WP 2.5 compatible
• Shortcut Macros - tested, version 1.2 is WP 2.5 compatible
• Twitter Tools - tested, versions 1.1 and up are WP 2.5 compatible.
• WP Mobile Edition - tested, versions 2.x are WP 2.5 compatible
• WP Grins - untested, reportedly broken in 2.5
• WP Since Last Visit - untested, needs updating in general
• WP Unformatted - tested, version 1.1 is WP 2.5 compatible

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I use Twitter Tools as an archiver - I want a copy of my Twitter content that I can work with locally, and that’s about all I really use it for. The additional features were added for the sake of completeness, as an exercise in working with the Twitter API, and due to requests from other users.

I’ve got a number of changes¹ and new features I’m prepping for an update to Twitter Tools, should I include some editorializing on how people should use the broadcasting features responsibly in the next update? I’ve never really seen that as my place - preferring to let people use their own judgment.

Comments?

1. Option to include @replies in the sidebar, make all @usernames clickable, make URLs in digests clickable, selective broadcasting of blog posts to Twitter, and a few more things I can’t recall at the moment. [back]

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1. Better examples and instructions for localization¹ and customization of Social Web services.
2. The ability to turn off all sharethis.com tracking information if you want to. Note you may need to deactivate and reactivate the plugin to get the option to appear on the Options page.

I’d recommend the widget version (2.x) for most people since it provides tracking and will support a variety of new features that are in the works, however if you need the control of hosting it locally for whatever reason, ShareThis Classic is your huckleberry.

You can download the Classic version from my ShareThis page.

1. Internationalization is not yet supported in the 2.x versions. [back]

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Here is what we were trying to do: copy the production database to the staging database so we could properly configure and test everything before pushing the new site live. Pretty simple right? It was, until we noticed a bunch of weird character encoding issues on the staging site.

It turned out that while the database tables were set to a Latin-1 (latin1), the content that populated those tables was encoded as UTF-8 (utf8). A variety of attempts to fix this failed, but what succeeded was as follows:

1. Export the data as Latin-1. Because MySQL knows that the table is already using a Latin-1 encoding, it will do a straight export of the data without trying to convert the data to another character set. If you try to export as UTF-8, MySQL appears to attempt to convert the (supposedly) Latin-1 data to UTF-8 - resulting in double encoded characters (since the data was actually already UTF-8).
2. Change the character set in the exported data file from ‘latin1′ to ‘utf8′. Since the dumped data was not converted during the export process, it’s actually UTF-8 encoded data.
3. Create your new table as UTF-8 If your CREATE TABLE command is in your SQL dump file, change the character set from ‘latin1′ to ‘utf8′.
4. Import your data normally. Since you’ve got UTF-8 encoded data in your dump file, the declared character set in the dump file is now UTF-8, and the table you’re importing into is UTF-8, everything will go smoothly.

I can confirm that a half-dozen or so variations on the above do not work. This includes INSERT INTO newdb.newtable SELECT * FROM olddb.oldtable;.

Also, if you’re doing this for a WordPress¹ site (like we were), keep in mind that copying over the production database will generally mean that WP-Cache is enabled. You’ll want to remember to turn that off. Yeah.

1. This is a fairly common issue in older WordPress installs because the MySQL database default is commonly Latin-1, and older versions of WordPress did not specify the character set when creating the database tables (so they would default to Latin-1) and the default encoding in the WordPress settings is UTF-8. [back]

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Thanks to the Squadcast team for having me on.

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Reporting

This is a big one that lots of people have been waiting for, myself included. When the ShareThis team and I first spoke about working together, this was an item we talked about quite a bit. Having a centralized service makes providing interesting reporting possible. The current reports are quite nice and are more than I’d have ever been able to offer:

There are snazzy little effects for the charts - good fun stuff that isn’t annoying.

I’m surprised that e-mail is as far down on the list for my site as it is. I wonder what would happen if I swapped the active tab to be the E-mail tab instead of the Social Web tab.

I’m also excited about what can still be done in this area, and some of the ideas I’ve heard are pretty interesting.

All of you WordPress folks that have registered and have been using the 2.x version of ShareThis now have a nice set of reports available to you when you log in to sharethis.com. I look forward to hearing about which of the stats you find most interesting.

TypePad Support

A ShareThis TypePad plugin is now available. A warm welcome to our TypePad friends, I know many of you have asked me for this and I’m thrilled it’s available now.

Blogger Support

A ShareThis Blogger plugin is now available. Same as above - many of you have asked me for this and I’m very pleased it’s available now for you.

It’s great to see ShareThis growing and thriving as it is, and a lot of fun to be a part of it.

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