Hey, there’s a new widget that can display user pics of people you follow (and people who follow you) on Twitter. It updates whenever you gain a new follower. That’s a new widget for WordPress I wrote a few days ago, and received aproval from the WordPress.org plugin directory today, so it’s the official launch. Go get yours right over here: Twitter Followers Widgets and...
Customize Posts Order in WordPress via Custom Fields
I came across this last night, might be helpful for some of you ;) Sorting posts in a customized order is pretty simple with the WordPress custom fields mechanism and custom SQL queries. Start off with a basic query: $querystr = " SELECT wposts.* FROM $wpdb->posts wposts, $wpdb->postmeta wpostmeta WHERE wposts.ID = wpostmeta.post_id AND wpostmeta.meta_key = 'order' AND wposts.post_type =...
Cloud Tips: Amazon EC2 Email & S3 CNAME Issues
So you moved your blog or website (or whatever) to Amazon EC2 and wondering why your e-mail notices have stopped working? Now I know there’s bunch of articles about the EC2 email issues, and most of them state that the letters are getting into the spam boxes or aren’t getting delivered at all, because Amazon’s IP pool has been blacklisted by most e-mail providers. Don’t...
Twitter API: Picking the Right Source
I’m sure you noticed that a few weeks ago Twitter changed the source that came unsigned via the API from web to API which could basically reveal any robot that is trying to act human, right? Well if you look at the statuses/update method in the Twitter API documentation they don’t say anything about the source parameter. Strange, right? Well I read something about it on some forums...
Working With Amazon EC2: Tips & Tricks
It’s been a while now since I’ve been hosting on Amazon Web Services and I’d just like to point out some issues I had and quick ways of solving them. We’re gonna talk about setting up a server that would serve not only you, but your clients too, cause $100/mo is quite expensive, isn’t it? So let’s begin and keep this as straightforward as possible. If you...
Foller.me: MySQL Tweaking & Optimization
As I mentioned in the interview with @enked on his website Chidimar.com, I had serious problems with MySQL database optimization on the Foller.me project. The current public stable version (beta-1) is using the MyISAM engine and it’s not holding much data – profiles, locations, geo points for the followers geography. In the new version (currently dev-1 and hopefully beta-2 in a few...
Have You Tried the Amazon Web Services?
Amazon EC2, EBS, S3.. I’ve been looking for the perfect web hosting for over two years now. Is this it? A few months ago I really liked MediaTemple cause they offered pretty good US hosting starting from $20/mo, which was quite good for the Foller.me project, so at the starting point I chose them. Their service is cool, definitely worth the money, but. A few weeks have passed, along with...
Interview: The Woo is a Mix of w00t & WordPress
I’ve managed to chat with one of the three founders of WooThemes lately – Adii Pienaar. Adii was very busy during the last couple of weeks with the Woo2 Release, but he was still so kind to answer some questions I had, so here we go: @kovshenin Okay Adii, how are things going at WooThemes right now? I mean after WordPress has released 2.8 and most of your clients have upgraded (I...
SquareSpace, Thesis and Back to WordPress
Yup, that’s the way it generally goes. I finally got myself an account at SquareSpace to play around with, and I poked the Thesis Framework a couple of months ago, so I now got to a conclusion – I’m not satisfied with any of those. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with SquareSpace, it’s a very neat and highly customizable blogging platform. I liked playing around...
Foller.me Gets Featured on Startups Live TV!
StartupsLive.tv is definitely one of the best shows I’ve seen around these days and guess what! I got there! Startups Live is the non-biased platform for any startup to get live exposure, a captive audience, and valuable feedback from potential business partners, customers, members, and investors. I sent a request to Startups Live asking them to feature the Foller.me Twitter service...