Twitter RSS and WordPress

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Recently I’ve been having problems finding a solution to getting my Twitter updates displayed in the sidebar of my blog. I was using a plugin that did this for me, but when it stopped working I went looking for a new solution. I thought of the RSS that is built into WordPress, as that is what I am using to feed some of the other content in the sidebar.

When I first set it up everything worked perfectly. It was even better than the plugin I was using. It gave a link to the RSS feed, my twitter profile, and a link to each of the tweets, along with the date that everything was posted on. This was great. I loved seeing links to each tweet, and the date was nice too.

Within the last week this stopped working though. WordPress was still seeing the RSS feed, but wasn’t getting updates, and there was an error message that looked kind of like this:

Warning: Attempt to assign property of non-object in/wp-root/wp-includes/rss.php on line 449

It turns out that somewhere along the line there were too many updates trying to go through. I think it was on Twitter’s end because on some of the other feeds I have more updates in the feed than are actually being displayed. For example, my delicious feed includes 15 items in the actual feed. If you were to click on the feed link you would see all 15 items, but there are only 10 items being shown on the blog. WordPress is setting a limit of 10, which is one of the options when you setup the feed for the RSS widget.

The Fix

Since WordPress wasn’t actually getting the updates, it was displaying there error message shown above. What I decided to to was to check out the api, and sure enough you can set a limit. Since I was only showing 5 updates on the blog, I decided to set a limit to 5 updates with the count parameter. The URL will end up looking something like this:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/10673592.rss?count=5

The count parameter sets how many updates are in the feed. You will obviously switch the 10673592 number for your own account id on Twitter. You can get that by clicking the RSS feed link on the bottom of your Twitter home page. You can also use your Twitter username instead of that number.

Apple Keynote

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Alright, I’ll admit it. This is a little later than I wanted to get this out, but I’ll just get into it.

Without Steve?

Yeah, I have to say, he definitely wasn’t Steve Jobs, but he wasn’t bad. I was really hoping the “One Last Thing” was going to be Steve, but I think they did just fine without him anyway. All of the announcements were interesting, although they had all been predicted beforehand. Let’s Get to the 3 announcements.

iLife 09

iLife 09 Looks great.

The application that I’m most looking forward to is iPhoto. It was the first application that they introduced, and some of the new features are just fabulous. The ones that really stuck out to me were the integration with Facebook and Flickr, faces, and places. Since I use both Facebook and Flickr, this will make uploading photos that much easier. To be honest, it will probably keep me on Flickr. Since I host my own photos on my website, I’ve always wanted to use Flickr as a way to host the ‘highlights’ of an album. Facebook integration will most likely mean that I won’t be putting any photos on MySpace anymore, since I don’t really use the service that much anymore, but that’s another story. The point is, that these are great features that will make many people’s lives easier and bring in much more traffic to these services.

My favorite new feature would have to be ‘faces’. If you didn’t see the keynote, it doesn’t sound like much, and I’m sure there are many people that aren’t as excited as I am about this feature, but I think it really changes the way everything works.

For the people who didn’t happen to see the demo of faces, it’s like that face recognition setting on your camera meets Facebook tagging. When you click on a photo, iPhoto automatically recognizes the faces that are present. If that particular person hasn’t been added to your faces collection in iPhoto, it will ask you who it is. After you name the person it will give you more people that could possibly be that person, confirming them makes iPhoto more ‘confident’ about its ability to identify that person. This also works with Facebook. Any people that have been ‘tagged’ in iPhoto will be tagged if you upload those pictures to Facebook and vice versa. So if one of your friends tags a person in a photo from Facebook, it will sync down to iPhoto and that person will be added as a face in your iPhoto faces.

Places works with GPS enabled cameras and will show a map of photos will GPS tags within iPhoto using google maps. This feature also works with photos uploaded to Flickr, since Flickr supports GPS tags.

They also demoed some new iMovie features that look pretty cool and Garage Band. The biggest new Garage Band feature… well I guess you could call it a feature, is the music lessons. It comes with a few free lessons for Piano and Guitar. Then, after you learn how to play basic things, you can take lessons from the rock-stars by buying a $5 lesson to learn one of their popular songs.

iWork 09

iWork wasn’t quite as exciting as iLife, but there were a few things that have been updated or added. The iWork.com service is interesting, although I don’t think it will be quite as useful as they think it will be. Sure it makes the whole process of sharing iWork files with people, but how hard was it before iWork? There are a million ways to do this exact same thing, that are just as easy — including email.

17″ MacBook Pro

Ahh, the 17″ MBP. I think everyone and their grandma predicted this announcement. Weren’t we all surprised when they didn’t release this from the start? Maybe it was the new battery that they were perfecting.

I’m still not sure what to think about the battery technology. It’s obviously cool that they made the charging ‘smarter’ to increase the life of the battery, but having a battery that’s not removable? This introduces so many problems that nobody wants to deal with. Just think about the iPod first of all. Sure this battery is supposed to last for 5 years, but what happens when it doesn’t? Who is going to replace it for the price of a new battery? Nobody! So the guy that has his warranty run out the day before the battery dies is going to pay somebody $200+ to get a new battery put in. Not to mention that the iPods are only $200 – $300 usually anyway, so when the battery dies it’s just better to buy a new one. When your MBP’s battery dies you’re getting a new battery put in it, even if the best price you can get is $500. However, it is an interesting idea to take out the mechanism to make the battery removable in order to make more room for a battery, therefore increasing battery life without increasing size or weight. I’m just not sold on it yet. 8 hours of battery life is never bad though.

I’m sure Al liked environmental report card though.

One Last Thing…

Unfortunately the ‘One Last Thing’ was not Steve Jobs, but instead iTunes. The iTunes announcement was HUGE in my opinion. Let’s go over the facts:

  1. 10 Million songs currently on iTunes
  2. 8 Million songs now iTunes Plus (DRM-Free). That’s 80%.
  3. Rest (100%) of the 10 Million songs DRM-Free by the end of the year.

They also have a new price structure, which I’ve already heard people complaining about. I must say that I’m not a huge fan of the new price structure, but I’m also not stressing over it. I don’t really know what they’re thinking. They put up a chart of the top online music sellers, proudly showing that they are on the top (and Amazon is 4th). They must be thinking that they have enough users, or that they’re way is so much easier that people aren’t going to go to Amazon. Personally, I’d go to Amazon in a second. If I see a song on iTunes for $1.29 the first thing I’m doing is checking Amazon. $.99, not a big deal, since they’re both DRM Free. $.69, well now we’re talking Monopolizing the online music industry. If they can sell enough songs for $.69 or even $.99 they’ll put Amazon out of business, but I think Amazon will keep selling songs until they’re not profitable anymore.

To see the full Apple Keynote, check it out: http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/0901ouabdcaw/event/index.html

Let me know what you guys think about these new features.

Contact Form

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I finally set up the contact forms for all my websites this past week. Hopefully nobody has needed to contact me yet, but I was really mostly worried about the contact form on http://joshbetz.net. Next up on my own personal sites is the redesign, or really the original design of the hsr blog.

On a side note: Now that SVN and Trac are up and running I should probably get more active in development, but TSE has been taking time up lately. That will hopefully be launching soon. I just need to talk with the guys and finalize the designs. We have some development decisions that need to be finalized as well and then I can finish it up. After that it will run itself for a little while at least. If Vimeo ever finishes that API update I can implement that too, but for the initial release I think we’re set on the current API and then we’ll go from there.

Using Gmail for GoDaddy Email

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I always wanted a personalized email address like you@yourdomain.com, but it never ended up how i wanted it, until now. Sure it’s easy to setup your own email server or register for GoDaddy’s email solutions, but they’re ugly. If you setup your own server have fun getting your mail from the road, and GoDaddy’s webmail shouldn’t even be considered a real email solution. Here’s a way to get everything you’ve ever wanted, and more.

#Send and Receive you@yourdomain.com email in Gmail

For this I used GoDaddy since they’re my domain registrar and webhost. I also setup an email forwarding account, so there is no actual inbox for the address I setup. It is true that Gmail can receive mail from POP3, but it only checks once per hour. This may be fine if it is an account that doesn’t frequently receive mail, but if this is one of your main email addresses you’ll probably want to receive the mail as if you were checking the actual mailbox for that account. The email forward just redirects the email to another account and you get it at the same time you normally would. Additionally, you can only recieve mail through 5 POP3 accounts from Gmail, so if you have more than five websites that you want to receieve mail from you won’t be able to get it all through Gmail unless you just forward the mail to Gmail.

If you’ve you’ve ever bought a domain or hosting from GoDaddy you might have tried they’re webmail service, but more importantly, you probably have more free email forwards than you could ever use. I wasn’t even aware that I had access to any email forwards until I went looking for the solution to this problem.

The first thing your going to want to do is sign in to your GoDaddy account and click “Email” under “My Products” on the left.

Then you want to click on “Email Forwarding Plans“. For me it was right in the middle of the page in the “Email Plans” section.

Now, you will most likely have free credits if you’ve ever bought anything from GoDaddy. Find the type of credit that you want to use and click “Use Credit“. A box will show on the right side with a dropdown of domains that you own. Select the domain that you want to use it with and click “Continue“. If the account doesn’t show up right away you might have to refresh that page a couple of times.

Then your going to click “Manage Account“. On the next screen click “Add” and fill out the details for the email address you want to create and the Gmail address you want to forward to and click “OK” at the bottom right to save. You can also click the “Bulk Address” option if you are adding more than one address.

Now your going to login to the Gmail account you forwarded the address to. In order to send email from that address you need to go to “Settings“, “Accounts“, and add the address under “Send Mail as:“. This will send verification to that email address to make sure you can send mail from that account. Make sure you change the “When receiveing as message:” value to “Reply from the same address the message was sent to“.

Go back to the inbox and there should be a verification email there, since you already forwarded the account to Gmail. Open that email and click the link. You’re Done! Now all the email you get at that personalized address will go to your Gmail inbox and when you reply it will be from that personalized address.

Optional: If you want to be able to sort through multiple email accounts in your inbox you can setup a label for that account. Just go to “Settings“, “Filters“, and click “Create a new filter“. Put the email address you want to be able to filter in the “To:” field and click continue. Then check the box next to “Apply the label” and choose “New label” from the dropdown. That’s it. Type the name of the label and you’re done.

Update: The new/better way to do this is with google apps.