At the March OC Podcasters meeting I did a presentation on how to get wordpress to interact with some popular 3rd party web applications such as Twitter & Facebook along with sharing posts on social networks. The day started out with me putting the final touches on my Keynote presentation I’d be showing at the event. If you were to ask my wife she would say I spent all day messing with it… and most of the day before too. Never again will I wait until the last minute to prep my presentation like I did this one. I’ve never used Keynote before and was very impressed with what I was able to do with very little effort. I did have a learning curve but that’s to be expected with a new app. After I learned the ends and outs I was able to make interactive slides that didnt require me to go slide by slide to make elements change on the screen. I also was able to get the Keynote Remote app to work on my iphone which is pretty damn cool.

Anyhow, back to the talk… I started out with a quick intro on wordpress themes (I should have included how a widget works in the slides but I did discuss that which you can see in the video) then later went into something new and fresh: Facebook Connect. This tech enables you to allow your readers to login to your wordpress site using their Facebook login info. The plugin I finally settled with was the one developed by sixjumps which took the basics of just authenticating with wordpress to a new level. With this you can leave a comment on the blog and allow the comment to be sent over to facebook. You can also share links from the site to facebook with ease and lastly be able to see who else is using the site from facebook. Pretty cool stuff to be totally honest.

Later I went into some plugins to connect wordpress with Twitter: TwitterTools by Alex King, TwitMe by Johnny Mast and Tweetbacks by Joost de Valk. I love Alex and Joost’s work and their plugins kick some serious ass. TwitMe and its dev are new to me but there are some great features he put into that plugin. Lastly I discussed sharing posts with friends using using Joost’s plugin Sociable and ShareThis.

One thing I learned with this is the power of the masses… If your doing a presentation on social media or new media, get your audience involved by asking them to get their friends involved. At the beginning of the demo I put a tinyurl link up on the screen and asked everyone to hop on twitter and send that link out to as a tweet so we can get some people in the chatroom. I also learned to have a videotape in the camera before using a sony camera as a videosource. Ends up that without a tape the camera goes into store demo mode and did all sorts of fun with the video demoing how you can do mosaic and sepia and other things. Next time I need to drag Jacob Morales out and have him record me with his kick ass setup. :)

Below are various ways to consume the content:

YouTube Video of me doing the presentations:

SlideShare of the Presentation:

PDF and KeyNote if you’d like to use these files for your own presentation.

Below is my Creative Commons info for this project.

Wordpress 3rd party web service by Jason Tucker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Wait… what? Jason’s using a windows editor for blogging? Last time I wrote about an editor was when I tried out MarsEdit for the Mac. My buddy Steve was looking for an app that would let him write blog posts while offline. He was checking out a few of them and I remembered Microsoft Live Writer and suggested it to him. I thought I’d give it a try as well since from the number of posts I’ve done with MarsEdit I didn’t use it every much.

The Grove

I attended the first ever Los Angeles Wordpress Users Group yesterday at The Farmers Market in LA. I’ve never been to The Farmers Market before so it was a pretty cool experience. Typically when I’m in LA I got to downtown or the west side never where the farmers market is at. I parked in The Grove parking lot since I didnt have cash to pay for the parking near the farmers market. I was a bit early so I took a stroll around The Grove so I could tell Jen about it. It’s an open air mall with a great water feature and places for kids to play and a food court.

The Users Group

12:00 came around quickly and I made my way to the Farmers Market. I found the Starbucks that was listed in the directions and then walked inside to see the actual farmers market. Shops, food an walk up eaterys were intermingled. It was interesting to see how they all worked together, people buying poultry at one place and crepes or mexican food in another. Sandwich shops, tourist info and LA themed items along with produce were all over the place there. I made my way to the place that was selling delicious smelling crepes and saw Douglas E Welch along with Jason Cosper. They were commandeering adjacent tables as they became free and I sat down at one of them and greeted everyone. It seems as if most of the people knew each other to some extent. I knew 2 people and only one of which I’ve met before, Douglas. It’s funny, I met Dougas at the Podcamp AZ event held late last year and now I’m meeting him at another event. We also had him recently talk at the OC Podcasters meetup a few months back too.

This meeting was mainly just a meet and greet, there was no structure to it and no set agenda. I talked to the people around me and nodded at the folks at the other end of the table. Jokingly someone asked if there was an IRC backchannel we can all participate in. Andy from netZoo cranked up his MacBook and got on yahoo’s live service to stream some of the event while also checking the scores of his fave baseball team. Slowly people were getting up to grab some food from the places here at the market. I strolled around a bit and went to the crepes place to get an egg and ham with sun dried tomatoes, it was delicious. Next time I think I’ll try the Nutella with strawberries those seemed to be selling fast. I talked to some of the people there about my wordpress installations and the various hacks and plugins I used with them. It seemed like most of the people there we’re bloggers and only a few of us were Podcasters. I think thats why I didn’t know many of them since it’s a variation of the same animal with the only commonality being a blogging platform and RSS for delivery.

Podcamp

After the event and some group pictures (see below) I stuck around for a bit to talk with Jason about the Podcamp Socal (LA?) event. We talked about possible known locations to hold the event and various people we should get involved in the planning of it. He’s done a few Barcamps and other events in the past so it was good to talk to him and get a feel for what I was getting myself into. I was very pleased what I heard and after talking to him I think that SoCal does need a PodCamp even more than I realized.

• Flickr Photos tagged: LAWPUG
• Upcoming Event: LAWPUG

I was on Geek Week #4 for the podcast A Geek and his Wife. Kevin and Heather do a couple cast where every other week Kevin invites a geek to be on the show and geek it up. This week its was ME!

We talked about my background, my podcasts, MAME, Xbox hacking, Asterisk, WRT45G hacking (with DD-WRT) and other fun stuff.

Give it a listen:
Geek Week on A Geek and his Wife podcast – Tucker Time
Subscribe via iTunes

I’m writing this post in hope of helping someone that are having issues with Wordpress 2.0 and getting the latest version of Falbum (the off site flickr album viewer for wordpress) to work. The main issue is that if you want to get Falbum’s friendly url’s to work you’ll need to enabled them. Then edit the .htaccess file in the root of your blog directory and move the block of code that talks about Falbum above the wordpress block.

# BEGIN FAlbum
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^photos/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?$ /wp-content/plugins/falbum/falbum-wp.php?$1=$2&$3=$4&$5=$6&$7=$8 [QSA,L]
# END FAlbum
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php

# END WordPress

Why? well, they confilct somehow and since .htaccess files are read from top to bottom, it would set the falbum rule first, then it would set the wordpress rules which will fix the issue. After doing so you’ll notice that Falbum will work, but only in Firefox. For some reason IE will come back with a 500 error and complain. The way around this is you’ll need to make a change in the Wordpress Admin >> Options >> Permalinks area. For it to work on my site I needed to change the “optional” area so it reads /category (see picture below). I’m not sure why this fixes it, but it will allow IE to be able to view the pages and navigate the images.

Hopefully this helps someone out there and if it does, please leave a comment.

So if you havent noticed (or care) Wordpress 2.0 changed up the way it deals with uploads. I found a website that describes this and why they went about it. I’ll save the typing for someone else and just link you over to it:

http://www.darcynorman.net/2005/12/24/wordpress-20-upload-management

So I did the upgrade to wordpress 2.0 on this blog (abstrakone.com) and didnt have any major problems as of yet. I also installed Livejournal Crossposter which I have yet to try (actually im doing this post to test it). I also installed XrisXros which does the same thing, but for MySpace.

I have relaunched JasonAndJen.com using Wordpress 2.0. I’m having a few CSS issues with Mac IE but other than that its working pretty well.

I have added a few cool things to the blog:

• Falbum – which allows me to display my Flickr photos on the blog instead of passing the viewer over to flickr. [Demo]
• Nice Archives – this makes the archives list prettier
• FeedWordPress – This will let me pull in feeds from the family members blogs and have them be displayed on the front page of the blog. It makes it looks like they posted the entried there. I’m thinking of setting some flags so only certain posts get shown on the site. I’m still working the bugs out on this one
• Family Bios – I wanted to make the site have more than just basic posts and no real content, so I thought that having each of our bios on the site would allow people to get to know us better. Down the road each person can add more info as they get older. Who cares right? Exactly.. but its fun so shut up! :)
• Birthday Countdown

I’m going to setup a countdown for each persons bithday and our anniversary and set links for wish lists on amazon for each person. Why not, ya know?

• Family member cameraphone pictures – I’m setting up a page that shows all of the pictures that each of us has taken with our camera phone and have been uploaded to flickr. Flickr adds a tag “moblog” to each picture so I’ll use that tag to pull in those pictures.

I’ve just finished some cleaning up on the redesign I did last night on my website. I think this design is pretty cool, the guy that cofounded deviantART created the wordpress template that I used as a base. He did a lot of cool things that are built into the template, some of which I took out or moved around a bit. Using someone elses design as a base especially for Wordpress is a good way to learn the templating system. I’m still working on a replacement color for the green… I like it but its clashing with the blue I think. What do you guys think?

http://www.jarkolicious.com/wordpress/themes/trisexuality/1/

Testing Image Transloading plugin for WP.
pulling image from: http://www.google.com/intl/en/images/logo.gif

This will save me some time in including images into my posts (no more getting image url/saving to desktop/uploading/pasting url.)