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.

# 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.

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

Kramer is a plugin that will add inbound links to a post on your weblog as a pingback or comment. What this means is that when a post in blog A links to a post in blog B, blog B will find the inbound link and add it as a pingback or a general comment, without the need for the author of the post on blog A to send a ping to blog B. The way it finds the new links is by searching Technorati for all new inbound to a particular post.

What this means is that pingback/traceback/trackback and other post-pinging tools are no longer required, as all links to a post will be found and shown as either pingbacks or general comments. To show links to the main weblog, or to other pages in general, a function called kramer_inbound() is provided. It can be used in WordPress templates to display a list of the latest inbound links to that page. It is usually included in the sidebar of a blog and can be fully configured via the Kramer administration interface.

So yaddy yaddy, what does that all mean? Well, it reads the links that you put in your posts and it pings them, then it does the same of inbound links to you. Tonight I thought I would scan through all my plugins I have enabled and installed and make sure they were up to date (some one really needs to come up with a way for the plugin page to “ping” the plugin authors site and test to see if each plugins has a new version). Kramer came up, I must have installed it but didnt know the power it had. So Xinu, Kris.. make sure you give this Kramer plugin a looksee.