Post to Twitter when you post to your blog

Filed Under Internet, Social Networking, Twitter, Wordpress |

I don’t like doing things manually when I can have software do my bidding. Usually I’ll send a twitter when I have a new blog post on here that I think people are interested in. (I recognize not everyone has my RSS feed in their feed reader…yet) But it’s a manual process and an extra step, so I went out and found Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin. Alex King is a name forever associated in my head with Wordpress, primarily for his help in finding themes back in the early days of WP. This plugin is pretty full-featured:

  • Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 15 minutes)
  • Create a blog post from each of your tweets
  • Create a daily digest post of your tweets
  • Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post
  • Post a tweet from your sidebar
  • Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens
  • Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

I’ve currently got it set up to send to twitter when a post goes live on here. So in theory, when this post went live, it should have shown on my Twitter page.

UPDATE: Looks like Twitter Tools will post any edits to a posts if that blog post has not been twittered yet. Sorry for the twitter flood when I removed the “Uncategorized” category from a couple old posts. I’m going to look into manually adding the “twittered” metadata to all my posts so it doesn’t happen again.

UPDATE 2: Threw together a quick little php script to update the database so old posts aren’t twittered when they’re edited. YMMV, User beware, no warranty, etc. You’ll want to make a backup of your databases, then fill in your username, password, and database_name and then run this either from command line or via the browser.

/*--------code start--------*/
mysql_connect(localhost, "db_username", "db_password");
mysql_select_db("database_name");
$res1 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM wp_posts p WHERE (p.post_status LIKE \"publish\")");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($res1, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
	//find out if the TwitterTools metadata has already been written
	$sql2 = "SELECT * FROM wp_postmeta WHERE (post_id = ".$row['ID'].”) && (meta_key LIKE \”aktt_tweeted\”) && (meta_value LIKE \”1\”)”;
        print “Post ID: “.$row['ID'].”  \n”;
	if (!mysql_numrows(mysql_query($sql2))) {
		//metadata not found, let’s fake it without twittering
	        $sql = “INSERT INTO wp_postmeta (post_id, meta_key, meta_value) VALUES (”.$row['ID'].”,\”aktt_tweeted\”,1)”;
		mysql_query($sql);
		print ” — added metadata to fake it.  \n”;
	} else {
		print ” — already been twittered.  \n”;
	}

}
/*——–code end——–*/

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RIP Dodgeball?

Filed Under Internet, Social Networking, Websites |


With the departure of the Dodgeball founders, and no indication that Google wants to improve it for months, it looks like curtains for Dodgeball are imminent. Dodgeball.com is currently returning a Google 502 Server Error. Generally a 502 error indicates too much traffic or server overload. We find it hard to believe that the failing Dodgeball is encountering this. Even if there is something wrong with the site, will Google invest the resources to fix it, or is Google finally ready to pull the plug? How in the world am I going to let people know where I am?!? It’s a good thing we’ve still got twitter.

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Another bubble coming?

Filed Under Internet, MySpace |

Take a look at these charts, look at the recent acquisitions of MySpace and YouTube, look at the success of PlentyofFish (which is run by 1 person out of his apartment!) and then try to tell me there isn’t another bubble coming? Hopefully this one we’ll go into with a little more knowledge and it won’t burst like the last one. I’m all about getting in and just banking the money. No fast sports cars, just money in the bank to let me live the modest life I want. But it’s not about the money for me so much as it is being able to do something I enjoy and contribute back to society in some way. One reason I’m so happy with the sidekick 3 themes site that I started up a few months ago. It’s rewarding to build a site when starting with a blank notepad and see it take shape. It’s nice to be able to provide something to people that they enjoy. And it’s nice to make some honest money that helps the site pay for itself and buys me a new toy every now and then.

So, what is going to be the next big thing to hit the web? Most of the companies experiencing huge growth haven’t been around for years. They were quick smart ups, started by smart people, without huge bank accounts. They were successful because they tapped into something and did it right. Where is that something that I’m going to provide on a large scale? Where do I fit into the cogs of the internet?

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Demographic Info From 26,000 Phished MySpace Account

Filed Under MySpace, PHP/MySQL |

So a few days ago LoLo tapped me for some quick PHP-ing to analyze a file of phished MySpace passwords that he had found. For those that don’t know what’s been going on with MySpace and the password phishing, check out this article for an explanation.

So armed with this data, I sat down and imported the file into a MySQL database, cleaning up bits and pieces, and then wrote some scripts to pull out useful data. Not content with just info on the emails and passwords, I started playing around with MySpace’s search page, and wrote a screen scraping script to grab the info of all the users by searching for their emails. It took a few hours to gather all the data, but then I was able to run some useful reports on it. I’ll let you check out Lolo’s full write-up on the thing, including the stats over on his article: Demographic Info From 26,000 Phished MySpace Accounts. If there’s any interest/demand, I’ll clean up the scripts and post the code.

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