Posting to WordPress from the Desktop

Filed Under Tools | 2008-11-21, 16:55

I’ve caved and finally started seriously looking at a desktop level application to manage all my blog posting. When you have as many sites as I do, it’s much easier (and faster) to keep them all in one interface. Having a web interface is nice for flexibility, but it is definitely slower.

Right now I’m playing with MarsEdit, which seems to do just about everything I want. There are a few things I’d change if I were the developer (I don’t like having to go to the menu to set the post date on a post I want to go live in the future), but overall I’m happy so far. Hopefully this will help me write even more each day across the different sites. I’ve already pumped out 3-4 blog posts for Geeky Tattoos in no time. So far the only major issues I’ve found are:

Resized Images
I like to upload full sized images to wordpress and then used the automatically generated thumbnail in my post. MarsEdit uploads the full image and then includes the full version in your post. It’d be nice to have this full functionality from the desktop, rather than having to login and tweak the post later.

Twitter Tools
It doesn’t seem to play well with the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress. Posts are not getting saved with the checkbox that says “Notify Twitter about this post?” I’m guessing I’ll have to either edit the Twitter Tools plugin and figure out how to fix that, or just modify the database so that the default for this option in new posts is set to true. Luckily it fails in the right direction (i.e. not tweeting as opposed to constant tweeting).

Anyone else have any other tools they recommend for blog publishing? I’m primarily using WordPress blogs, so that’s a requirement. OS X is also kind of a requirement since I’m still using the Macbook Pro, but Windows based suggestions might be useful to others.

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WordPress app for the iPhone

Filed Under Apple | 2008-07-22, 00:05

The app that I (and ever other blogger) has been eagerly waiting for is finally here! WordPress has released what looks to be a full featured app for the iPhone for all us on the go bloggers. I had to jump on iTunes to grab it because I wasn’t finding it in the app store on device, but I’m posting from it now. :). Oh, and the best part? It’s free!

UPDATE: After 2 posts via the WordPress app for the iPhone I have the following to say:
– It’s awesome.
– I wish it posted an image before the text instead of after.
– It made a weird test post that got picked up by TwitterTools plugin at first.
– It’s hard to make valuable posts without being able to copy and paste urls from the browser.
– Writing html markup in the post is amazingly annoying with iPhone keyboard.
– I really like the “local draft” feature in addition to saving a draft on the server.

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Post to Twitter when you post to your blog

Filed Under Twitter, Wordpress | 2008-02-25, 12:15

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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