Retweeting the Right Way

Retweet Shirt Photo by Deb Hanson - http://www.flickr.com/photos/debspace/3766841512/

Just released an update to ReTweeter (1.1), which now uses the Twitter API for Retweeting. This means that instead of the traditional “RT: @username” syntax, the retweeted tweets will now show Twitter’s little retweet icon and the link to the original tweet (where it says “about 4 hrs ago”) preserved, and the retweeting user’s name at the bottom, like so:

Screencap by Jeronimo Palacios - http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeronimo_palacios/4093181811/

Sunday Coding – ReTweeter, WPBook

Two quick Sunday updates.

First, ReTweeter has been updated to 0.9.4. The fix here was primarily to deal with tweets which, when retweeted with the username prepended, were longer than 140 characters.

Second, WPBook has been updated to 1.5.3. This includes a new option to enable publishing to the wall of a Fan Page independent of publishing to the author’s personal wall. (1.5, 1.5.1, and 1.5.2 all could publish to Fan Page walls, but also published to the author’s wall, which in many cases results in duplication for many of your friends and fans.)

Also in 1.5.3 is some improved error checking (fixed the “activation on PHP 4 hosts” bug and added more Try/Catch pairs around Facebook client calls) and the ability to support old school permalink urls with query string parameters.

Good to be home on the weekend . . .

WPBook 1.4 Released

(Update 1/14 – now 1.4.2. Fixes detailed in readme – Admin side javascript issue, issue with submitting comments for folks who install wordpress files in a subdirectory different than their root URL)

(Updated 1/5 – it’s actually 1.4.1 now, as there was a typo in the theme/index.php file – get_exteral_url should be get_external_url).

Last night I packaged and released version 1.4 of WPBook, the plugin I maintain which creates a view of your WordPress blog as a Facebook application.

(For example, see Open Parenthesis as a blog, and then Open Parenthesis as a Facebook app).

Highlights of this release

• Fixed bug which made invite friends link only work on the home page
• Fixed bug in setting for custom/header footer which included a permalink
  (WordPress support topic 306263)
• Added Gravatar support
• Added (experimentally) a list of “pages” as well – this means you should able to use WPBook even if you have a static homepage set in WordPress – just use the url of your home page as the “Canvas Callback URL”
• Removed hard coded references to wp-content and plugins directories
  (See http://willnorris.com/2009/05/wordpress-plugin-pet-peeve-hardcoding-wp-content)
• Removed hard coded reference to config.php, routing Facebook comment submission through WordPress’ built in query parser instead
  (See http://willnorris.com/2009/06/wordpress-plugin-pet-peeve-2-direct-calls-to-plugin-files)

Read more…

Selfish APIs

Photo by Uncle Bartelby

Adina Levin wrote earlier this month (Twitter, Facebook, and the unselfish API about the differences between Twitter and Facebook not in terms of how they treat their users but in terms of how they treat external developers.

Read more…

ReTweeter 0.9.1 Released

Photo by Andrea Mercado

Thanks to Karen Huffman (@slakm) who raised some issues she was having with an installation of ReTweeter, I’ve tracked down the bug and uploaded and released 0.9.1.

Turns out that in late December of 2008, the Twitter API servers started sending a 417 Status Code response to many clients, including ReTweeter. (See Alex Payne’s announcement on the Twitter API Google Group and this message from Tom Morris which identified the necessary fix for CURL based clients).

In addition to squashing that bug, this update also better handles error responses from the Twitter API in general, which is to say it actually identifies to the user what status code was returned to enable better troubleshooting.

Remember to copy your settings from your old version before overwriting with the new.