I love the concept of this project: get together a small, focused group of smart people to create a useful tool in the course of a week.
Surviving the OAuthpocalypse with Retweeter
A while back I hacked together a script for automatically reposting all tweets matching a given hashtag, called Retweeter. It’s useful for conferences and other events where you want to see a stream of info regarding a given topic, but don’t want to catch the attention of spammers. (To use retweeter, you set up a twitter account in the name of the hash tag, and retweeter only reposts tweets from those it follows – so if someone starts spamming, just have that retweeter account stop following them).
All was well and good until the OAuthpocalypse arrived:
WordPress Quickie: Remove Feed Links
Sometimes you just want to use WordPress as a simple content management system, and the site owners don’t plan to blog or have any content for which feeds really make sense. Its easy to not add subscription options to sidebars or footers, but don’t forget the autodiscovery links in the header, which look like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Open Parenthesis RSS Feed" href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/feed" />
These links are what browsers like Firefox use to “autodiscover” the feeds and add the feed icon to the address bar. But what if you don’t want any feeds? Just add this line to your theme’s functions.php:
remove_theme_support('automatic-feed-links');
And voila, no more autodiscovery feed links.
There’s no codex page for remove_them_support(); but my guess is this requires WordPress 3.0 or later as that’s when 'menus', 'automatic-feed-links', 'custom-header', 'custom-background' and 'editor-style' were added to add_theme_support();.
Open Source Business Social Software
Two projects I’ve been looking at this summer show just how far the Open Source world has come with respect to social business software. Eureka Streams, which is a new open source project sponsored by Lockheed Martin, and based on the Open Social standard, and Drupal Commons, a project sponsored by Acquia and based on Drupal. Both offer a compelling feature set by leveraging existing platforms but with a focus on the needs of the collaborative, knowledge seeking business employee. Both also now have videos, feature tours, and communities of participation growing around them, so you won’t have to go it alone.
Continue reading →
Spring Cleaning (in the Fall)
If you normally get Open Parenthesis posts via RSS reader, or syndicated on another site, you may not have noticed, but I’ve decided to switch things up here and install a new theme. I started this blog at the first WordCamp Boston back in May of 2006, right when I started working for Optaros, and I threw together a custom theme, based loosely on a very very popular theme called Rounded (to which I can no longer find anywhere to link):
It’s served me well, but over the years it’s come to feel a bit cluttered. Too many sidebars (more accurately perhaps too many widgets in the sidebars), too many colors, too many rounded corners (ah, the enthusiasm of Web 2.0), fonts too small, contrast too weak between text and background. The new theme is brighter (more white space!), lighter (less brown, blue, and orange – more red), and all around easier to read.
The new theme is based on one called Nameless by a German designer named Karsten Kuhnen:
I’ve made a few alterations, especially to the sidebar on the right, to better fit with the content here – but the design is very simple, clean, and modern. Hopefully less to distract you from the content.