WP Plugin: Import your Flickr comments

I have had a plugin running on my photoblog In Photos for quite a while now that imports comments on my Flickr stream into my blog posts. It prefixed “Flickr:” to the username and linked back to the Flickr comment.

Due to overwhelming demand (two people asked!), I cleaned up the plugin a bit and put a configuration page on it and called it the Flickr Comment Importer. There are a few things to consider if you want to use this plugin but it’s straight forward to install and configure and it’s all documented on the plugin page.

Download it now!

Ireland.com uses WordPress MU

Damien alerted me to the fact that the new Ireland.com blogs are using WordPress, and so with much excitement I hit the site and browsed around. A quick look at the source showed that they are in fact using WordPress MU which is rather neat.

Ireland.com is the website of The Irish Times, a major daily newspaper here. It’ll be great to see journalists blogging there, but only if they are allowed free reign. If they pull it off, they’ll bring a lot more attention to the site.

So far, only two blogs are operating. On the Record is a music blog written by Jim Carroll, and Price Watch by Conor Pope. Conor’s first post is Window or aisle? €15 please, a short post exploring new charges by Aer Lingus. I don’t see a Trackback link there but hopefully they’ll allow trackbacks and pingbacks sooner rather than later.

Welcome to the ireland.com blog page. We have two blogs, one written by music journalist Jim Carroll, using his weekly column On The Record as its cornerstone. This blog will shed light on the machinations of the music industry at home and abroad. From today, the consumer-focused PriceWatch section will also be carried in blog form on the site. Written by Conor Pope, the blog will be updated throughout the week and will allow users to post details of rip-offs, ask questions and perhaps even highlight bargains they have spotted.

Update on Sep 8, 2009 They’re not using WordPress MU any more unfortunately. Looks like a Windows based system, with ugly urls. The links to the blogs above are broken as a result. Disappointing.

WordPress MU 1.2

Go grab the new WordPress MU 1.2 from the download page now. This is primarily a bugfix update but it also has a security fix and all WPMU site owners are encouraged to upgrade.

I’ll post to the MU forums in a few days time with details of the security fix. It’s a short one-liner that can be applied within minutes if you can’t upgrade.

Update: After you update, go to “Site Admin->Themes” and click Save. That will update the allowed themes list because it was changed a few days ago.

Edit: a few issues with themes and .htaccess rewrite problem appeared overnight. These have been fixed now. If you updated to 1.2 then download the new 1.2.1 version and copy these files into your install:

  • wp-admin/themes.php
  • htaccess.dist
  • wp-includes/version.php
  • wp-admin/admin-db.php
  • wp-admin/themes.php
  • wp-admin/wpmu-themes.php

A free daffodil for your blog today

Today is Daffodil Day here in Ireland and in honour of the day I’m offering a daffodil header image to any blogger who’d like it. There are no restrictions on how you use this image, do what you like, but I would love if you would blog about Daffodil Day.

I’ve made two header images especially suited to blogs using the K2 theme. These are 780×200 images, and to make things easier there’s a mirrored image to suit your blog title. Larger sizes are available on request.

Daffodil Day is in aid of cancer research. The Irish Cancer Society does what it can to fund raise for cancer research and care so they’re a good charity to support.

Daffodil Day is the largest annual fundraising event run by the Irish Cancer Society to raise money for people with cancer.

This year our Daffodil Day is on March 23rd, and over 5,000 volunteers nationwide will be helping to sell fresh and silk daffodils and daffodil pins.

If you would like to help out during Daffodil Day, just phone us on 1 850 60 60 60 or Email reception@irishcancer.ie

Daffodils are flowers of hope and of springtime. That is why they are such an appropriate symbol for the Irish Cancer Society’s cancer care projects. These projects help to improve the quality of care available to people with cancer throughout Ireland.

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I have to admit their linking policy is a little strange. I never thought I’d have to ask permission by fax to link to a website.

Slightly later … we bought our daffodils while doing a spot of shopping in Blarney. Here’s the very nice volunteer and her springer spaniel who were manning the stall outside Supervalu. A bunch of daffodils or a pin are 3 Euro each. A small contribution to cancer research.

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Updated a year later in 2008! Daffodil Day is next Friday. I’m offering a beautiful daffodils photo for sale in aid of the Irish Cancer Society. See my blog post for further details!

You didn't hear? Upgrade now!

On the off chance that you haven’t heard the news yet. You should upgrade your WordPress install straight away. Don’t hesitate, do it now. Don’t pause to grab a cup of coffee. If you’re just waking up then rub the sleep from your eyes and jump to the download page and grab WordPress 2.1.2.

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Users running from svn code aren’t affected, but then you probably already knew that already didn’t you? You should be subscribed to Hackers and Testers lists.

Don’t worry if you’re running a WordPress MU site. That isn’t affected, although you should upgrade to the latest 1.1.1 release as that fixes a number of problems with 1.0 as well as merging in some security fixes from WordPress core.

WordPress.com users have nothing to worry about.

Catch it if you can! WordPress mu 1.1.1 escaped!

Despite my best efforts to put off releasing WordPress mu 1.1.1 for another day it slipped through my fingers, tarred and zipped itself into neat bundles on the download page and screamed at all and sundry that it was free.

So, go on! Download and enjoy. As always, try it on your development servers before pushing it live, just to make sure it doesn’t conflict with anything else you’ve installed. We’re tracking the development version of WordPress itself so any new features that you see there will be in WordPress mu too. And if you haven’t looked before, the mu timeline will give you a good idea of what’s changed recently.

Some highlights:

  • PHPMailer is now used for email delivery. Once you configure it to use a local smtp server email literally flies out the door.
  • “No Options” are saved. Well, WPMU already had something like this for storing false option values but now it’s much better. Thanks Ryan for fixing that in MU.
  • Ryan’s In The Trunk post has a pretty good list of the new features you can expect in this release.

WP plugin: Flickr Blog This to draft post

Have you ever been annoyed when you blog a photo from Flickr and you wished the post had been saved as a draft instead of being published?

I’ve used Flickr to host the images on my photoblog from the first post there but this plugin should make it easier and less stressful to use. Every time I publish a photo through Flickr I have to rush to resave the post as a draft post before anyone notices all the extra line breaks or broken links. Add to that, I tag and categorise the post and it’s a frantic few minutes of editing.

The Flickr Blog This to Draft plugin for WordPress simply stops the publishing of blog posts from Flickr and saves them as draft posts.

Irish WordPress powered companies and a free iPod

Matt started the “company website run on WordPress” theme by posting that moo.com runs on WordPress, so here are two Irish companies that use WordPress to run their websites:

  1. Segala, a company involved in website accessability and trust. They have rather an interesting idea about content labeling. Paul Walsh, their CEO, “is Segala’s W3C advisory committee representative”. Keep an eye on them. You’ll be hearing more about them I’m sure! Oh, and if you leave a comment here, it may be entered into a link bait competition Paul’s running. He’s giving away an iPod on March 2nd. If he picks you, I’ll email you with Paul’s email address.
  2. The second website I will mention is one outside of the usual web 2.0 zone. It’s Harrington Estates, an estate agent in West Cork, Ireland. Houses are listed in posts, and interested buyers can leave a comment using the standard comment form. Thanks to the SEO friendly nature of WordPress, the site also appears on the front page of Google for related search terms! Thanks Frank for that info!

Are there any more Irish companies using WordPress that I can profile in a future post?

Update – the winner has been announced! Competition closed!

Is Flickr under attack by spam?

Has anyone else noticed an increase of spam comments on Flickr lately? I noticed my first spam comment there only last week, complained about it, and the comment and user were both deleted shortly afterwards. I thought nothing more of it.

This morning I got an unwelcome shock when I checked my Flickr comments through Bloglines. More spam comments. There’s a screenshot below. When I clicked through to the photos in question both comments had been deleted but later on another spam comment appeared and I now suspect any comment left by users with usernames starting with “a” with a mixture of upper and lower case characters and digits. Maybe it’s time they invested in an Akismet license for Flickr.com? Thanks Lloyd for the reminder!

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