tijs.org

When somebody writes a wordpress plugin for it you just know a technology is becoming mainstream Alan did the good work of writing a plugin that allows people to login to your weblog with openid accounts. I wondered what would happen to users that already had accounts so i asked Alen to which his clear reply was; they can choose or more precisely:

The plugin takes the place of the Wordpress Account Registration step. So, once a user registers with WPOpenID, they /are/ the wordpress user (for example) http-user-example.com. The only difference between this new user, and the user admin, that the OpenID users don’t have passwords set, and thus can’t login with the Username/Password combination.

However, there is nothing stopping an OpenID user from logging in, then visiting their profile, and changing their password to something else. If they do that, then the OpenID user can login with Username/Password as well.

In addition, if a normal wordpress user (for example, ‘admin’) wants to login with OpenID as well, they can visit My Profile => Your OpenID Identities (/wp-admin/users.php?page=your-openid-identities or /wp-admin/profile.php?page=your-openid-identities, depending on whether logged in as an admin), and add OpenID identities to the account. Afterward, the user can login with any/all of the identities listed, or their original username/password.

It is intended that there NOT be two separate accounts, one Username/password and the other OpenID. If that situation is created, there’s currently no easy method to merge them.

…which means i know a lot of blogs which will start implementing this little gem soon.

Since i moved this blog to wordpress somewhere in 2003 i never had gotten around to adding titles to all the old posts so one could actually click on them in wordpress. Thus this wealth of ancient history has been lost to all for quite some time, horrible! Today i installed a little plugin that lists each and ever post by month and year which was a good excuse to write a little script that cleaned up all the old posts and add titles and post-slugs, behold; Ancient History. Beware though, the page might take a while to load. Eat that Google

I made a simple widget that allows you to show the latest forum posts in widget enabled wordpress templates for our PussyCat Lounge blog. It might be useful to somebody else so download ahead if you use XD Forum:

xdforum.php.zip (version 1.0).

To use it follow the these steps:

1. Download and install the XD Forum plugin and follow the instructions to activate it
2. Make sure you have permalinks enabled and working for the forum
3. Download and unpack my widget
4. Activate the widget plugin if you haven’t already
5. Upload it to the /wp-content/plugins/widgets/ directory
6. Activate the widget in the Admin interface
7. Optional: Edit the title of the widget in your templates widget admin interface

I just upgraded my Plazesmap Wordpress plugin to version 0.4 which upgrades the Google Maps API used to version 2. This will allow better satellite photos and map data where Google started offering these (parts of europe for instance).

Wordpress 2.0.2 was just released which seemed like a good time to upgrade this blog.

update: i seized the opportunity to install a new theme too. Since i’m doing lots of AJAX work lately i thought it appropriate to use the Durable theme which makes use of the Prototype library for a some nice effects. All my old plugins were moved to the new theme too and are now nicely tucked away in the top menu.

update2: The GoogleMaps JS does not always play nice with the durable theme which is too bad. I guess i’ll wait if Durable 0.3 fixes this and do some testing myself otherwise.

I just updated my Last.fm plugin. Get the latest version here: Last.fm Recent Tracks Wordpress plugin

The caching behaviour has been changed to account for the fact that Last.fm sends an empty list after an x amount of time in which no new tracks have been added to the Last.fm profile. Default behaviour was to display “no recent tracks” when this happens which i have changed so that it now keeps displaying the cached list of recent tracks until a new list is available from Last.fm. (It will still display “no recent tracks” when your profile was empty to start with or an error prevented the plugin from getting your new profile data.) This seemed to be the preffered behaviour for most people but if lots of people want the old behaviour too i might make it optional (shout if you do). Have fun.

I am not sure yet if it’s time to upgrade but we’ll know soon enough. I for one am waiting just a tiny bit longer. There aren’t any new features i need in 2.0 and i didn’t hear of anyone tackling the biggest problem of Wordpress; it’s rather inefficient use of the database.

A new version that fixes a bug with the Javascript in Internet Explorer was just fixed, if you use this plugin please download the new version.

While i had some trouble in the beginning, like collin, both my weblogs have been totally spam free since installing Akismet.