Category Archives: Wordpress

Windows Live Writer Plugin #1 – YouTube Video.

General, Plugin, Software, Wordpress

**ANOTHER EDIT** Version 1.0 out now.

**EDIT** version 0.2 now includes support for Google Video

Version 0.1 still available (in case the new mods give you trouble).

Here’s my first ever Plugin for Windows Live Writer.

It requests the ID for a video clip in YouTube (for example, the url of the default video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtdJFtdXYps so the id from that url is GtdJFtdXYps ).  For Google video, you need to docid number (19 digits) for example : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3573852431733156394&q=kitten would give the docid of 3573852431733156394.

From that scant information, the plugin adds the embedded player for the video into your post.  Simple.

Download the file, and then extract the DLL into the Plugins folder of your WLW installation.  It will then appear in the “Insert” menu on the next restart of WLW.

I know it’s not much, but I thought I’d write it as a quick practice.

Demo :

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtdJFtdXYps]

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=3573852431733156394]

Windows Live Writer

General, Software, Wordpress

I’ve been pointed in the direction of this tool by a co-worker, so I thought I’d have a look.  It’s always tough to review these blogging tools because you’re working out what you’re doing as you type.

Picking categories for a post is a simple drop down list in the interface, and typing / adding pictures, etc is all WYSIWYG.  No quibbles there.

Th only thing that doesn’t seem to be working as it should is the style detection.  If I understand correctly, it is supposed to be able to pull down your stylesheets, etc, so the WYSIWYG is just that.  Not in my WP install it doesn’t.

Other than that, it seems like a good enough tool.  I’ll explore more later.

**EDIT** Apparently, there is an SDK that you can use to write plugins . Also check out the forum , where you will see the issues others are having.

**EDIT 2** On my other machine, the download of the style information seems to work.  However, there’s an issue with this theme and the editor, so I have to type all the text in a box about an inch wide. :)

Excuse of the Day in the sidebar

PHP, Plugin, Site Design, Software, Wordpress

You may have spotted the “Excuse of the Day” at the top of the left sidebar. This isn't a WordPress plugin as such, but a small bit of PHP in one of the theme files. If you want to use the same code, there are a couple of things you need to do.

1) In my case, I am concious of not wanting to abuse Eric's bandwidth, so I have set up a shell script via cron to wget the feed file once per day. I'd recommend this for another reason – if, due to unforseen circumstances, meyerweb is down, your code will still work on your local copy.
2) Edit your theme file in the appropriate place to include this block.

Technorati and Bad Behaviour

Bad Behaviour, PHP, Software, Wordpress

This blog is running Bad-Behaviour to try to limit spam and general naughtiness. It does it by header analysis on incoming requests, and it caches the results.

I noticed a couple of days ago that my Technorati pings were not updating on this site, and eventually narrowed it down to the fact that the Technorati Bot doesn’t send complete headers, so BB was blocking access to this valid source. Adding the technorati bot address to the whitelist file (as well as some other fiddling around that I’m not going to go into) means that the bot can now see the feed, and work with it correctly.

I hope this helps someone out there if they are having similar issues.