As such, firsttube.com 10.3: based on the default WordPress 3 theme “Twenty Ten.”  There are minor customizations to the HTML and the CSS, but overall, it’s almost entirely stock WP.  It’s much faster, much leaner, and much easier to maintain.  Enjoy.

So far, I’m hosting about 5 domains with another one potentially in the pipe. I’m giving everyone cPanel access, which means MySQL, phpMyAdmin, mailboxes, forwarders, Fantastico, and much more. You shouldn’t have to do anything: your feeds should remain intact and you should see no interruption of service.

According to Web 2.0 friendly site Stimator, firsttube.com is beach front property. According to Stimator, firsttube.com is worth $2,146,840. Of course, the only people who might actually find it worth more than a few twenties is a spammer, since I’m rich in search engine placements and backlinks. Still, nice to be loved.
Why Stimator put so much effort into designing an awesome interface and then decided to leave a major grammatical problem in their badge is beyond me.

• Akismet is a comment filter that uses a “karma” type algorithm to analyze comments and separate ham from spam. According to my internal stats, Akismet reports 37,512 spams caught, 284 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.934%. Not too shabby. As a result, this site no longer has a captcha.
• Blip.It iPhone Handler is a neat little tool that creates a method to display embedded flash as Quicktime on-the-fly, ideal for iPhone compatibility.
• Cache Images, another Mullenweg gem, let me fetch remote images and store them locally. I prefer to host all images locally if possible, so this is fantastic.
• “ftBlogrollerWP (ft)” is my own modified plugin that creates a page with all of my links, as seen here.
• Google XML Sitemaps is a tool for creating a sitemap that Google and other search engines can use to spider your site. This would take forever by hand and would be very hard to keep up manually, but this plugin makes it effortless.
• Limit Login Attempts. No sense in letting someone hammer your WordPress admin login eternally. Basic security that ought to be part of WordPress core.
• Similar Posts is a snazzy little plugin that tries to find similar posts to any given post. I use this on each post’s page. In pre-Wordpress firsttube, I did this by searching for other articles with the same tags. In WordPress-era ft, I do this via a plugin. Similar Posts requires the Post-Plugin Library.
• Tangofy is a simple plugin to modify icons in the stock WordPress admin pages.
• TTFTitles is a sweet little plugin that creates images from text. I do this on entry titles and sidebar titles. It allows you to add a dimension of professional typography and to use fonts that aren’t in the eight “web safe.”
• WordPress Database Backup: you’ll never guess what this one does!
• WordPress Hashcash does the spam filtering in conjunction with Akismet. Whatever Akismet misses, Hashcash catches. Essentially, it catches *everything* Akismet misses and only really reports problems when users have javascript turned off.
• WordPress Popular Posts provide me view counts, plain and simple. I used to keep track pre-Wordpress, but sadly, I lost my hit count (many of which were in the thens of thousands of views) and only started again this month. Nonetheless, it’s in the sidebar.
• wp-cache is a caching program, but I’m not currently using the cache.
• WP-Lytebox automatically adds a lytebox effect to inline images, which is spectacular.
• WP-Optimize is a database optimizer that does optimization not only of MySQL overhead, but also removes autosaves and other space wasters from your database.
• WP-Syntax makes my code pretty, and that’s all.
• WP iPaper is a plugin for embedding scribd stuff.
• Lastly, WPtouch iPhone Theme is a stylesheet that makes this site look native on the iPhone. It’s truly a beautiful skin.

That is all. Thank you to all the above developers. As a reward, please accept this pingback!

Fast forward a bit, I’ve gone ahead and modified instantShift’s Christmas theme that was designed for Smashing Magazine.  I am, at least right now, very happy with this theme and I think I’ll stick with it for awhile.  

Today is a new beginning for the US… and a little change is in order.

Behold! The firsttube.com RSS cloud generated by www.wordle.net (doesn’t work here without the www.  Lame!).   I got the idea from Kroc.  This is based on a snapshot of my RSS feed the morning of 12/12/2008.

Onto my gripes. I can’t get inline replying/threading to work.  There is very little documentation on it so far. The functions are called comment_reply_link() and get_comment_reply_link(), and there’s nothing anywhere in the codex that helps, there’s little on the internet, the only place to get any real detail is the code itself, which explains:

from wp-includes/comment-template.php starting at line 949 on WP 2.7.0

 * Retrieve HTML content for reply to comment link.
 *
 * The default arguments that can be override are 'add_below', 'respond_id',
 * 'reply_text', 'login_text', and 'depth'. The 'login_text' argument will be
 * used, if the user must log in or register first before posting a comment. The
 * 'reply_text' will be used, if they can post a reply. The 'add_below' and
 * 'respond_id' arguments are for the JavaScript moveAddCommentForm() function
 * parameters.
 *
 * @since 2.7.0
 *
 * @param array $args Optional. Override default options.
 * @param int $comment Optional. Comment being replied to.
 * @param int $post Optional. Post that the comment is going to be displayed on.
 * @return string|bool|null Link to show comment form, if successful. False, if comments are closed.

It doesn’t matter much, because it doesn’t work, period, even though I’ve followed the instruction here to a t. So I’ll have to fix that in time.

My last gripe is with the new wp_list_comments() routine. I understand this is all new, but the idea that templating comments requires a callback function as a wrapper to all comments, pings, and trackbacks is clumsy at best. The codex on wp_list_comments() have nothing to explain it to people, so while I’ve dug in and gotten things working, it’s not for the feint of heart just yet, since you need to build a PHP function in your theme in your functions.php file (or create one if it doesn’t exist, which cannot be done via the Dashboard). I’m a little sad, since the theme system is so flexible and the new plugin system is just incredible, to see the new comment loop be so manual compared to the single file approach used so successfully in the past.

I know that Scoble says WordPress 2.7 rocks, and it does. Scoble doesn’t realize the shortcomings because he hasn’t tried to play with the new features, and fortunately, it very gracefully degrades. But it’s got some work to do to be perfect, for me at least.

Today I took my first stab at writing a WordPress plugin. Turns out, it’s really easy. I’m mean really easy. The plugin is pretty simple: it just searches through every post and turns the unlinked words firsttube.com into a hyperlink. However, it seems like it might be a useful plugin for some, even just as a text-replacement plugin. So we’ll see if I publish it. In the meantime, though, it took me about 15 minutes to write and then it was recognized by WordPress, which was very cool.

I have a few ideas for more involved plugins too that I may write, one day. But in the meantime, this one is pretty cool.

It should be fixed now, so that likely means another 20 dupes or so, I can’t control that. But I can tell you that I think we’re all caught up. Thanks for hanging with me.

First off, I was very excited about the features of WordPress.  I was really excited, most specifically, about the API, and about the rich text WYSIWYG of the backend.  I’ve done a lot of work on Small Axe’s backend, but it’s still nothing compared to WordPress.

When I imported my stuff, it worked well, but the “slugs” — or URL-friendly post titles — did not convert properly.  They converted as WordPress friendly, properly escaped slugs.  The problem was, my slugs needed to stay intact, because I didn’t want all old links to break.

Understanding the way WordPress functions is really tough for a WP newbie, because the code is so spread out, yet compact, voluminous, yet digestible. Start with index.php, onto wp-blog-header.php, into wp-settings.php, and then you find the massive list of files in the wp-includes directory.  You’ll dig all over trying to find files to find includes in includes in includes. I finally found a great article that tries to explain the WordPress slug architecture. It’s fairly complex. Much of it lives in/wp-includes/query.php. However, my problem was very specific.

Many of my post slugs had periods in them. The period does not interfere with the URL, but WordPress doesn’t like them, and somewhere in the massive beast. So I had to find the page that “gets” posts. Lo and behold, there is a function called “get_posts” that lives in /wp-includes/query.php. I kept poking around. Like anyone who keeps digging, eventually, you’ll find yourself in wp-includes/formatting.php. And there it is.

Slug posts get sanitized – like everything, virtually all input is strictly sanitized – by a function called sanitize_title_with_dashes(). This function generates the slug. In order to include dots in your slug titles, just replace lines 366 and 267 (on WordPress 2.6.0) with this:

$title = preg_replace('/&+?;/', '', $title); // kill entities
$title = preg_replace('/[^%a-z0-9 _.-]/', '', $title);

Then your slug titles will not strip periods. Of course, I don’t recommend you actually use periods, I just wanted them to work when fetching old posts created before I knew any better.

After that adventure, I have to tell you, I’m really loving WordPress. There are some incredible plugins that have done some amazing functionality extension for me. So far, so good.