What is the best Twitter plugin for WordPress MU for simply publishing tweets when new blog posts are published? Or for WordPress in general?

It’s a question I’ve been mulling over a lot recently as I’ve been looking at:

1. Reducing the number of tweaks I have to make to WordPress plugins on this site; and

2. Linking other company WordPress sites into our Voxeo twitter stream.

Back in December 2007, when I first linked this blog site to our Twitter stream, I wound up using Alex King’s great Twitter Tools plugin (see also here). The challenge, though, is this:

I had to hack the plugin code to make it work for us.

THE PROBLEM

Specifically, I went into the code to remove the “New blog post:” that gets added as a prefix to any new message going out to Twitter. This is difficult to do by design, as Alex states in his plugin FAQ:

Is there any way to change the ‘New Blog Post:’ prefix when my new posts get tweeted?

Yes there is, but you have to change the code in the plugin file.

The reason this is done this way, and not as an easily changeable option from the admin screen, is so that the plugin correctly identifies the tweets that originated from previous blog posts when creating the digest posts, displaying the latest tweet, displaying sidebar tweets, and creating blog posts from tweets (you don’t want tweets that are blog post notifications being treated like tweets that originated on Twitter).

Can I remove the ‘New Blog Post:’ prefix entirely?

No, this is not a good idea. Twitter Tools needs to be able to look at the beginning of the tweet and identify if it’s a notification from your blog or not. Otherwise, Twitter Tools and Twitter could keep passing the blog posts and resulting tweets back and forth resulting in the ’spinning fireball of death’ mentioned above.

I have, of course, removed the prefix entirely. And now the problem is that whenever I need to upgrade the plugin, I have to remember to make this modification. Not good.

The issue is that there is a basic fundamental disconnect between the purpose of the Twitter Tools plugin and what I want to do.

The Twitter Tools plugin allows you not only to publish Twitter messages when you have a new blog post, but also perhaps more importantly to publish a blog post aggregating all your Twitter messages. So at some interval you have a new blog post that contains all your recent tweets. While I can see this being tremendously useful in some cases, and is honestly something I’ve been thinking about for my own personal blog, the truth is that for the Voxeo blog portal…

I don’t care!

All I really want out of the Twitter plugin is to publish a tweet whenever we publish a new blog post. I want the one-way push. And that is not where the power lies in the Twitter Tools plugin.

The challenge now in mid-2009 is that it seems like every developer, their brothers, sisters, parents, aunts and uncles have made a Twitter plugin for WordPress - there’s a zillion of them!

A SOLUTION?

So far, in the limited time I’ve had to research this, the plugin that has caught my eye is “Twitter Publisher” by Timan Rebel. It does precisely what it is says… very simply publishes a tweet any time you post a blog post. It does have the ability to add a tweet prefix, but that is blank by default. It also nicely has the ability to use either the bit.ly or awe.sm URL shortening service, which lets me tie the shortened URLs into my bit.ly account for tracking purposes.

I’ve installed this over on the VoiceObjects Developer Portal, which is currently a standalone WordPress (not WPMU) site, and so tweets now appear in our main Twitter stream when blog posts are published there. So far it seems to be working fine, although a couple of times I have been puzzled by how it has abbreviated the blog post title. For instance, here, pointing to this blog post, the post title is:

Adapt-to-me, as I don’t want to adapt to you

yet it was shortened to:

Adapt-to-me, as I don’t want to adap…

which seems strange as it didn’t seem to need to be shortened like that.

Outside of that, it’s been working well so far. I’m intrigued to try out the capability to also send a message to an author’s Twitter account based on including an author’s Twitter name in his/her profile.

MOVING AHEAD

Part of my reason for writing this post is to find out what plugins others have found useful for one-way publishing to Twitter. I have two steps I need to take:

1. Add a Twitter plugin to blog.imified.com so that posts there automatically appear in our main Twitter stream (Added challenge there: ideally we would like tweets to appear in both @voxeo and @imified)

2. Replace the Twitter plugin I use here at blogs.voxeo.com in our WordPress MU installation so that I can remove one post-plugin-upgrade tweak I have to make.

The one challenge with Twitter Publisher is that it’s not 100% clear that it will work with WordPress MU, although I’ve generally found most WP plugins to work well with WPMU.

So I throw the question out there… what Twitter plugins for WordPress MU (or WordPress) have you found work the best for updating your Twitter stream whenever you publish a new blog post?

(Thanks in advance)

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Today it was finally time to upgrade the site to WordPress 2.7. I’ve been planning for this for a long time but first had to wait for WordPress MU 2.7 to become available at the end of January and then was caught up in working on how to make a redundant WPMU server for failover purposes (not entirely there yet, but getting close). Well… then there was this wee minor job role change in February… and suddenly it’s April!

So for those of you running WordPress MU - here’s what I did, in the hopes that it will help you. Some of this follows the steps in the WPMU Codex for upgrading - some of it is my own variation.

1. BACKUP EVERYTHING - both the wpmu directory and the database.

2. MAKE A WORK DIRECTORY - I’m a paranoid type, especially when it comes to working with a live site. So what I did was copy the wpmu directory to one named wpmu27. The basic idea is that I’ll do all my updates in wpmu27 and then move that into place once I’m sure it’s all good to go.

3. DOWNLOAD WPMU 2.7 - Just grabbed http://mu.wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz. Expanding that got me a wordpress-mu directory.

4. PREPARE TO COPY 2.7 OVER - What I want to do is just copy the files from wordpress-mu into my wpmu27 directory and overwrite all the files there. But first, I want to do two steps:

   • MOVE OLD WP-INCLUDES AND WP-ADMIN - In my wpmu27 directory, I moved wp-includes and wp-admin to have a -orig on their names. Why not just blow them away, especially when I have a copy in the neighboring wpmu directory? I don’t know… I just would rather have more backups than fewer.
   • MOVE NEW WP-CONTENT - Over in the wordpress-mu directory, I moved wp-content to wp-content-new because I do not want it overwriting all my content.

   With those steps done, I simply cd into wpmu27 and do this to bring over the new files:

   cp -R ../wordpress-mu/* .

   Ta da… all the 2.7. files are in place. I’m not done, though.

5. COPY OVER BLOGS.PHP - In looking through what changed in the new wp-content directory (that I moved to wp-content-new in the previous step), the, only file that appeared really different was blogs.php. So in my wp-content directory, I did this:

   # cp ../wp-content-new/blogs.php .

   which overwrote my older file.

6. ADD NEW LINES TO WP-CONFIG - WPMU 2.7 apparently needs some new lines in wp-config.php and so following Step 10 of the upgrade instructions I added these lines:

   define('DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'blogs.voxeo.com');
   define('PATH_CURRENT_SITE', '/');
   define('BLOGID_CURRENT_SITE', '1');

   I also had to add two more security keys:

   define('NONCE_KEY', 'uniquestring');
   define('AUTH_SALT', 'uniquestring');

   The “unique string”, I have learned, can be anything, really. The site at http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ generates very unique strings for you, and you can just copy one of them over into each of the variables. You can refresh the page to get new unique strings. (I was confused by the fact that this page has variable names on it - and didn’t have AUTH_SALT - but learned that the names are just there for convenience, but you can use the string for other variables… or just make up your own string.)

7. ADD MORE LINES TO WP-CONFIG - After this entire process was completed, I found that the site came up, but I was unable to login to the site as an administrator. In searching the WordPress MU forums, I found this post which suggested adding these lines to wp-config.php:

   define('ADMIN_COOKIE_PATH', '/');
   define('COOKIE_DOMAIN', '');
   define('COOKIEPATH', '');
   define('SITECOOKIEPATH', ''); 

   That worked… and I was able to get into the site.

8. MAKE MANUAL MODIFICATIONS - Over time, I’ve found some tweaks I need to make to the WPMU distribution for this site, specifically to files in wp-includes. Those modifications are:

   • Modify wp-includes/functions.php to allow other Java file types - on line 2070 of the 2.7 file
   • Modify wp-includes/formatting.php to remove extra line breaks - on line 116 of the 2.7 file
   • Modify wp-includes/kses.php to allow Skype and SIP URIs - on line 353 of the 2.7 file.

   At this point, the WPMU files are all ready to be moved into place. I’ve been making all these modifications and updates in a separate directory, so the main blog site is still untouched from a user’s perspective.

9. DE-ACTIVATE ALL PLUGINS - Logging into the WPMU web interface, I deactivated all plugins to the site.

10. MOVE WPMU27 DIRECTORY INTO PLACE - Next I just swap the directories so that the new code is in place:

    # mv wpmu wpmu-old# mv wpmu27 wpmu

    This gives me the option to simply move the old code back in place if something fails.

11. LOGIN TO THE SITE AGAIN - When I refreshed my screen to login to the site, I had to login again. As noted earlier, I had to add more lines to wp-config.php in order for this to work.

12. PERFORM THE SITE-WIDE UPGRADE - In the “Site Admin” part of WPMU, I chose “Upgrade” which then upgraded all the blogs in the site. (My understanding is that this is upgrading the database if necessary.)

13. RE-ACTIVATE ALL PLUGINS - Turn them all back on for the various blogs. (I’ve been using “Plugin Commander” to activate some plugins across all blogs.)

14. TEST, TEST, TEST - I then went through various blogs to make sure things were working, comments could be left, etc.

15. ENJOY… - Now the site is running WP 2.7 with the nice new dashboard, editor, etc….

That is the process I wound up going through. Hopefully this helps some of you out there who may be working with WordPress MU.

The redundant, failover server is still in the works… more on that another time.

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However, this still didn’t let me upload larger files. In fact, the result was somewhat comical in that the WordPress error message said “You cannot upload files larger than 100M” - but yet my files were far smaller than that. It turned out in further investigation that there is a second setting in php.ini that needed to be changed: post_max_size, as in “the maximum size of a given blog post”. That was also set to “2M” and was therefore gating my upload. A quick change to make both look like:

upload_max_filesize = 100M;
post_max_size = 100M;

followed by a restart of Apache… and I was uploading away. I’m writing this here mostly so that I remember for other WordPress installs - and in the hopes that it helps someone else out there…

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I have a problem. If something were ever to happen to the physical server hosting this site… well… blogs.voxeo.com would be off the Internet until a backup server can be put in place… a backup image restored, etc., etc. That could take a period of time. There’s also the risk of losing whatever content was added to the server since the last backup.

I don’t like single points of failure.

What I’d like to do is to have some type of system in place so that if the physical server fails for some reason, the site won’t be offline for very long at all. It seems to me that there are a couple of approaches:

1. BUILD A WPMU “CLUSTER” - It’s pretty clear that large WPMU sites are already doing this. There are various forum posts - for example here, here, here, here and here. There is a WordPress Codex piece on scaling. There’s even a slide deck from a presentation by a Joseph Scott (looks like a talk I would have enjoyed seeing). Overall it looks rather straightforward - set up multiple web servers… replicate the MySQL databases… rsync the data (or use some sync mechanism)… set up some DNS entries… and so on…

The thing is that in reading through all those pages I feel a bit like I would be trying to build the Space Shuttle just to be able to drive down to the corner store. I don’t have 200,000 blogs… I have six… and maybe we’ll grow that to 10, but it’s still a tiny number. I’m not really concerned about scaling the server and dealing with performance issues as I am with ensuring availability.

Of course, I’d naturally also like the WPMU cluster to be easy to administer… easy to update… easy to post to, etc.

Really, I’m looking for a nice easy HOWTO for someone who just wants to create a small WordPress MU cluster. I can’t seem to find one… (which maybe means I need to write one when I get it all sorted out.) If anyone has any pointers to pages I may have missed, I’d love to learn of them.

The nice thing about doing a cluster approach would be that a server could die and the site would continue to be available. The dead server could be repaired, resynced and put back in action. Plus, since we have our own rock-solid, redundant, geographically-distributed hosting infrastructure, I could put the second WPMU server in another of our data centers and be able to get that added redundancy.

2. MIRRORING A WPMU SERVER - Another less-involved approach seems to me to be to mirror the primary server onto another server and then be able to swap in that backup server should the primary server fail. Essentially it is very similar to a cluster except that only one server is actually in use at any time.

From a user and administrative point-of-view, it would still be a single WPMU server that we are posting to and administering - with then some kind of sync going on to the backup server.

If the primary server dies, the recovery could be as simple as pointing the DNS entry for “blogs.voxeo.com” to the IP of the backup server (or bringing up the backup server with the IP of the primary… or pointing the public IP to the internal IP of the backup server… there are numerous ways to do this).

So far, though, I’m not finding any forum posts, HOWTOs, or other posts talking about how to do this. I’m thinking it’s probably setting up MySQL replication again and then using something like rsync to sync the WPMU files between servers…

3. USING A DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING CLOUD - I suppose another approach is to virtualize the WPMU instance and distribute it across multiple servers. Sort of like sticking the whole site up in Amazon EC2 and S3 - only in our own data centers since we already have the infrastructure. I could do this and in fact it does seems like a good layer of redundancy to add. But I’m not sure it’s really the whole answer, because there’s still only one MySQL instance and one WPMU instance running. With either clustering or mirroring you have multiple web servers and multiple databases running, so you have more redundancy going on.

Ultimately, all I’m looking to do is to ensure that if a physical server fails - or needs to be taken offline for any reason - the WordPress MU site will still be accessible to visitors. If anyone reading this has any suggestions or thoughts, I’d definitely be grateful to hear them - either as comments here, email, Twitter replies, whatever. (Thanks in advance.) However I wind up solving the issue, I’ll be sure to write it up here.

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Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress mu, wordpressmu, wpmu, availability, cluster, clustering, mirroring, redundant, cloudcomputing, web

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PUBLISHING TO IDENTI.CA

Using the great Twitter Tools plugin, I’ve set this site up so that any blog posts published in any of our public blogs go out in our Twitter stream at twitter.com/voxeo. The primary reason for that is doing this is that we realize that many people (myself included) consume a lot of news/blog content through Twitter now. I’ve noted that myself that I don’t read RSS feeds in a feed reader nearly as much as I used to… instead I consume the information through Twitter. So we publish our posts out that way for people who want to subscribe to them and consume them in that fashion.

But what about the open source microblogging site Identi.ca? I use identi.ca personally, presented about linking Voxeo’s voice platform with Identi.ca at OSCON in 2008, and wrote up a lengthy piece about Yammer, Laconica and other options for internal microblogging back in October. It’s a great service and offers some interesting ideas for distributed microblogging.

Now we have an Identi.ca account at identi.ca/voxeo, but obviously we don’t use it. So I want to do for Identi.ca what we do for Twitter and publish our blog posts out that way. So far, the two main plugin contenders I see are:

• WordIdentica
• Identi.ca Tools

Judging purely from the websites, WordIdentica seems to have a lot of comments and, one would guess, usage. We’ll have to see.

MAKING THE SITE MORE IPHONE/TOUCH-FRIENDLY

Since we are huge iPhone fans and users here, I was intrigued when my colleague Ron Blaisdell pointed me to WPtouch: WordPress on iPhone which essentially is a plugin that provides a theme that makes your site look nicer and more navigable on your iPhone or iPod Touch. I haven’t tried it yet, but I did browse with my iPhone over to a site Ron did at http://www.flgyr.org/ and it does look cool on the iPhone!

Just two of the many things I’d like to do to the site…

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So I stopped. Since we know exactly who will have an account on this WPMU server, and we very definitely do not let just anyone in, I’ve gone ahead and installed and activated the “Unfiltered MU” plugin. I just followed the installation instructions and dropped it in my mu-plugins directory and… ta da… the problem with embeds went away.

Now there is the detail that authors need to have at least “Editor” status within WordPress MU for the Unfiltered plugin to let their embeds through, but that’s okay because, again, we have a very closed WPMU environment where I know precisely who will be writing on each blog. So for the people who need embeds, I have no issue setting them up with “Editor” access.

Anyway, it’s very great that Automattic makes the “Unfiltered MU” plugin available - and it’s great to no longer have to worry about whether or not new embeds will work within our blog site.

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Here’s the deal… with our recent acquisition of VoiceObjects, we now have a developer blog hosted on the VoiceObjects site and for a variety of reasons we’d like to continue to have it hosted there on the VO site. It’s well-integrated with the rest of the site… the authors are all set up to publish to it… etc, etc. I don’t want to move it to our WPMU site here. Maybe someday that will make sense… but not right now.

What I would like to do now, though, is to mirror the content over into this blog site. Essentially create another blog here and just have posts from there appear here. This helps promote VoiceObjects activities within the larger realm of Voxeo activities, plus the VO posts then also go out through our Twitter and FriendFeed streams.

In looking around the web, I have seen a lot of WordPress plugins that will let you import a blog if you are migrating an existing blog over into WordPress or WordPress MU… but so far the only one that seems to let me mirror a site is the SmartRSS plugin. Another one, FeedList, looks close, but without actually installing it I can’t tell if this will mirror content into a main blog area - or if it is more designed for sidebar widgets. This WordPress forum post shows that others are looking for similar solutions.

Any suggestions? Can any of you recommend a plugin to mirror one blog in a WordPress / WordPress MU site?

Thanks in advance. Any advice would be greatly appreciated - and I’ll definitely update this blog as I come up with a solution.

UPDATE - Shortly after I posted this, Olle Johansson suggested I check out WP-o-Matic which does indeed look like it will do the trick! (Thanks, Olle!)

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My rationale for doing this is quite simple. It’s a fact of life that if you offer a RSS feed for your blog site, your content is going to get “scraped” and show up on other websites by spammers who are purely looking to use your text to get some search engine attention so that they can theoretically get people to click on the ads that they surround your content with.

It’s annoying. Especially when you’ve written some really good content and you want the people coming to your site versus the spammer’s site.

However, after eight years of blogging I’ve learned that there is only so much you can do. Every now and then if there is someone re-using our content in a particular egregious fashion, I’ll try to contact them. But 99% of the time they either don’t easily have contact info or make it difficult to find. (Then there was the time I called up on the phone someone scraping one of my external blogs. She was rather puzzled as to how I got her number, but it was simply in the DNS records for the domain she was using. Needless to say, she agreed to stop scraping my content.) Chasing down content scrapers and asking them to stop takes up time and energy that could, quite frankly, be better spent generating new blog entries and other projects. At some point you have to ask if it’s worth the hassle.

Instead of fighting, I’m trying to use it more as an opportunity for publicity. I’ve found that most of the content scrapers, and so far all the ones I’ve found scraping Voxeo content, are just taking our RSS items verbatim and running them on their sites. Now this isn’t always the case. I’ve found some very bizarre mashups of my content with other content on some spam sites. But for the most part it seems to be true.

So if they are going to take all the content “as is”, I want to make sure that they get some subscription links in there so that perhaps people finding the content on the spammer’s sites will find up coming back to our own site.

Right now I’m adding the footers manually, but at some point I may get around to incorporating them directly into the WordPress template we use to create all of our posts.

We’ll see. It’s all part of this grand experiment known as social media…

What do you do to combat content scrapers? Or do you just not care and consider it added publicity?

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Now I thought we had this all set up so that the favicon would survive across WordPress MU upgrades. We have the correct “favicon.ico” file in the two themes we use here (one for the blogs.voxeo.com “portal” page and one for the individual blogs). I thought we were all set.

So you can imagine my annoyance when after an upgrade a while back the favicon that was showing up was the default WPMU one:

The problem turned out to be the fact that WordPress MU has multiple favicon.ico files in the installation. A quick “find” brought me these:

wpmu/favicon.ico
wpmu/wp-content/themes/default/favicon.ico
wpmu/wp-content/themes/voxeo-home/favicon.ico
wpmu/wp-content/themes/voxeo-default/favicon.ico

Our themes do, in fact, have the correct favicon.ico file, but it isn’t being used. The one file that seems to matter is the favicon.ico in the top level of my WPMU installation.

So the fix is trivial… just copy the favicon.ico from one of my themes up to the top level of my WPMU install. Ta da… problem fixed.

Of course, given the caching that web browsers do, the new favicon may not be visible in web browsers until either a refresh is forced or the browser’s cache is cleared. (I had to clear my cache in Firefox.) If users have also bookmarked the URLs in a browser such as Firefox, the favicons in their bookmark menus may not necessarily update. (In Firefox 3, there is a longer process you have to go through to change the bookmark favicons.)

In any event, new browsers connecting to your site should now see the correct favicon.

I didn’t try simply deleting the favicon.ico file at the top-level to see if that would cause WPMU to use the favicon.ico icons in the specific themes. In my case, I only want one favicon used across the entire site, so I’m okay replacing the top-level file.

Unfortunately, this appears to be yet one more step I need to add to my “WordPress MU Upgrade Checklist”…

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In any event today I finally made a switch I’d been wanting to do for several months… I moved this site over to Akismet for blog comment spam protection.

From the beginning of this blog site, I was using Spam Karma 2 for a number of reasons and it seemed to work fine. Then back in July, the SK2 developer, Dave du Verle, announced that he was officially discontinuing development of Spam Karma 2, was releasing it under the GPL version 2 and making the code available for others from a new website. I monitored that site for a while, but no new releases or really any information appeared and the development email list appears to be basically dormant. In reading Dave du Verle’s blog, it’s pretty clear that he’s moved on.

And that’s okay. I for one appreciate all the time and work he put in to making SK2 as solid a tool as it was. (Thank you, Dave!) It was great to have it available while it lasted. But between Dave’s posts and also the fact that more comment spam seemed to be getting through SK2 and winding up on our site, it was rather clear to me that I would need to move at some point soon - and based on my own usage of Akismet on other personal sites, I figured I’d switch to it.

What finally made me make the switch was really the VoiceObjects acquisition and the fact that the VoiceObjects’ blog used Akismet and had an enterprise subscription that needed to be renewed. If you are renewing for one blog, you may as well do it for several…

The Akismet plugin installation was predictably very simple. I just

1. uploaded the Akismet code to our plugins directory

2. enabled its usage through “Plugin Commander” in our Site Admin
3. went to each of our main blogs and activated the plugin
4. in each blog, entered the API key from WordPress.com
5. in each blog, went to the Comments page and cleared out all the spam comments found by Akismet in its initial run.

This last point was a bit strange to me. It seems like SpamKarma 2 must not have been actually deleting the comment spam from our database even though I thought I had it set to do so. Akismet found a great number of spam comments which did not appear to be visible on the site but were apparently in the database. I found it rather strange since I had just cleared out all the SK2 “harvested spam” lists prior to de-activating it and activating Akismet.

Note that I could have installed Akismet directly into the WordPress MU mu-plugins directory and had it automagically be activated for all blogs (the latest versions of Akismet even allow you to hard-code your API key in the plugin so that you can easily protect all blogs). My main reason for not doing this was so that we would remain in compliance with our enterprise license. This license is only up to a certain number of blogs, and I want to ensure we are staying within the terms of that license.

So there we are… now protected by Akismet… we’ll see how it goes in the weeks and months ahead…

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