Month: May 2010

Twitter IPhone App – Custom API URL

May 21, 2010 / Joseph / 0 Comments

Change of plans. I decided to take an opportunity I came across yesterday.
Let me explain. I subscribe to Tech Crunch via twitter, that’s my way of keeping up with who’s, who’s and the what’s going on in the tech world. Well I saw a post they made yesterday about a new twitter IPhone application that was coming out or maybe it was just being renamed, I can’t remember but you get the idea, right? So I thought why not give it a try. So I went to the Itunes App store via my IPhone and downloaded the app. I played around with it for a while and quickly became very happy with the functionality. It had a butt load of options and was totally ad free. For the longest I had been using Echofon which wasn’t.
Any who, one of the features I played around with while testing was the photo posting. Photo posting is probably one of the most important feature for me. I figure I can text my posts in if needed.

So to test this feature out I added a test twitter account to the app and posted a random photo from my IPhone. The photo showed up immediately which is great, but when I took a closer look I realized it posted the image to Yfrog. WTF, I was kind of irritated for a little while and wonder why in the heck would they use that site, I hate that site. So I went back to the app to see if there where other options I could select from that would allow me to change this out. Echofon has that feature, so I assumed they would also. Now hold your hat on what I’m about to tell you next, it’s a shocker. Not only did they have several options to choose from, they also had an option that would allow you to add your own custom API URL. Yea that’s music to my ears. First off I love using API’s and secondly I just so happen to have a image hosting site that posts to Twitter and Facebook. So that was it, I knew my night was on lock. I took a pause for a few minutes and then went straight to Burger King and grabbed a couple of those $1.00 double cheeseburgers, came back to the house and started coding my ass off. I think I went to sleep around 4 am, but had to get back up by 9:00 am, I had some shares of stock that I was trying to dump before the market bottomed out.

So to make a long story short I completed building the API for my site sometime around 5 p.m. today. It took longer than what I expected because the market went running today. If you’re curious I took home an extra 315 bucks today. But I have everything working now. You can now post images to your Frin.ly account from Twitter’s IPhone app. I’m not advertising the API right now because I want to take sometime to revamp the site before I start to let people use it. I was looking at some of the code and some of it didn’t make since to me, and I was the person who wrote it. Go figure.

Anyway I said all of this to say that I’m off track right now and things will probably be pushed back another week or so I think. But I’ll keep you posted.
Later,
Joe

New SMS Project in Scope

May 20, 2010 / Joseph / 0 Comments

I have a new project in mind, it’s SMS based. I’m going to take this weekend to scratch it out on paper before I actually start coding the thing. This is still a new approach for me. On my last project I flow charted everything out before hitting the code and things actually went a tad bit faster. Plus I found that if you don’t have a well documented process before you start then it’s actually harder to determine the projects end date because you will be constantly added bits and pieces or modifying things.
Overall I’m really, really excited because this project will be solving one of my longtime dilemmas. And that’s remembering things. So if I can bust this one out in less then a month that would be incredible. But honestly the coding has never been an issue, it’s the designing, that’s my Achilles heel. I’ve always thought if I could some how team up with a web designer I would kick some major ass. (Please take that as a hint)

WordPress Transfer Complete

May 19, 2010 / Joseph / 0 Comments

Ok, I think I’m now fully transferred over. I won’t BS you it took longer then what I expected. It’s probably because I was being a fast ass and kept making minor mistakes. But basically all I did was pull the posts/data from the database and created a XML file that kind of matched the exported WordPress version. I left out a lot of containers like the categories and tags containers, actually that was another animal in itself. I figured I would create new tags and categories once I had everything imported, hopefully forcing me to create a more organized blog. I did realize another issue after I was done, and that was making sure I didn’t lose much search engine traffic. I expected a drop off in traffic, but I didn’t want it to be a large drop off. So basically I added a few 301 redirects in my .htaccess file and added some code in the header.php file to make sure that the pages where able to flow from the old site to the new site without issue.
So for the most part it, I think I’m done. I have a few minor things to add but the heavy lifting is over.

WordPress Installed

May 18, 2010 / Joseph / 0 Comments

Ok so I’ve gotten the account setup and finally wordpress is installed. I’ve also found a Theme over at Freethemelayouts.com that I’m happy with. So basically now it’s time to tackle what I believe will be the hard part. How to import the posts I’ve made on my old blog into my new one.
I’ve taken a look at the XML file and the containers that wordpress includes during their export process. So I’m guessing all I have to do is a database pull and and create a XML file with the same or similar containers. Sounds easy enough right, let’s see.

Going back to WordPress

May 9, 2010 / Joseph / 0 Comments

Ok, so I’m thinking about going back to word press. I just spent the last five minutes tying to remember how to get back into my own site.. Crazy, I know. I’m not really sure why I left word press in the first beginning. I think it had to be my code obsession. Let me explain I love writing code, its keeps my mine busy. So it doesn’t matter how awesome a site is or was I end up mashing it and developing my own version. Sometimes with more features and most of the time with less. Yea that’s it. At the time I believe word press was too heavy. But in fact it may have been my server was just dam outdated. Since them I’ve upgrades the hardware and etc so it will be interesting to see how it will perform now. So the only issue I have now is how in the hell do I import what I currently have into word press. If you have any advice please email me.