modMunch 1.0

modMunch allows you to receive your comment moderation notices via an RSS feed, instead of clogging up your inbox. The idea came from Matt Brett when he posted that he was looking for something like this on twitter.

Features

• Gives you an RSS feed with the comments that are awaiting moderation.
• Access is restricted through the use of a personalised access code.
• Privdes all the same information that the standard email notifications provide.
• Removes the need for you to receive constant emails telling you to moderate comments. Multiple emails replaced by a single feed.

modMunch in action

Here is an example of the modMunch feed being viewed in NewsFire.

Installation

1. Download the zip file and extract the contents.
2. Upload to your wp-comments-mod-rss2.php to your root Wordpress directory.
3. Upload modMuch folder containing modMunch.php, readme.txt and changelog.txt to wp-content/plugins directory.
4. Activate modMunch from plugins page in Wordpress admin.
5. Go to options->modMunch in your Wordpress admin and enter your accesscode which will allow only you to access the feed of comments in the moderation queue. Your code will need to be at least 6 characters long.
6. You can access your modMunch feed in two ways:
   • http://www.yoursite.com/wp-comments-mod-rss2.php?modmunch=youraccesscode
   • http://www.yoursite.com/modmunch-feed/?modmunch=youraccesscode
7. Enjoy.

Download

You can grab the download by heading over to the current official page for modMunch on my other site: http://www.deanjrobinson.com/wordpress/modmunch/

Twitt-Twoo 1.1

Twitt-Twoo is a simple little plugin that will allow you to update your Twitter status right from your blog’s sidebar. AJAX takes cares of the hard work, and means that your page doens’t even have to reload, allowing for quick and easy status updates.

Features

• Displays your latest Twitter status, and when it was last updated.
• Displays your Twitter icon/avatar next your status.
• Allows for easy updating of your status from the sidebar.
• Updates using AJAX, so no page reload is required.
• Provides a link to your personal Twitter page. eg. http://twitter.com/deanjrobinson
• Provides a link to your Twitter RSS feed.
• Simple options page located in admin Options->Twitt-Twoo
• Provides a ready-to-use widget/module.
• Comes with a new Twitt-Twoo icon, inspired by the Feed and Share Icon projects.
• NEW – Caches your last ‘Tweet’, to improve page load times.
• NEW – Option to hide your Twitter image if you want to.

Twitt-Twoo in action

You can see it at work at the top of my sidebar on the right hand side. The images below outline the simple task of updating your Twitter status.

	This is how your status will be displayed in your sidebar, as you can see it shows your status, your icon/avatar and when your status was last updated.
	After clicking on the ‘edit’ button you will be shown the field to enter your new status into, when your done click the ‘update’ button.
	You will be shown a little ’spinner’ to indicate that your status is being updated.
	Once your status has been successfully updated, you new status will be shown.

Installation

1. Download the zip file and extract the contents.
2. Upload to your wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Activate Twitt-Twoo from plugins page in Wordpress admin.
4. Go to options->Twitt-Twoo in your Wordpress admin and enter your settings so that Twitt-Twoo know whos Twitter to show, and update.
5. If you use the sidebar widget plugin then you should now have a Twitt-Twoo widget available for you to add to your sidebar. This also applies to users of k2-based themes such as K2, Reodable and Unwakable.
6. If you prefer to manually edit your sidebar.php then this is the code that you will need to add:

   <?php if (function_exists(’twitttwoo_display’)) { $twitt_twoo_user_name = get_option(’twitt_twoo_user_name’); ?>
   <div class=’sb_twitttwoo’>
   <h2><a href=’http://twitter.com/<?php echo $twitt_twoo_user_name; ?>’ target=’_blank’>Twitt-Twoo</a></h2>
   <div>
   <?php twitttwoo_display(); ?>
   </div>
   </div>
   <?php } ?>

   – OR –

7. If you wish to insert your own structure around the Twitt-Twoo output, you can just use this:

   <?php twitttwoo_display(); ?>

8. Enjoy.

Download

Please note that this plugin uses the json_decode function which is only found in PHP5, so if you aren’t running PHP5, then you won’t be able to use this plugin. Sorry for this restriction, I am working to find a way around it at the moment.

You can grab the download over at the current official Twitt-Twoo page at http://www.deanjrobinson.com/wordpress/twitt-twoo

Blueberry is not a theme itself, but a skin for the Sandbox theme. The parameters of the competition were that it was a pure design thing, you couldn’t mess around with the php code of Sandbox. Only CSS and images, which sure makes things a whole lot simpler.

For the moment I have got a live preview online, this is the same preview that I’ve been using for the past couple of weeks while working on Blueberry. So if you would like to have a play around with Blueberry in the wild please do so, I’ll leave this up for a couple of weeks, or at least until the previews are online at the Sandbox competition site.

You can find the download current hosted over on my other site: http://www.deanjrobinson.com/blog/blueberry-for-sandbox/

Installing Blueberry is really simple. Note that you must have Sandbox installed to use Blueberry, if you don’t have it you can get it here.

1. Upload the sandbox-blueberry folder to your Sandbox folder in wp-content/themes/.
2. You will need to edit the default style.css file that comes with Sandbox, so that it loads the Blueberry skin. to do this replace everything after the header in the default style.css with:

   @import url(’sandbox-blueberry/style.css’);

3. In your Wordpress admin, go to the presentation tab and select the Sandbox theme.
4. Enjoy.

Thats about it, judging starts now, and runs for a week then the winners will be announced. Personally I’m looking forward to seeing what other participants entries are like. I think I probably could have done more with mine if I’d wanted, but I chose to keep it fairly minimalistic (or in other words…completely different to Redoable).

I’m calling the public version “Pipedream Lite”, because thats what it will be. In its current state Pipedream is not a ready to roll theme that anyone could use, there are a number of customisations that were included specifically for my site and the way that I wanted to structure the layout.

At the moment my line of thought is that ‘Lite’ will have the same overall look, the header, the footer, general post layout etc, but things such as the home page layout that you see on deanjrobinson.com and the colour scheme most likely will be kept for myself. this is mainly because I want to retain the uniqueness of my own site. Where possible I will try to keep as much functionality as possible, even if it takes until a 1.1 release to get it all included.

Development of “Pipedream Lite” has not begun as yet (not including the version running on my site, since ‘Lite’ will be pretty much rebuilt from the ground up), and at the moment I’m not looking at a public release until early next year. Why so long? Well I’ve promised many, many people that I would address the Wordpress 2.3 compatibility issues with Redoable, and work will be starting on Redoable 2.0 in the next couple of weeks.

The sidebar is module/widget ready, with over 20 different modules available to use. By default the sidebar will work without the need to add any modules, and will display the calendar, categories, tags, blogroll and listen and watch modules depending, of course, on whether you have the relevant plugins set up.

Two of the modules, ‘Listen’ and ‘Watch’, make use of categories in Links, you can set which category and how many links to display in the Redoable options panel. The idea of these is to provide links to music, movies etc that you might be enjoying at the time. This was based on a method described by Matt Brett.

Sidenotes will be shown on the homepage. The category and number of sidenotes can be set in the Redoable options panel. They are displayed using Matt’s Asides technique just as they are in K2.

As with K2 the Extended Live Archives can be setup from the Redoable options panel, and you can also enable the Archives page. I also added support for Alex King’s Articles plugin, and once the plugin is activated the Articles page can be turned on or off from within the Redoable options panel.

On top of all this there are countless tweaks here and there to just about everything, too many to list here and many are probably barely noticeable.

Note: Redoable is not a style for K2, it is an independent theme. You can have both K2 and Redoable installed on your blog at the same time as they do not share any config options and can be configured separately.

Supported plugins

The following plugins are supported by Redoable ‘out-of-the-box’, and all are highly recommended. All you need to do is download them, add them to your plugins folder and activate them. If you know of any great plugins you would like to see in future releases leave a comment or send me an email.

• Alex King’s Articles v1.1
• Brian’s Latest Comments v1.5.10
• Extended Live Archives v0.10beta-r18
• Semiologic’s Google Analytics Plugin v1.9
• Gregarious v1.5.2 and v2 beta
• Noteworthy v1.0
• Random Quotes v1.3
• Rechuked Buttons v1.0 (Based on Sawchuck Buttons plugin) – Not WP2.1 compatible…yet
• Related Posts v2.04
• Share This v1.4
• Ultimate Tag Warrior v3.1415926
• Ultimate Category Cloud v2.0 (Based on Weighted Categories plugin)
• Word Count v0.01
• WP-PostRatings v1.04
• WP-PostViews v1.1
• Wordpress Download Monitor v1.5
• Quoter v1.1
• Subscribe to Comments v2.0.8
• Spam Karma 2
• wp-recent-links v2.0
• Twitt-Twoo v1.1

Installation

1. Download the Redoable package.
2. Unpack, and upload to the wp-content/themes/ directory on your server.
3. Login to your admin area and set Redoable as the current theme.
4. Install and activate any of the above listed plugins.
5. Enjoy.

Thankyou

Michael, Chris, Zeo, Steve, Ben and anyone else who has contributed to K2. Without K2 there would have been no starting point for my theme.

Tyler Longren for his Unwakeable theme which was also based on K2, and served as a good base to build Redoable from.

FamFamFam for the fantastic Silk icon set. There’s an icon for just about everything.

The authors of all the plugins listed above, they help make Redoable what I want to be.

Help make it better

Nothing is ever perfect, so if you have any feature requests, or find any bugs please submit them here:
Support Forum

Download

You can get the latest version of Redoable from its current homepage here: http://www.deanjrobinson.com/wordpress/redoable/

Version 2 of Hahlo is now live! It has been in the works almost since the day that version 1 was released. The short timeframe that version 1 had ended up probably doing more harm than good, and while the basics worked well enough it had a few failings which unfortunately resulted in many people switching to other alternatives. Now with Hahlo 2.0 a lot more thought has gone into how things should work, and how they should fit together. On top of that there are also a huge pile of new features and enhancements which will hopefully bring those that had left back to Hahlo. Keep reading for full details about the additions and improvements that have been made in this all-new version.

The Interface

The basics of the interface should still be familiar to users of v1 despite that fact that pretty much everything has changed in some way. Lets start with the navigation. Gone is the unintuitive ’star’ button which was used for updates, in its place is a nice, simple “Update” button. Give that a tap and up pops the familiar update box, the same as before.

One of the biggest changes is the relocation of the menu/toolbar form the bottom of the screen to the top, and by default its hidden to keep screen real estate free. This was also done out of necessity since the mobile version of Safari doesn’t support fixed positioning. Tap the ‘Menu’ button and the toolbar will appear, and you’ll see a whole bunch of brightly coloured icons to navigate your way around. You’ll also see the arrow, tap that to reveal more toolbar options. They have been split like this to make the buttons themselves larger and easier to use on the iPhone.

On a number of the ‘timelines’ you will see a few little circular icons in the top right of each tweet. The star icon allows you to quickly, and easily save the tweet as a favourite. Just tap it and it will turn ‘gold’ once it has been saved. The message bubble with the ‘M’ in it is for Direct Messaging that particular user, give it a tap and the direct message box will appear with the recipients name already filled in. The third button is the highly requested reply button, tap that and the update box will appear with the @username already filled in and ready for your reply.

From any screen you can easily tap on a users profile picture and you will be taken to that users individual timeline. Coming soon you will also be able to follow and unfollow other twitterers directly from Hahlo.

What can I do with Hahlo?

First thing that you will probably notice when you log in to Hahlo is that there are a lot more options. You can now do just about everything that is available from the twitter website all from Hahlo, and there are still more features in the wings. Lets have a look at what you can do.

• “My Timeline” – this is your timeline of tweets
• “My Friends Timeline” – this displays the most recent 20 tweets from you and your friends, at the bottom there is a button to show 20 more tweets, tap it and the next 20 load directly onto the bottom of list. You can view upto the last 200 tweets in your friends timeline.
• “Friends I’m Following” – a list of all the friends who updates you are following, with easy links to DM or reply to any of them. There is also a ‘grid view’ button in the top right that will take you to a screen displaying all your friends avatars, just tap their picture and you’ll be taken to their timeline.
• “Who is Following me” – a list, 20 at a time, of the people who are following your updates, along with links to send a reply and view their timelines. Again there is the ‘grid view’ option.
• “Replies to my Tweets” – simply view a list of all the @ replies that have been sent to you
• “Direct Messages” – this is a list of all the direct messages that you have received. At the top you’ll notice three buttons, the ‘outbox’ button will take you to a list of all the messages that you have sent, and the last button will open the ’send message’ box for you to direct message one of your friends.
• “My Favourite Tweets” – a list of all the tweets that you have marked as favourites, great for saving funny, informative, or useful tweets.
• “Public Timeline” – pretty self-explanatory, its the public twitter timeline

As already mentioned you can easily update your twitter status by tapping the ‘update’ button at the top of the screen no matter where in Hahlo you are. Replying to tweets has never been easier, just use the @ button that appears on many of the screens. The same goes for sending a direct message, just tap the ‘M’ button as mentioned above.

Optimised for your convenience

Since I wrote an article recently comparing the relative load sizes of some of Hahlo’s competitors its only fair that I try my best to optimise Hahlo to the best of my ability. All images have been optimised to provide minimal file sizes, my css is now gzipped which reduces the load size greatly, and the javascript is now packed and gzipped further reducing load.
With regards to the CSS there is still more room for further optimisation in the future.

When you first login to Hahlo the inital page load is just 60kb, almost half that of v1, and a full load of the public timeline is just 100kb, but approx. 40% of this is user profile image which are beyond my control.

Its also worth noting that now that the full interface is AJAX many things such as icons and the UI images only ever need to be loaded once, after that pretty much all that you are loading is the content of the page in questions, this helps to reduce load times across the board.

Ask and you shall receive

In the past couple of months I have had many requests from users, and I have tried where possible to include their requests. Two of the most requested features were @ replies and clickable links. As already mentioned sending an @ reply is dead easy, and you will now notice that whenever an @username appears in a tweet it is linked directly to that users timeline. You will also notice that any link that is in a tweet will be linked up automatically, something that was request by numerous users.

When I opened the beta version of 2.0 up for testing the first request I got was for an easy way to bookmark the friends timeline. Within about 20 minutes I had that sorted, along with a bunch of other ‘pretty’ links that you can use.

• http://hahlo.com/username eg. http://hahlo.com/deanjrobinson will take you directly to that users timeline
• http://hahlo.com/public_timeline will take you straight to the public timeline
• http://hahlo.com/friends_timeline will take you straight to your friends timeline
• http://hahlo.com/replies will take you straight to your replies
• http://hahlo.com/direct_messages will take you straight to your messages inbox
• http://hahlo.com/sent_messages will take you straight to your messages outbox
• http://hahlo.com/friends will take you straight to the list of your friends
• http://hahlo.com/followers will take you straight to the list of your followers

The Future

Yes there are still more features that I hope to add to Hahlo in the future. The first on that list will be adding the functionality to allow you to follow and unfollow fellow twitterers quickly and easily. If you have a request for something that you would like to see Hahlo do, I’d love to hear it, just leave a comment or contact me at dean@hahlo.com.