Did some light housecleaning today. First of all, I pulled in this plugin called delicious-integrator and so far I’m very pleased with it. I chose to put the bookmarks on their own page partly cos I didn’t want to slow down the sidebar any more and partly because I’ve been taking a little extra effort to include useful commentary on digitalramble’s delicious page so I figured I wanted to show off a little more than just five short ones on the side .

Note to other Dreamhost residents and others with allow_fopen_url disabled at their sites: the current incarnation of delicious-integrator will not work out of the box. You have to go into the file delicious-integrator/delicious.php, find the line containing

$contents = @file_get_contents('http://' . $wpdi_username . ':' . $wpdi_password . @del.icio.us/api/posts/all');

(there is only one file_get, fortunately. Replace it with (or comment it out and add):

/* curl wrapper: */
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://' . $wpdi_username . ':' . $wpdi_password . '@del.icio.us/api/posts/all');
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$contents = curl_ e x e c($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Take out the spaces in the middle of curl_ e x e c above! (I can’t post it intact here.) That should do it. The options/delicious page you get with this plugin has a somewhat puzzling pair of templates, but what these are used for is to control how the sidebar or page layout goes. You can choose the ordering of items/tags in the page, for example. I put the items first — who wants to scroll through fifty tags before seeing any interesting bookmarks?

Anyway, I’m very pleased with this one, and getting it to work. The fella is aware of the curl substitution, but of course his problem is that some of his clientele do not have the curl library available! I would think that the php function_exists utility would be very useful here.

I upgraded WP, as I described earlier. That went more smoothly than I thought. I certainly hope 2.1 doesn’t require a hasty fix-it plugin by the next day though!

I cleaned up a bit of http/error.log mystery: it seems that the im_smileys plugin does an odd bit of jiggery in putting up what seems to be a smiley popup (eg if you can’t remember which smiley is which) upon clicking on a smiley. For some bizarre reason, it links in the php file itself as the javascript file. I can’t decide if this is some kind of bizarr-o hack where the php file degenerates (via comment trickery) into just a javascript program when src’d as one, or if some other really weird thing is occuring. In any case, it doesn’t work, whether because of the WP version, or what, but what I did was disable the javascript pop up (there’s a setting in the control panels, although I did it by hand into the file since I was poking around thinking maybe it was something being dropkicked to the curb by allow_fopen_url’s settings). So now the error file is free of the “client denied by server” messages for this plugin.

One last plugin left to cleanup! The codesnippet plugin appears to call on a css file within the plugin directory, which causes more “client denied by server” complaints. I’ll try symlinking to that file from another spot and seeing how that works.

In this vein, I must mention I find the statistics available to the Dreamhost resident on their management panel a good way of finding bad links. In this case, they provided a clue about why the error messages were occuring. Basically, you can’t look into the plugins directory via the url. This has to do with my htaccess settings. So that’s kind of interesting. But anyway, pay attention to stats that tell you which files are most often accessed, and which files are not successful on query. Those really help in tracking weird problems down.

I have some further tweaking to do. I’d like a category cloud, without the overhead of the tag warrior. Something very simple that does just that. I’ll probably scale the notables back which are slowing down the page load on front. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll ditch them for simpler just delicious and just technorati links.

The favicon/image through the rss/atom feeds seem to be working. So I’m considering putting together a plugin that allows WP users to control favicons. It would have a control panel that would allow the user to specify an image/icon for the feed, and one for the current theme. Something along those lines. This way I can play around with how to put together a plugin that adds items to the panel.

I’ve also seen theme switcher plugins but it would be nice to have a css switcher one. I’ve seen one for pre 2.0, but not post. Maybe I’ll play with that and see if I get it working. I was thinking in terms of having a font size switch in just css (no need for an entire theme switch for that level of switcheroo). A friend of mind requested something like that (very nice bloke, he’s a florist tho I must say his clientele is kind of odd) for his blog.

There’s additional bling, such as a live comment plugin that would show (my legions, my hordes) of commenters their post as they typed it in. That would be fun. There’s an “email this” plugin I want to use, but I think it ran afoul of the allow_fopen block first time I tried it, so I’ll look at it again now that I’ve got a better handle on that.

There’s just about every kind of plugin out there. There’s a netflix one of all things…they provided an API to get at your queue, I guess. Wow. I suppose I should be thankful no one plugs in their ipod playing lists for me to get an earful when I go visiting…