Tag: WordPress plugins

Instagram Digest : round two

It’s been a couple of month since I mentioned Instagram Digest plugin for WordPress.  Unfortunately, making it work wasn’t as easy as it seemed at first.  The thing is that Instagram’s Developer corner shows you four pieces of information, once you register a new Instagram API application. These four pieces are: client ID, client secret token, website URL, and redirect URL.  Just populating them with sensible values doesn’t necessarily work.

The trick here is to get a little bit of understanding of how OAuth works.  When a new API application is created, there is an authentication stage, where you, as a logged in Instagram user need to confirm access of the newly created application to your data.  For that, a redirect URL must handle the request from the Instagram, and, in case of Instagram Digest plugin, you need to save the authentication token.

Too bad the documentation for the plugin is not too clear on that.  Luckily though, after playing around with an deleting and re-creating the application a few times I managed to make it work …

… just in time for the upgrade of the site to WordPress 3.5.  What’s so special about WordPress 3.5 then? Well, if you look closer at the announcement of this version, you’ll see that the media manager has been changed heavily.  It looks very nice now when you are adding the images the old way, but it also doesn’t work too well with the Instagram Digest plugin.  The gallery is created, but it seems to have all the wrong things in it.  Manually fixing it takes just a few clicks, but is annoying enough, since the whole point of this plugin is automation.

With that, you do have my first Instagram digest post, and a possibility of a bumpy ride for the next few days until I figure it all out.  If you have any ideas on how to fix it, please let me know.  Otherwise, please be patient.  Maybe spend more time with your family during the Christmas holidays instead of browsing through silly blogs like this one.

WordPress Plugin : WP Instagram Digest

For a while now I enjoyed automated Instagram Digest posts in Yana’s blog.  I’ve decided I want the same for my blog too.  A quick Google search suggests that these are done with WP Instagram Digest plugin.  So I’ve downloaded and installed it.

The configuration is not too complicated.  You’ll need to login into your Instagram account and then go to the developer’s center to register the application and receive the API key and secret token.  Hopefully, eventually this will be a part of automatic configuration, but not yet.  Once you do that, you get can configure the plugin to run at certain times and post to specific category and/or with specific tags.  The cool thing is that you can control the minimum number of new images needed to create a gallery posting.  This feature will prevent empty posts or posts with a single image.

 

I had to consider if these kinds of posts would be too annoying.  Firstly, I already have an Instagram widget.  That looks nice, but it doesn’t really send out any notifications.  Secondly, when I publish to Instagram I often cross-post the image to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and sometimes Foursquare.  I don’t really want to annoy the people with both the individual photos and the digests.  Thirdly, my blog posts are broadcast to Twitter and Facebook, and sometimes Google+.  So, would it be too annoying?  I guess not.  Because since I’ve switched the Social 2.5 plugin, my blog posts aren’t broadcast to Twitter and Facebook automatically – I push them through with a click of a mouse.  So, I guess, I just won’t be pushing the digest posts through and all should be fine.

The first Instagram digest will be out today at 21:00 (server time).  Let’s see how it shows up.  Hopefully it will also work well with the Lightbox plugin for the image popups.  Curious…

P.S.: I’ve also introduced a separate category (Photography->Instagram) for these digests and a new tag – “automated” – that I will try to use for any kind of automated postings.

WordPress + P2 = Company Intranet in 5 minutes

I’ve mentioned a few times already that I became a big fan of P2 theme for WordPress.  I currently maintain multiple installations of it, just because it is so easy to setup and start using.  I have it as company Intranet or as a project collaboration tool.  It’s like a blog, a wiki, and a chat room combined together.  And since I’ve installed it so many times, I thought I should publish what exactly I am doing, in case someone else will want to try it.

Continue reading WordPress + P2 = Company Intranet in 5 minutes

WordPress Plugins: Liveblog

WordPress.com VIP blog announced the availability of the Liveblog WordPress plugin.  This is pretty cool for anyone doing live coverage of events and such.  One of the coolest things about this plugin is that you don’t have to setup a separate blog for live blogging.  You can turn any post – new or existing – into a live blog and post updates straight from the front page.  People who have the blog post open in their browser, will see a notification of an update available, like the one the screenshot below.

Pretty cool.

WordPress Plugins : Teleport

WordPress Plugins : Teleport

Teleport is all about getting around WordPress quickly! Use keyboard shortcuts to get where you need to go with just two key strokes.

First press “w”, then choose from the following:

  • e – (Edit) Edit current post/page
  • d – (Dashboard) Redirects to the Dashboard
  • s – (Settings) Redirects to the Settings page
  • a – (Archive) Redirects to Posts/Pages/Custom Post Types
  • q – (Quit) Logs the current user out / Redirects to Log In page
  • w – Close Teleporter / Log in
  • esc – Closes the Teleporter