Ping.fm Custom URL

1. 

   A nicely-designed settings page stands at the ready to accept your input.

2. 

   Everything is clearly laid out and explained.

3. 

   More detailed help is only a tab click away at all times.

4. 

   The illustrious status widget. You feed it status updates, it feeds widgety goodness to all your blog's readers.

5. 

   A full-blown admin page to manage all your status updates and micro-blogs.

Can I change the number of status updates displayed?

Yes, of course you can! Go to your sidebar widgets and hit the ‘Edit’ link for
the Ping.fm widget. This is all mentioned in the installation instructions, but
I can see that you’re the impatient type that never reads anything. I bet you
didn’t read the owner’s manual for your car, either, huh?

Why am I not seeing any updates in my sidebar?

Well… have you posted any yet? Only status updates posted to Ping.fm after
installing the plugin and after configuring the custom URL will show up on
your blog. If you’re confident you’ve done everything right, there might be
something else going on. You might have discovered a bug, or an “undocumented
feature” as we software engineers like to call them. Send me some sugar at
matt@mattjacob.com and I’ll see what I can do.

Why aren’t pings coming through to my site?

Read the question immediately preceding this one once more. Done? Now go through
the checklist below and make sure everything is kosher:

• Is your site blocked off from others using HTTP Basic Authentication or some
  other method? Do you have firewall rules restricting users to a certain IP
  range?

• Are you using any WordPress plugins that limit outside access? I’ve seen
  problems related to the Bad Behavior plugin in the past.

• Can you hit the “secret posting URL” from your browser? You should get an
  error message, which is a good sign that the plugin is installed and
  working.

• Do you have some boxes checked over at the
  Custom URL Settings page? Next to Use for:, you
  need at least one of those options selected (preferably all three).

• Under the main Ping.fm Service Settings, is the
  box checked next to the Post messages to Custom URL option? This is
  important.

• If you’re only posting status updates or micro-blogs from Ping.fm, is the
  widget activated and placed somewhere?

Can I post blog entries or pages from my Ping.fm account?

The original answer was a defiant “get off my lawn, you damn kids!” That lasted
for a whole point release. By popular demand—and thanks in no small part to
Rocco and Vinny, who were sent to convince me—the ability to post blog entries
has been available since 0.9.2. Support for creating pages might be added in a
future release. Give the people want they want, right?

Will this plugin work with WordPress.com blogs?

Definitely not. That would be goofy, because WordPress.com blogs don’t allow
plugins. Plus, Ping.fm already has support
for WordPress.com hosted blogs anyway.

Can you add feature X, Y, and Z? And Q? And L?

I could add all kinds of features, but the real question is whether I
should. The intent and operation of this plugin was meant to be simple, but
go ahead and pitch your feature idea to me. If it’s not too outrageous and I
think others would benefit from it, I’ll probably add it to a future version of
the plugin.

2.0.1

• Fixed edge case where “Fatal error: Call to undefined function
  wp_create_category()” would be triggered if the pingfm_options record was
  manually deleted from the wp_options table.

2.0.0

• Transitioned away from a separate database table holding status updates to
  WordPress’s new “custom post types” that were introduced in 3.0. This had
  the added bonus of providing “real” single post pages for status updates
  and micro-blogs, and a native WordPress interface for managing it all.
• Added true support for images sent from Ping.fm. They’re now downloaded
  locally and given first-class treatment (like any other uploaded media).
• Redesigned the entire settings page and rewrote much of the help content.
• Rewrote much of the code and split it out into separate classes for
  performance and organizational reasons.
• Fixed timestamp offset bug (again). Hopefully fixed for good this time.
• Added robust upgrade functionality designed to be extended to future
  releases as well as this one.

1.3.3

• Fixed timezone handling throughout the plugin. Be sure to set a named
  timezone (the city closest to you) in General Settings, or else your
  timestamps might not be correct.
• Fixed invalidly-nested </li> element in the widget.
• Minor code beautification. Very minor.

1.3.2

• Further tweaking of the way rewrite rules are filtered and flushed. In some
  cases, rewrite rules weren’t taking affect immediately after a brand-new
  installation of the plugin, but that should be remedied with this release.

1.3.1

• Tweaked the rewrite rules a little more. There were some edge cases where
  other things would overwrite our rules, but that should be fixed now.

1.3.0

• Added support for displaying images associated with pings. A corresponding
  option has been added to the settings page.
• Added specific check for PHP 4 to prevent code from even being parsed if
  an insufficient version of PHP is found.
• Failure for PHP 4 now handled gracefully instead of with a syntax error.
• Moved flushing of rewrite rules to only happen on plugin activation and
  not on every page load. This should have a noticeable positive impact on
  performance. The only downside is that the plugin will have to be
  deactivated and reactivated if pretty permalinks are enabled (a worthy
  trade-off in my opinion).
• Cleaned up the code in various places to make it more readable (especially
  with regard to the error message pseudo-constants).

1.2.1

• Primarily a documentation release. Lots of stuff in the README was
  clarified, fortified, beautified, and just plain shifted around.
• Fixed a small bug related to a new option that was added in 1.2.0. After
  saving the options twice, the problem would have fixed itself anyway.
• Added screenshots for the benefit of the WordPress Plugin Directory.
• Moved the changelog off of my site and into the Plugin Directory to give
  people a more central point of contact.

1.2.0

• Added option to force all status updates to become actual posts.
• Added option in widget to “permalinkify timestamps” (archive page is
  editable via tmpl-single.php).
• Invented new English word: permalinkify.
• Tried to make the settings page clearer and easier to understand.
• Did some code housekeeping.
• Added Ping.fm logo to settings page.

1.1.0

• Complete code rewrite (PHP 4 procedural to PHP 5 OO) and new way of storing
  settings in the database.
• Did away with external ping.php file for receiving updates.
• Added native WordPress URL hooks and internal support for mod_rewrite.
• Added RSS feed containing 20 most recent status updates.
• Added archive/permalink pages for individual pings (mostly in conjunction
  with RSS feed, but can be used elsewhere as well). Page is templated for
  easy customization.
• Provided interface for user-supplied widget styles (CSS).
• Widget HTML/CSS makes more sense. Widget container has an ID of wp-pingfm
  and a class of wp-pingfm-widget.
• Added wp_pingfm_status() for people using non-widgetized themes. See
  Other Notes section for docs.

1.0.1

• CSS is now targeting #pingfm in a less specific way (because it broke on
  themes with multiple sidebars).
• Fixed random bug only seen in WebKit where a space preceding a status update
  was considered significant whitespace. (Don’t ask me—I don’t build it, I
  just code to it.)

1.0.0

• The first non-beta release!
• Modified CREATE TABLE for installer after reports of it failing on MySQL
  versions < 4.1.
• Added check for widget to determine if database table was created properly.
• Tweaked a few textual things here and there.

0.9.7

• This version was never released publicly and the changes made for it were
  rolled into 1.0.0.

0.9.6

• Added this page as a home
  base for the plugin on my site.
• Made the README more readable (hopefully). The documentation should be
  easier to understand now.
• Fixed the mod_rewrite example to include the [L] flag. The entire line
  didn’t get copied from my conf file the first time around.

0.9.5

• Minor textual changes and a speed enhancement (eliminated a DB call using
  some crafty coding).

0.9.4

• Added widget options to specify colors used in injected style sheet (CSS).
• Reorganized, streamlined, and beautified some code.

0.9.3

• Fortified README with some additional information and a mod_rewrite
  example for shortening the inevitably long URL.
• The plugin now auto-detects the directory it’s running from. Anything under
  /wordpress/wp-content/plugins should work reasonably well. If the
  WordPress Plugin Directory wants to create a really long folder structure,
  so be it.

0.9.2

• Added support for all types of Ping.fm updates. Blog and micro-blog posts
  now show up as actual entries in WordPress.

0.9.1

• The initial public release! After being hacked together with loving care
  during a couple late nights, the code finally sees the light of day. Cue
  angelic choir and bright background light…