Tag: php

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I use the WP Plugin Post Kinds here, which lets me blog things like Replies, Likes, etc. This plugin has a setting that determines the order in which my own remarks with a Reply or Like and the thing I am replying to or liking are shown.

The default order is [the thing I respond to] [my response], but here in this blog I have changed that, because I like to have my own response first. This ensures for instance that my own words, and not someone else’s get posted to Twitter if I share my post directly to Twitter.

This setting does not change the way the same blogpost gets added to the RSS feed. This means that my regular readers do not get the content of a posting as I intend it, which is in the same order as a website visitor.
In addition it causes anything that consumes my feed, such as my Micro.blog account to show the post I am responding to first (someone else’s words) and not my remarks. Below in three images is how that looks in practice:

The old version: the order is as I want it on the site.

The old version: the order is reversed for the same item in my feed

Micro.blog posts from my feed, and therefore shows not my words first but the words I’m reacting to, which makes them appear as if they are my words

I figured out where in the plugin files (in class-kind-view.php) the feed gets created and how it is different from how the posting is created for the site. Then I added the conditional code from the latter to the former. This works on my site, as shown by the following three images:

Testing the new code: on my site the item is in the right order

In the RSS feed, the content of the item is now in the right order too

And the right order now shows up in Micro.blog, showing my own words first

Then I tried to let the creator of the WP Plugin know I made this change, through a Pull Request on GitHub. I’v never done this before. It’s basically a message ‘I changed this file here’ which the original creator can then adopt in the original code. Making that message meant engaging with concepts such as forks, branches, commits and then the Pull Request. I think I pulled if off, but I will only know when David Shanske, who makes Post Kinds indeed incorporates it in the plugin.

Hoping I’ve submitted my first ever PR the right way

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People often ask me how I stay informed, and always seem to know even about smaller initiatives around the topics I work on. Part of that is what I call ‘Radar’. With Radar I automatically collect all the Twitter messages that mention keywords I am interested in, and detect the web addresses they mention. Those web addresses are evaluated on their type (is it a blog, a video, a general site, a presentation, a photo?) and counted as to how often they are mentioned.

runningtotalsradar

Running totals for Radar: found 350k people, mentioning over 1 million URLs

Radar then presents me with overviews of all URLs mentioned on Twitter in the past day, or week, on the key words I follow. This way I find not just the ‘big’ websites, but also the smaller events, initiatives and discussions, that are mentioned by smaller communities. Next to URLs Radar also tracks who is mentioning certain topics, which basically gives me a list of suggestions of who to maybe follow on Twitter, or who’s profile I may want to look at to see if they also blog about the topics I am interested in.

urlmentionsopendata

Most mentioned URLs in 4566 tweets on Open Data in past 24 hours

peoplementioningfablab

The 47 people tweeting about FabLabs today, new people highlighted

What comes out of my Radar then may get added to my feedreader, or to my bookmark collection, or to my notes collection in Evernote. Radar is the serendipity antenna that scoops up a wide variety of things. To me, whatever is being mentioned on Twitter is like the froth on the waves: it is not all that meaningful by itself, but shows me where there is movement and energy of interaction. That points me to the places and people that make up the wave below the froth. Which is where the significant info is.

Radar at first was a bunch of php scripts I wrote myself that ran on my laptop and which I started manually in sequence. My coding skills aren’t all that great though, so ultimately I asked Flemming Funch to clean things up for me. That meant he coded the scripts from scratch, with only my original outline of what I wanted remaining. Now it runs permanently on my VPS with a basic web front-end for me to explore the output (see screenshots).