Alex Little

I’ve finally got around to allowing you to post a comment using an OpenID, by installing one of the WordPress OpenID plugins.

I had tried to do this over a year ago, but couldn’t quite get it working correctly. I had a number of problems before, notably that my hosting server only ran PHP4, whereas (at the time) most OpenID plugins seemed designed for PHP5, or a specific version of PHP4 that I wasn’t running. The other main factor was that most of the OpenID plugins at the time were very early (beta or earlier) versions, so may have been a little buggy still, whereas the plugin I installed today was very easy to get set up and running.

Anyone using a verified OpenID to post a comment on this site will find that their name and email is not required, plus your comments skip moderation.

Please let me know if you find any problems in using your OpenID on this site.

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that I’ve added a ‘VSO feeds’ section to the side bar. I wanted to be able to aggregate feeds from other VSO volunteers to show on my site, unfortunately the RSS widget built into WordPress won’t aggregate feeds for you – you’d need to create a new wdiget for each feed – not really what I wanted.

However, I did find the SimplePie Plugin for WordPress which has done exactly what I needed and was very straightforward to get up and running. The display is all done via templates and is very configurable. The only (very small) niggle that I have is that you need to specify the feed urls in the code, rather than in the WordPress admin pages, e.g.

<?php
echo @SimplePieWP(array(
     'http://markvso.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default',
     'http://siddypen.wordpress.com/feed',

http://nonoincambodia.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default'

      ), array(
     'items' => 10,
     'date_format' => 'j M Y',
     'truncate_item_description' => 100
  ));
?>

At the moment I’m only showing feeds from 3 blogs, but if you have a feed that you’d like me to add then please send it on.

Rather unfortunately the blogging system that VSO uses (http://www.vso-stories.net/) doesn’t provide RSS feeds of the postings (!) – though it does provide an email subscription service. So there are several other blogs I’d like to include in my aggregator which would be very relevant, e.g. Julian Bass’s blog, but I can’t until vso-stories provides an RSS feed factility

Whilst writing my previous post and trying to upload the relevant screenshot using the ‘add media’, I kept getting the (rather unspecific) error message: “HTTP Error, An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later.”

There’s a WordPress forum thread which mentions this error (plus other problems people are having with the Media Library), but the easiest solution I found was just to edit the .htaccess file.

Have just updated this site to the most recent version of WordPress, which was as easy as ever I do like the new admin interface too!

However on upgrading I noticed quite a large PHP error_log file which seems to consist mainly of messages like this:

[03-Apr-2008 08:46:31] -------------------wpopenid-------------------

[03-Apr-2008 08:46:31] WPOpenID Status: file:error_log [info]: Logging errors via PHP's
error_log faculty to: error_log

[03-Apr-2008 08:46:31] WPOpenID Status: userinterface hooks: Enabled (finished including
and instantiating, passing control back to wordpress)

Turns out that debugging for WPOpenID is on by default, and you can only change the setting by changing the code – rather than through the admin pages

Anyway, all I needed to do to stop the constant entries into the log was change the \wpopenid\openid-registration.php file so that WORDPRESSOPENIDREGISTRATION_DEBUG was set to false (line 20).

I’ve just moved my website over to the server here in KMi, so the url has changed – but redirects from the old site are all in place. Was fairly easy to get everything moved acrosss – though my old site was running ColdFusion and MS SQL and this new site is on WordPress (so it’s MySQL and PHP) so I’ve had to rewrite parts, eg the photo pages as I couldn’t find a WordPress photo plugin that did exactly what I wanted!