Wibtown

I’m attempting to integrate the site with Facebook so you may see some test posts in my feed.

Some of you may have noticed the mini posts section in the white sidebar which arrived almost a fortnight ago, has gone by a few different names and has had no explanation until now. My problem was that I needed something to put into the sidebar to replace the gallery photos which weren’t working correctly anymore and at the same time I was also considering starting a Twitter account.

I’d heard of Twitter but in the past I didn’t really see the point in using something that would only let you make one hundred and forty character posts which seemed too small to say anything really useful so I never bothered to sign up. Recently however I have been wanting to post little comments about films that I have been watching or books that I’m reading but the posts were so small that it didn’t seem like it was worth the effort.

Twitter seemed like the perfect tool for doing this as it meant that I could make my small posts which solved that problem and then using V.J.Catkick’s Twitter plugin for WordPress also solve my empty sidebar problem. The other good thing about this is not only can I do the mini posts but I can also do a quick post which can be expanded upon later with a proper blog post or use it for news about upcoming posts etc.

So  that is why there is now the mini post section in the sidebar and the only reason that I’ve not mentioned it before is because I wanted to make sure that I’d be making it a permanent feature first.

Lastly if you’d like to subscribe to my Twitter feed you can do so here.

As the new version of WordPress now has threaded comments I’ve decided to switch back from using the forum to host the comments. Rather than having a page full of comments which can be confusing if you’re having a discussion with somebody you can now respond directly to their comment and have all replies grouped together.

If you want to reply to the post just use the comment box as usual but if you want to reply to a specific comment you just need to click the reply link in that comments box.

I’ve also upgraded the sites theme to the latest version of Aerodrome which can be found here. It still doesn’t play too well with Internet Explorer though so if you want to see it how it was intended use another browser such as Firefox or Safari.

In an effort to get the blog and forum a little better integrated with each other I’ve decided to use the forum to host the blog comments. This has been achieved by using a plugin called Wp2BB by Alfredo de Hoces.

When a new post is made to the blog the plugin will automatically create a new topic in the forums for comments to be left in, there are links at the bottom of the post leading straight to the forum post in question but you will need to register for the forums if you’d like to leave a comment.

With a bit of help from dex I’ve just uploaded a some chat room software as it seemed like a fun idea at the time. If you want to use it you’ll need to sign up for the forums and then go here. So long as you are signed in to the forums you’ll be signed in to the chat rooms as well.

The software that I used is called AJAX Chat which was very easy to get up and running using the phpBB version which uses the details from my phpBB installation to define users and user permissions.

Just a quick note to say that a forum is now available for the site, click here for access until I put a link in the sidebar. Feel free to sign up and if I know who you are you may be granted “special” privileges. I decided to use phpBB if anybody is interested.