MWGblog

Ever since the advent of the iPhone, I’ve always tried to have an iPhone optimized theme for my sites. For the last 2 plus years I’ve been using the iWPhone plugin for WordPress. It did the job with a simple straight forward approach. However recently, I switched to WPtouch. This plugin is a power house. It also provides a feature I’ve always wanted for my mobile themes – Google AdSense integration. More on that in a minute. (Click on images below to see close-ups.)

To start it lets you set up a simple theme and then, when you are ready, you can really dig in an customize all types of features. As you can see, the home page displays a simple chronological listing of your most recent posts (I chose calendar display – it also has thumbnail view), allows for a number of menu functions and a feature to read the first few lines of the post before committing to the next screen.

The post screen displays the whole post and allows for both the submission and display of comments.

This is also where you’ll see the Google AdSense, it dislpays between the title bar and the post content. The Adsense is optimized for mobile content and has a rollover display that pages through the advertiser title, link address and copy elements. If you are curious to take the theme for a spin and see it in action, I’ve set it up on MWGblog.com, PodcastAcademy.com and ReelReviewsRadio.com.

Another nice feature is the theme works for iPhone, iPod Touch, Android smartphones, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm.

As for podcasting, it worked just fine playing audio tracks straight from the sites. Perhaps in a future version some intelligence can be built in to display a small “play” symbol next to the file link. I’d also like to see the ability to add AdSense to the main page perhaps after every 2 or 3 post titles.

I’ve just scratched the surface here. Make sure to check out WPtouch’s great gallery of Features and the whole host of Admin options.

I have upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.5.1 and deployed a new Theme. Yes, it looks the same but it is a complete rebuild and now sports a new wider main content area. Some stuff will be broken for a few days as I sort through it all. Feel free to send along any problems you notice. Thanks!

Over the last few years I have set up numerous web sites and email addresses. Much like your garage, one day you look out and wonder where all the mess came from. I am too spread out – my current situation is not efficient. As such, over the next two weeks I am going to consolidate all my hosting plans, servers and emails. While I’ll keep all the sites, moving my corporate and personal sites, I’ll also redirect a number of my key URLs. BTW, if you are a WordPress server wiz, I am looking for someone who can move 4 WordPress installs to my new server. I can do it, but my guess is an expert can do it in 20% of the time it would take me.

I have just turned on the newest feature at Reel Reviews in all its AJAX goodness: the DVD List. I am often asked whether or not I have a particular film, now people can check for themselves and request a Reel Review. We have created a catalog section that lists all the DVDs in my collection. It allows visitors to browse the collection, purchase via Amazon (thanks for the support) but most importantly it lets people request a review. The review requests are tabulated and displayed in the admin panel. Here are some screenshots and explanations.

Read more…

I discovered the hard way, that if you have built an audience subscribed to a custom rss extension, you might need to think twice before upgrading your WordPress install. WordPress has changed the way it handles the feeds from the site. The old /wp-rss2.php file is still there, but frankly that is an ugly extension. On this and my other sites I have always used a rewrite so that people could pull the RSS feed at mwgblog.com/rss.xml. Turns out WordPress 2.0 breaks this. Buried somewhere in the permalink building code it causes a 404 error to be posted to the header breaking aggregators. Interestingly it will display in the browser and only seems to effect rewrites to the feeds. All the other rewrites work just fine. A few other people have posted in detail about this problem. Of course, you find this out once you have already done the upgrade. I don’t know that it is a high priority fix; 2.0 is new and they have bigger fish to fry. If you are a php expert, feel free to dig into the classes.php file, my guess is that is where the problem lies.

So how did I fix it? It’s complicated. I have a script that scrapes the wp-rss2.php file and posts it to a static xml file. I then changed the rewrite to point /rss.xml to the static xml file. That is a pain the ass way of doing it, but it works.

I am still hopeful someone with PHP prowess will care enough to find the real fix.

Sorry for the mess – upgrade in progress.