Self Exile Media » Wordpress

Twitter Fans (Wordpress Plugin)

Sohail Abid — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:54:59 +0000

I was looking for a plugin that can show my twitter followers in a box very much like Facebook’s fan widget. Found a couple but their presentation was not what I was looking for AND the thing that bothered me most was that they needed both your username and password to work.

I have strong opinion about developing applications that are smart and simple. So I created this plugin. After you activate, it gives you a new widget called Twitter Fans. Just drag n drop it in the sidebar. And set your username (that’s the only required thing). You can leave the rest empty.

Download from official WordPress plugin repository.

And of course, I would highly recommend you to follow me: @SohailAbid

Here is a screenshot of both the administration and how it appears on site:

Wordpress Plugin: Hide Wordpress Version from Hackers

Sohail Abid — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:35:03 +0000

The first thing hackers see before trying to apply any cracking attempts on your wordpress-based websites is the version of wordpress you are having. Experts say you should hide that version number from your output html to make it difficult for crackers to get into your site.

Prior to wordpress 2.5, this was written in header.php theme file. So you could simply delete that line:

” />

But from wordpress 2.5 onward, this is generated automatically by wordpress core engine and inserted in part of your site’s HTML. I have written a little plugin “hide-wp-generator” that hides meta-generator tag altogether and thus helps you keeping your site secure.

Download the Plugin Here

Twitter Nonsense

Sohail Abid — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:37:17 +0000

Twitter Nonsense is new addition to my portfolio. Its a beautiful and nice use of wordpress to present daily-comic strips. I was responsible for implementing the design into the wordpress theme with some necessary customization to wordpress itself. The client for this project is Anton Gigov, one of the best clients I’ve been working with.

The difficult part was to show comments and commet-form on home page. It is possible with a hack: by commenting out line # 643 in wp-includes/comment-template.php:

642. if ( ! (is_single() || is_page() || $withcomments) )
643. return;

But modifying wordpress core files is never a good option if you can achieve the results with a plugin or custom coding within theme. What I did for Twitter Nonsense was to write the following code segment at the top of header.php that redirects the user to latest-post when he visits the site:

$url = “http://” . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

if($url == ‘http://www.pink-sheep.com/twitter-nonsense/’)
{
global $wpdb;
$last_post_id = $wpdb->get_var( “SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type = ‘post’ AND post_password = ” AND post_status = ‘publish’ ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 1″);
wp_redirect( get_permalink( $last_post_id ) );
exit;
}

Testing wordpress mobile client

Sohail Abid — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:04:57 +0000

Hello all, i’m writing this post via a wordpress client for symbian os. Hope it works or i’ll write my own.

update: so it worked! The client is Scribe. Its written in python. I had to install python for symbian before installing this client. Its quite slow, may be because its not native symbian code.