Few updates to WP Likes

Some most requested features releasing at last!

Added-

1. Enable/Disable WP Likes on specific categories. (check settings page).
2. Support for %NUM+1%, %NUM-2% etc in state texts.
3. Shortcode for displaying top(monthly, weekly) posts on a page.
   • Create a new page. Add shortcode in page content.

   • [wp_likes]

     shows top 5 all time  liked posts.

   • [wp_likes show="weekly"]

   • [wp_likes show="monthly" count="10"]

4. Change in behavior- like link always shows now, added- “Be the first to like” text.
5. Tested to work on latest wordpress 3.3.

I am also rewriting the plugin from scratch to support a variety of requested features, but that would take some time. (I have a day job now!.)

Let me know if it breaks anything, been a really long I updated this and not keeping with wordpress scene.

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You like it so much!

Thanks! I didn’t knew you guys still like `WP Likes` so much. I thought Facebook almost killed it..

After a year, I am willing to work on this again. Keep the feedback coming.

The top requested features, my priority are -

• Customizable display of `like` stats (monthly,weekly,daily).
• Display stats on separate page.
• Put CSS, javascript in separate file
• Remove jQuery dependency and re-write JS using closures.
• Resolve conflicts with other plugins, and so no more ‘I click it, nothing happens!’ errors.

Missed out anything ? please drop a line..

First, I would be moving my blog to linux host (probably EC2) and upgrading it to WordPress 3.0, with a new theme. Don’t get scared if things look a little different here in few days!

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I wanna read history!

Yes, I want to read history again, the world history. I never thought I would go back to that subject after my school. So how this now?

I mostly read tech related stuff online and offline. Time had never permitted me to look beyond the articles on techcrunch, hackernews, techmeme or twitter. Offline I read the Google Story, then the iCon- Steve Jobs, and more recently the facebook effect.

Like every geek, today I was checking the Internet for the much awaited Apple announcement on blogs, which came to be that iTunes would be selling “The Beatles’ from today. So what the heck? I remember reading in iCon, that Apple had some legal dispute with The Beatles record publishing company over the name Apple.. I knew Beatles were big but how big?  they are from 1960s.. why so much fuss about this now? I expected that if they are so old and famous, most fans would likely be owning their records on some media (tapes, CDs) by now.

I quickly googled for The Beatles and added to my knowledge that they were originally from England and have been the most commercially successful rock band in the history. There were 4 band members, 2 of them already died. They are also on the list of TIMES 100 most influential people of 20th century.

This is where it gets interesting.. I clicked on it to discover that Albert Einstein was on top of this list. Runners up were- Mahatma Gandhi(Yay!) and Franklin D. Roosevelt. There was one more interesting reference on the page citing to a letter from Einstein to president Roosevelt suggesting US to start nuclear research. Later Einstein regretted sending this letter, the picture on this special cover of TIMES was of Einstein in ‘immense sadness’ captured by a famous photographer. Thats quite a lot good stuff I read today.. But I wasn’t done yet.

Next on the TIMES top people page was mention of Adolf Hitler and why he didn’t make up to the top 3 on list.. They said that as he was unsuccessful in his endeavors and as the century ended on positive note, they skipped him but he was there on list. Whenever Hitler’s name comes up, there is one word that always tied with it- Holocaust. I knew it was related to mass killing of people, mostly Jew, but didn’t knew the numbers. I opened up the page to it, and boom ! to my shock there were not hundreds,thousands but MILLIONS of Jews killed in the Holocaust. 67% of over 9 million jews were murdered. How they killed them ? I am not even supposed to talk such stuff in my religion.. But this was important- Why did they kill them ? Why some people hate Jews so much?

Eventually I figured out the reasons, but still not satisfied with them, I need to read more.. Reading the history will help me find answers to the stuff I find weird today.

See from where I went- Apple announcement->Beatles->Times top 100->Einstein->Hitler->Holocaust->Jews

(The reason I talked about this in so much detail is that how internet makes it easy to rediscover lost subjects of interest and instantly read about them. But books are books, I can’t really trust something written on Internet, the authors are less known, in most cases its just random people’s views. If you happen to know good books on world history(the early 1900s) do let me know in comments)

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An open letter to business people

I couldn’t agree more with him. Won’t copy paste it, its an excellent read.

Hoping people get me now better

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The solution to facebook privacy puzzle

Almost everyday I hear stories associated with disastrous facebook privacy controls. Someone’s vulgar/rash updates appear in there family members newsfeed, someone has his photos in Pjs circulated everywhere on facebook!  All this is resulting in people sharing less, now they have started to think before they share anything.

Whats the solution to this ??

Facebook’s all about a profile wall and a newsfeed. whatever you post gets added to your wall. Your newsfeed gets populated with posts from various friend walls. Thats it!

For instance – whenever a friend tags you in a photo in there album, it creates a post on your wall. The newsfeeds of your friends pick that entry from your wall and soon everyone in your list could see that photo.

What facebook privacy controls offer now is – add attributes to a wall post entry to hide it or show it to certain people. It doesn’t stop  friends from making erroneous posts on your wall unless you block them all over from posting, which is something you never would do to him/her.

So here’s the idea– why not provide a user with a set of walls instead of single wall for all ? A user sets default walls for different people, he gives different views of himself to them.

Now suppose, I set default walls for my college friends, my work people, my family members. Whenever my college friend tags me in a photo, that goes to wall designated for him, and it appears only in newsfeeds of  my college friends, no one else. I have sandboxed friends this way! I, no more depend on people in friend list for taking care of my privacy.

Facebook already has networks for this, but these networks are very wide, they contain girls, boys, people whom I may not have acquaintances with. Hence they don’t work.

Idea is still developing, will post more as it refines…

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The new issue with social sharing sites and Google Buzz

You open facebook. Check your feed, find some new posts, videos and photos. Cool.. you even press like or comment on few of them.

Now you go to twitter. Some more cool content for you. Also you notice some posts from services like youtube, flickr, blog feeds duplicated(from facebook) in your feed. Uninteresting.. isn’t it?

So now comes the new thing- Google Buzz. You have already checked facebook, twitter for your daily social dose. But as its inside gmail, you ought to click it.  All that you see is– same repeated content which you have seen earlier. Nothing new.. and on top of that google buzz marks the items people comment as unread, making you check it again and again even when there’s nothing really new. Even the gtalk status updates which you see right away clearly in gmail are starting to appearing in buzz. #fail

Hope you get this redundant data problem..

When I first heard of google buzz and connected sites I was very excited. I thought it would aggregate ALL content posted by my twitter and facebook friends, apply its superb relevancy algorithms and show it inside gmail.  The google guys are clever, they will surely figure it out some day..

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From iPhone to Android

Okay.. enough iPhone, I need a change, something new to play/hack with. WinMo is his own world of stylus and task managers. Nokia phones are not for geeks Blackberry still doesnot have a decent touch-screen phone and its hack-ability is known to be very low.

I am left with the Android which is making a fuss almost every day. I did try the android in its very early days of T-Mobile G1 then tried the G2 (HTC hero) but none of them proved to be compelling and the absence of multi-touch from majority of applications made me stick to iPhone. So which iPhone I am talking about? The very very very old 4GB iPhone. It still rocks my world with its simplicity and powerful basic functionality as in the iPod, the phone app and the safari browser.

Now android caught my attention again with 2 recent major developments-

• The Google maps app now has a turn by turn navigator !! something which only $50+ apps like tomtom used to have.
• The Nexus One getting multitouch in browser,maps and other apps. (more on this)

Hence I got a T-Mobile G2 back today as the Nexus One is out of my reach. Popped in my Docomo simcard and was really taken away by the amazing HTC sense UI. The first thing I do in phones is to check if I am running the latest software or not. Boom! this phone is still on 1.5 or the cupcake! I remember seeing the 2.x firmware mentioned in most of the good posts and announcements about android. I wanted to try out the other features like the facebook integration, gmail and the android marketplace.. BUT all that would go with new firmware install. My impatience was growing to install the latest firmware on my phone.

So here starts my hunt for the latest firmware for HTC hero with multitouch apps and new google maps. Initially  I go with the stable shipped  ROMs and later use them to benchmark against the custom roms. I came across the words “OTA” wherever I read about new android updates. I dug my phone for the ‘check for updates’  button, but couldn’t find any. I thought if I give this clever device a internet connection, it would automatically check for updates and prompt me to download. My belkin router malfunctioned and i had  given it for service, so I created a AD-HOC wireless network to take android to internet. But wait the adhoc wireless network just doesnot show up in android !! And I thought the blackberry and the PSP were the only devices to ignore adhoc networks Some googling led me to an article which claims to get it working, but right now I am more keen in the ROM update, Google might have fixed it in 2.x?

The HTC websites has some kinda rom update, but it asks for the serial no. etc just to download the ROM. I am not doing that. Lets search for a decent rom which is tweaked to the least..

Now I come across – Rooting the HTC Hero, installing custom recovery …  this page cleared a lot many things for me and pointed  in right direction. After reading reading and reconfirming from 2-3 sites I choose the following path for new ROM.

Stock (1.5 or HTC 1.7 software version) ->Custom Recovery Image -> HTC 2.73(rooted) -> Latest radio as here

I expected I would end up with hacked/rooted 2.0 android with latest radio.. BUT damm the phone (even though its snappier than before) is still on 1.5!!

I went to the ultimate destination for cooked roms I remembered from winmo days- the xda-developers.com They seem to have everything! even android 2.1!  Without much reading I downloaded one ROM. While it was downloading, I started to read about these android 2.1 roms. I figured out that most weren’t stable enough like the 1.5 stock, the UI looked horrible on many(I downloaded one with sense UI), camera was not able to deliver full 5mps and mms wasn’t working yet. Inspite of these I just wanted to try this 2.1 and went on to install it. My phone would take any ROM now as it had a custom recovery patch. The phone booted.. I could spot the new loading animation. After 5 mins of use, HTC Sense felt like a  non-sense! apps were crashing before I could actually explore every menu item in them. Google Goggles wasn’t there. The new google maps app, couldn’t determine my location but was able to route and offered me to try the new beta navigation feature (woot!). I couldn’t find any satellites as I was indoors. The multitouch gestures were there in browser but not swift like the iPhone’s.

Tomorrow I will take this new google maps for a ride in my locality. After that will go back to the rooted latest HTC ROM with android 1.5 and explore other features.

On other side, I have also put the  android source code for download, why not make the OS say Hello Aakash when it boots

One more thing, if you are on Windows 7, download the android drivers from softpedia. You need them to run the ADB and hence to install patched recovery image. I have read that all these changes, hacks are reversible, to go back to factory state all you need to do is– run the RUU from HTC on PC.

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WP Likes 3.0 – its not just likes!

Finally done with the 3rd major iteration of the WP Likes plugin. You can see it in action on this blog. Improvements all around and everything is smoother.

I will enlist a few-

1. Renders in one line and more refined customization. No more ‘you and’ being appended everytime. Differentiates between people and a person.
2. Translating or reusing the plugin never been so easy.
   
3. Compatible with popular WP Super Cache plugin. Automatically updates the cache for the post which is liked. Inform WP likes that WP Super Cache is enabled from the settings page and it will take care of rest.

I am testing the plugin right now, so far it has no problems  with WP 2.9.1. You too can try out the plugin from- http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-likes.3.0.zip . I will mark this as a stable release after a day or two of testing and consequently your wordpress will ask for plugin upgrade.

[Update]: Release time!! This is working like a breeze. If you want further tighter integration(like in WordPress MU) or even more customization, I am offering support at a very nominal fee. Send a mail to me[at]aakash[d0t]me if you need help. Next version will have improved sidebar widget and people tracking of some form.

[Update2]: This does restore the new default CSS. You might want to backup the old css for reference. And there are some alternate like button images in plugin images folder, you might want to try them out!

As always press like if you like it. Keep the bug reports and feedback coming.

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Happy New year!

A very happy new year to all of you. 2009 was great, learnt many new things and good lessons of life. However the last month of 2009 was not so great . Got my elbow fractured + had university exams. There are a lot of things that need my attention- the WP-likes plugin, the orkut app. Will address to them soon, this hand is recovering faster than I expected.

New year resolutions? There are many.. Yeah, blogging more frequently  is one of them.

Head over to - http://aakash.me/2010.html for some jQuery fireworks.

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Analyse what have you done in past from Twitter and TwitVerbs

Ever wondered what have you been doing over the last few days, where the time is being spent on?  Well if you tweet a lot, this twitter tool can help you.

TwitVerbs- http://twitverbs.appspot.com/

It gets the verbs from your tweets and lets you know when you have been doing what! Like when you have been going out somewhere,, drinking, smoking, cooking or playing something. You will be amazed by the results. trust me. eg–

What @biz has been doing

This app is the result of my latest crave on python and the google app engine Do post feedback, if you forgot the url, here it is again- http://twitverbs.appspot.com/

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