For ages i have been looking for a specific theme for my blog but everything i’ve found had something that just wasn’t quite right for me. So lately i thought screw it and i’ve been making my own themes and i thought i’d upload them for anyone else who might like them. Feel free to chop and change them to suit what you need. Click the thumbs for screen shots.

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We’re all at it aren’t we?  Twittering away. I do it on my phone, from my blog, on the web and what i love most of all is Twitpic! I love the fact that i can take a quick photo on my phone and within seconds it’s uploaded to Twitpic, which automatically makes a post to twitter for me letting my followers know i’ve just graphically twatted! Phew. Look, i even have a little ‘Tweet This‘^[1] button on the bottom of my posts, my twitterings showing up in my sidebar not to mention my last 9 twitpics. I can’t remember a craze like it since the Rubicks Cube …. remember pulling off the stickers and putting them back in the right order after failing miserable to understand that geeky book that came out showing you how to do it. Yes, i bought that too :-?

I think Twitter is far more useful than the likes of myspace. The trouble with myspace is the amount of clutter and what-not that people stick on their profiles! Slideshows and video players and music players and gadgets galore and messy backgrounds and all-at-the-same-damn-time!! Facebook is better but for i think Twitter beats them all. It’s quicker and simpler. Who the fuck has got time to trawl through every single friends myspace or facebook for a quick update on how they’re doing? So anyway, microblogging gets a big thumbs up from me! Not that i’ll be ditching my big blog or facebook any time soon :P

10 Best Twitter tools for WordPress blogs | Twitter plugins for wordpress | Twitpic | Twitter Buttons

1. Ok scratch the ‘Tweet This’ button for now, that mother fucker broke my damn site so i’ve disabled it until the author fixes it or i find an alternative. BAH! EDITED TO ADD: ok, aaand un-scratch that, i’ve found an alternative so my posts are now tweetable again – hoorah! [↩]

Ok, GEEK ALERT! I’m posting this here so that hopefully, anyone who has the same nightmarish problems i had with this fu*$ing plugin will find this and will be of some help. There’s a little plugin for wordpress called Postie and what it does is allow you to post to your blog from an email (in other words from your mobile phone). I installed it because i wanted to be able to send pics and videos from my mobile phone but oh my god, what an absolute bitch to set up!

First thing was it wouldn’t post to a wordpress category which meant i just got an error message instead of a post. The category drop-down box was blank in the backend admin panel. To to fix that you need to download these two files and replace the existing ones:

http://stairway27.net/blog/2007/11/25/fixing-postie-for-wordpress-23/

Also took me a while to set up the email, i was originally using gmail but then i created an address on my own server with the port set to 110. Works fine.

Now then, you need a way of letting the plugin check for new messages automatically. One way of doing this is by inserting a bit of code in the footer of your template which you can find here:

(Automated Browser Activation): http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_by_Email

The other way is to set up a cron Job which is what i’ve done (More info on this at the above link).  You do this in your webhost control panel. Look for an icon that says cron jobs and set it up there. Search your webhost forums or help files for info on setting up a cron job with them. It’s fairly straight forward. I pasted in this line (replacing YourUserNameHere with your own username obviously):

/ramdisk/bin/php5 -q /home/YourUserNameHere/public_html/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php

and i’m having it run every 5 minutes

*/5 * * * *

So finally! It’s working …. well, no it isn’t. The cron job stripped out the DIV tags so my video would just leave a link and there would be no player to play them in (plugin my arse, it would have been easier to write it our friggins selves). So, i got around that by installing this plugin:

http://an-archos.com/anarchy-media-player/

It puts any media link into a player (videos and mp3′s). There is another way of doing it by adding another cron job, something to do with cookies but i couldn’t get my head around that so this way works for me.

Oh, one other thing (it’s sort of related), if your mobile phone won’t let you send large attachments (videos) by email then there is another way. Use Shozu. http://www.shozu.com/portal/index.do Using this you can upload photos (and videos) to most websites such as Flickr, Photobucket, Myspace, Facebook, WordPress, Blogger and so on. Tell it to send your videos to your Postie email address and this will get around the large attachments problem. One other nifty feature of Shozu is you can create carbon copies. In other words upload a file once and it will automatically send that one file out to your multiple sites. For example i send a picture to facebook and it also gets sent to here, flickr and moblog. Very handy for the busy nerd on the move!

I have spent most of the day on-and-off trying to sort out this bastard gadget for my website. In a nutshell i wanted the ability to be able to blog from my mobile phone, or more specifically, the ability to take a photo and send it straight to my blog because i often forget about my phone pix amongst all the clutter and they get deleted. This way i can send them straight to my blog and not worry about losing them.

But what a nightmare! WordPress has the feature of emailing blogs (from a phone for example) but they haven’t got the pics working so i got a plug-in from elsewhere which didn’t work so needed to be butchered to fit. But now it’s working … for now at least. So now i can blog on the move – yay!