Category Archives: Wordpress

A Crude WordPress Based Microblogging System

Those of you who follow our Twitter feed are probably aware of an experimental project we launched last week. The goal of this trial was to determine the ease by which we can repurpose WordPress; a platform allowing bloggers to publish high quality content, into a microblogging site similar to F* My Life and Text From Last Night. The challenge itself isn’t all that difficult if one has basic programming knowledge. However, we wanted to demonstrate just how valuable the extensions created by the WordPress are and thus, placed a restriction on ourselves. To create our target site, we were only allowed to modify code created by other programmers in the WordPress community. As you may have guessed, the project was a complete success and  was completed in a little under 2 hours (give or take).

Transferring a WordPress site between hosts

Recently, we decided to switch our hosting provider due to issues relating to uptime and server speed. The entire process of transferring our WordPress installation between hosts was documented and turned into a video tutorial to aid others wishing to do the same thing. The tutorial is about 8 minutes long and covers everything from backing up the data to changing the DNS settings. The end benefit of using the technique demonstrated in the video is, your visitors will see absolutely no downtime as you transfer between hosts. 

TinyURL integration with your blog

TinyURL and WordPress Intergration

Make it easier for your readers to share the URL of your posts by integrating the TinyURL service into your blog. A demonstration of the final product can be seen by scrolling to the bottom of this page. In order to follow this tutorial successfully,  access to PHP will be needed. Additionally, we will be using the TinyURL API so make sure your content follows their Terms of Service agreement. The guide below is made for Self-hosted WordPress blogs. However, the code is simple enough to be modified and used on any other platform.