How to incorporate your recent tweets into your web page?

I was recently given the mandate of integrating a web design concept that required me to have “recent tweets” into the home page of a website.  I initially thought that it would be easy given how popular twitter is these days. But it turned out to be a small challenge. First, I tried using the twitter badge. For those of you who are not familiar with this badge:  It is a small javascript , a badge that displays the recent tweets. It looked to straight forward but I quickly ran into a  problem.  The design on the badge was not even close to the design that I was given by the web designer. The design was to be integrated into WordPress platform. I first decided to use the “simple tweet”  plugin. Unfortunately, this didn’t work either. There were to major issues “the simple tweet plugin” only imported the tweets that took place after its installation. Where as all the tweets I needed the plugin to import was in the past. The plugin also didn’t have the ability of displaying the date and time .  I continued searching but majority of the other plugins were for designed as widgets. Except one: HL tweet . It sounded too good to be true! I clicked on install but the plugin refused to work out of the box. There was a weird error message I couldn’t understand. I made a Google search and I realized that there were many others who ran into the same problem. To my horror there were no solutions . I made more search and I found out that this plugin was using an open source program. The programmer partially explained what to do to resolve the issue. But it wasn’t sufficient. I read his notes many times but it wasn’t clear. I finally decided to delete the crt file that was in there. Since he wrote that he made this optional at the latest version of his code I thought it could solve the issue. I was a happy camper.  It worked like charm. After making couple of css changes it matched the design layout perfectly. It took me about 5 hours to make this functionality work. But it was well worth the effort.  Everyone, including the client and the designers were happy with the final result.

Integration of web design work could take a quite a bit of time. We are I.T. Montreal Web Design. And we are here to make your dreams come true. Contact us today for more info!

Manually Upgrading an Old Version of WordPress to the Latest Version

Ever since version 2.7  WordPress is capable of upgrading itself with the click of a button.  However, If you have an older version of WordPress you will have no choice but to do the update manually. It is also possible to do the manual upgrade even if you are running a new version of WordPress. In any we suggest strongly that you take a backup of your WordPress  files and database before proceeding with such an upgrade. You wouldn’t want to loose everything you have written so far would you ?

The manual update process is simple.  Short  instructions during the writing of this post could be found here http://codex.wordpress.org/Updating_WordPress . (The URL that explains the upgrade process in a more detailed manner is http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended )

As a quick note we suggest that you put your site into maintenance mode before doing such an upgrade. You can find the details of how you could achieve this at http://sivel.net/2009/06/wordpress-maintenance-mode-without-a-plugin/ . If this looks complicated don’t panic just yet! As almost always is the case there is also a word press plugin that you can install for this job. The plugin could be found right here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/maintenance-mode/ .

Upgrading your WordPress to the latest version is important. The new versions are more secure . As a general rule of thumb they are easier to use and have many more plugins and themes that you can use. If you don’t have the time or if you don’t feel like doing it yourself  we can take care of this upgrade for you for a small fee. You can contact us by filling the contact us form of our company.

Worpress

I have recently installed “Word Press” as our blog . I must admit that I am truly impressed by its capabilities.

Installation literally took me 2 minutes. The setup assistant simply asked me the database name, user name and password and configured everything for me with no hassle.

“Word press” comes packaged with everything you may need to create your basic blog.  A nice theme , a very easy to understand GUI, a fancy WYSIWYG editor , auto save feature, being able to easily set up categories,  spam detector, RSS, and many many more features are all couple of clicks away ..

Possibilities are just endless. One could easily get lost in the large pool of wordpress plugins, themes and features. All extremely well designed and very user friendly. For example I wanted slightly  change the theme for my needs and all I had to do was click on the design tab on the top and it gave me access to “Theme Editor” I thought that this was just fascinating. And really easy to understand. I simply love using Word press. Everything is just the  way I would have wanted it to be.

There is a huge community that supports this amazing open source project.

If you need help with theming wordpress , installing a plugin, making your wordpress site multilingual,  or creating a custom functionality for wordpress you can always count on us. Please don’t hesitate to contact us via our contact us form at http://www.itmontreal.com/en/contact.html