Using JSON with WordPress

With the popularity of jQuery, AJAX, and client-side programming operations in general, there’s more use made of JSON as a format for getting data backwards and forwards.

For example, the Twitter API offers data as JSON – and more manageably than accessing their RSS XML feeds for user timelines.

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How’s Twitter doing these days?

Some thoughts on Twitter and how it affects the average WordPress blogger presently :- how to get value out of it, what to avoid and how to maintain a decent etiquette – it does seem to have grown slightly in the last year or so.

Success requires 2-way communication. “Broadcasters” – you know the ones… Their profile says 3 following 12,455 followers – they’re not being a success via Twitter, they’re trading off an established reputation.

It would be nice not to have to do the work, but if you’re starting at the bottom… you’ll have to do the work, no one else will. Follow those who follow you.

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WordPress, Twitter and URL-shortening

You’re producing a WordPress theme, or plugin, that is related to Twitter and for obvious reasons you want to include url-shortening functionality… How’s it, generally, done? Just the briefest snippet of PHP, this example for is.gd:- function shorten_url($url) { $request = 'http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=' . $url; return @file_get_contents($request); }

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WordPress Twitter Integration

Publicity, relationship-building, just plain keeping in touch – Twitter offers it all and the art is to integrate your tweeting into your blogging, if that doesn’t sound too salacious. Here’s a few scattered suggestions on the subject. First up, to begin at the beginning, reply to @’s – I know it’s absolutely bleedin’ obvious, but [...]

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WordPress RSS Functions

So you want to get a RSS feed and echo it to a WordPress page or sidebar – you’ve already got the RSS sidebar widget feature, but what if you want a little more control over what’s coming out? New in WordPress 2.8 is the fetch_feed() function – as the name suggests, a means of [...]

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