The specific repercussion will be that every implementation of a plugin will need to be registered with Twitter as a separate application.

This means that the development of WP to Twitter will need to move in a slightly different direction. After pondering a bit, I’m left with four plausible choices:

1. Let the plugin die
2. Implement OAuth for the plugin
3. Build a pass-through web service to act as an application interface with Twitter
4. Associate with a 3rd party web service in the same capacity

These all have downsides, obviously — but I want to lay out my thoughts on each possibility and I’m asking for comments from the users of my plugin on their preference.

Death of WP to Twitter

Although it’s not really my favorite option, I have to acknowledge that it’s plausible. It’s certainly the easy answer — maintaining an even moderately popular WordPress plugin is a lot of free labor. I already spend more time on maintaining than I really should, from a financial perspective, and this may push it over the edge.

Implement OAuth

This would be a fair amount of work for me, although not insurmountable. The real downside to it would be how much work it would be for users — every one of you would have to register one application with Twitter for every site where you installed the plugin. With one site, this may not be a big deal — but I know it could be a real pain for people with more than that.

It’s not without some potential advantages, of course – when you’re registering your own application, you could customize the application name, the home URL for the application, etc.

Build a pass-through service

One way around the Oauth mess is for me to build a separate service which would handle actually connecting to Twitter. WP to Twitter would authenticate with that service, and pass the post off to Twitter. Again, this would be a lot of work — but, more significantly, it would involve some definite expenses.

I’ve been happy to maintain this plugin for not-much-better than free, but when it comes to incurring expenses, I start to feel a bit unexcited. It’s not like WP to Twitter is a commercially viable business, and I have expectations of profit from it — but I’d prefer not to find myself going into the hole because of it. I’d probably need to see an increase in donations to make this feasible.

Use a 3rd Party Service

Obviously, if I can build a service to connect with Twitter, so can somebody else. This is almost certainly the easiest solution which keeps the plugin usable — but it does mean creating a dependency on a 3rd party to keep the plugin functioning. Depending on Twitter is just natural; obviously, if Twitter goes away, the point of the plugin is lost. Depending on somebody else is something I’m less certain of, on the whole. There’s a reason, after all, that the plugin allows for use of URLs without an external shortener.

Give me your thoughts

This is very important to me — I want to know what direction you’d like to see WP to Twitter go. Please let me know! Do you know another solution? Do tell!

And if there are no responses…well, that has a pretty obvious meaning as well.

The future of WP to Twitter
Copyright 2004 – 2010 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

Current version: 2.1.1

• Download WP-to-Twitter
• Follow me on Twitter!
• Support this plugin!
• Support Questions and FAQ

2.0.0

• Fixed bug introduced in WordPress 2.9 where logged in users could only edit their own profiles and associated issues.
• Fixed bug which caused #URL# to repeatedly be added to the end of tweet texts on reactivation or upgrade.
• Fixed bug which generated shortener API error messages when no URL shortener was used.
• Fixed bug which prevented display of URL on edit screen if no URL shortener was used.
• Added Spanish translation courtesy of David Gil Pérez
• Made so many language changes that aforementioned translation is now terribly out of date, as are all others…
• Added ability to restrict posting to certain categories.
• Added option to dynamically generate Google Analytics campaign identifier by category, post title, author, or post id.
• Added option to configure plugin to use other services using the Twitter-compatible API.
• Added support for YOURLS installations as your URL shortener. (Either local or remote.)
• Redesigned administrative interface.
• Removed use of Snoopy and alternate HTTP request methods.
• Discontinued support for WordPress versions below version 2.7.
• Major revisions to support checks.
• Version jumped to 2.0.0

See the change log at WordPress.org.

Comments on this post are closed; please make comments at the WP to Twitter home page!

WP to Twitter Update
Copyright 2004 – 2010 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

About WP-to-Twitter

Download WP-to-Twitter

Technically, this plugin has been available from the WordPress plugin directory since last Monday, but today is it’s official launch. This is for two reasons: first, it gave the plugin a week to “shake out the bugs,” so that the official launch could be as stable as is reasonably possible.

Second, it’s my birthday, so I’ll be able to remember when the plugin launched. Isn’t that sweet?

The plug-in is pretty straightforward: it posts a status update about your new WP post to Twitter, passing by Pierre Far’s Cli.gs URL shortening service on the way. If you have a Cli.gs API key, you’ll get the added bonus that your Cli.gs will automatically show up in your Cli.gs account, so you can track the statistics of that Clig right from the beginning.

By default, the plugin will take a chunk of text you’ve defined and your post title and truncate them to an acceptable length (including your Cli.gs post URL) to send over to Twitter. However, you don’t have to just accept this stock text: you can custom author your Tweet for every post, using the WP to Twitter custom field in your post authoring interface.

Read more about WP->Twitter

Download it at WordPress!

WordPress to Twitter with Cli.gs
Copyright 2004 – 2010 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

Try it out or download it!

I know it’s only been a month, so it’s obviously far too soon for me to be publishing any kind of a script update. However, these were things which just needed to be done.

First, I’ve greatly improved the internationalism of the script: it now operates searches on UTF-8 encoded data, so it should be great for working with any language which requires characters in that character set. Testing this kind of behavior is difficult, so if you should encounter any problems please do let me know!

Second, I improved the pagination of results. Previously, if there were 150 pages of results, you’d have to see links to every single page of the results. Granted, this can be advantageous, but it’s not really practical. In this updated version, when there are more than 10 pages of results you’ll only have links to the first page, the last page, and two pages before and after the current page. This boundary is configurable — you can offer 50 pages before and after the current, if you wish, but the default is 2.

Last, I changed the way the search query was checked before being sent to MySQL. The original version of this script used my own custom-authored regular expression to secure the request. This was probably very secure, since it functioned by only allowing certain characters rather than checking restricted characters — but it did make things such as multibyte queries pretty much impossible. So it was time to change over to a more standard method. So be it! I got what I needed out of the regular expression; it didn’t need to stay in the script.

Update to Search script in MySQL/PHP
Copyright 2004 – 2010 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

Use the color contrast evaluation tool.

There are, of course, a lot of color contrast evaluation tools available on the web. Roger Johansson published a list of 10 color contrast checking tools last September, and there are undoubtedly more out there yet.

In fact, for a long time, I’ve primarily used the three tools by Gez Lemon which are on that list:

• Color Contrast Analyzer
• Luminosity Contrast Ratio
• Color Contrast Analyzer Firefox Extension

I certainly have no intention to stop using the Firefox Extension, but I’ve been irritated by the other two tools for a long time for two reasons. First, the simple fact that there are two tools. Obviously, the first was written long before the second, but given that they are testing the same pieces of information, it would be nice to be able to conduct the test with a single test. The second is that the tools have rather poor usability: the original color contrast analyzer, at any rate, gives a lot of information and it can be rather difficult to pick out the key bits: the actual contrast between the items and whether or not you’ve passed or failed.

This tool I’ve just placed on the web (“released” is far too glorified for this) is purely intended to combine these two functions into one tool and to provide more readable output.

I haven’t checked the output as thoroughly as I might have; there may well be bugs. Let me know if you notice one!

New tool: evaluate color contrasts for WCAG 1 and 2
Copyright 2004 – 2010 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

It’s not that the previous version was terrible, but I knew perfectly well that it could be much better.

The additions to the script are pretty straightforward:

Additions:

• Added: Made row highlighting available in both tabular and list-based search results.
• Added: Search terms are now highlighted in search results.
• Added: The default sort is now to order results by query relevance.
• Added: Paginated navigation of search results is now available.
• Added: Translation base file [English], so translating the script is easier.
• Added: Basic Spellchecking [English]
• Added: Default stylesheet

Changes:

• Changed: Text excerpts are now truncated at word boundaries, rather than in the middle of words.
• Changed: separated results template information into external include files for easier upgrading or modification.
• Changed: Included the search form as part of the script so that search terms could be automatically returned to the search input.

The spell checking is the most exciting addition in my view. It’s hardly complete, but it’s based on a list of 4,068 common misspellings available from Wikipedia. This addition has significantly bulked up the total download size, since I’m including the spell-checking database as part of the download, but I think it adds a lot of value to the script.

I’ve also added a translation base file to the package, to make it a bit easier for users of the script to port it to their own languages. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet had time to seriously work on the internationalization of the search script itself, so (to be entirely frank) this is an area which the script isn’t really well suited at this time.

Internationalization is next on the list, however. It’s a high priority at this point, since internationalization ranks as one of the most reported problems with the script.

With spell-checking in mind, I think it’s appropriate to provide a healthy reminder of the limitations of spellcheck:

Candidate for a Pullet Surprise

by Mark Eckman and Jerrold H. Zar

MySQL/PHP Boolean Search Updated
Copyright 2004 – 2010 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

If anybody reading this can provide additional translations, let me know in the comments — I’ll respond privately to make arrangements. It’s an easy job; the language file is independent of the rest of the script, so there aren’t any serious challenges in sorting what needs to be done.

Thanks in advance!

Looking for Translations
Copyright 2004 – 2010 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

Example Poll

Download the .zip archive

It didn’t quite take 2 years, at least. But very, very close. The last release of this script was May 25th, 2006 — so I made it just under the wire. But this is also a bit more than just a script update. In fact, this is a complete overhaul. I’m not certain that there’s actually a single line in the poll script which is the same as the previous version.

This was necessary; because the previous version was, in a word, pretty lousy. It may have acted as a decent jumping off point for some beginning programmers to code their own; but, on the whole, it was not a sophisticated script, and it was nothing like developer-friendly.

This new version, leveraging the power of Google’s Chart API and some clever scripting by Christian Heilmann provides a better end result with fewer potential problems for the user.

I’ve vastly increased the flexibility of the script — which once could only support a fixed 2 – 5 options in a single question — to provide support for any number of questions with any number of options, customizable at the question level. I don’t anticipate that anybody will be authoring 100 question polls with this…but they could, in theory.

And, to cap it all off, I’ve added an administrative interface which allows users to perform most of their basic management needs without needing to crawl into the database. Hopefully, it won’t prove to be too buggy.

Are there likely to be bugs in this? Yes! So, if you download this and try it out, please let me know what you notice. I caught quite a few; but I think it’s safe to say that there are a few left in there.

And by “a few,” I mean “actually, there could be a lot of ‘em.”

Check it out or download the package now.

Long-awaited update to PHP/MySQL poll
Copyright 2004 – 2010 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

Just wanted to add the comment, since I didn’t specify it explicitly, that I’m not trying to claim that the accessibility of this particularly CAPTCHA is all that fantastic — it’s pretty good, but there are serious problems. I’m just saying that it’s a neat idea.

In case you don’t already know, “CAPTCHA” is an abbreviation for “Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart.” From an accessibility perspective, they tend to have significant problems — and I’m not going to try and claim that this one is perfect. However, it is very thoughtfully done, and has a very interesting additional feature which I appreciated.

I ran across this via Stumbleupon. Unusually, rather than finding it because I was busily stumbling around, I actually became aware of it because I was trying to create a new account. The interesting CAPTCHA is called “reCAPTCHA.”

Specifically, the concept behind it (explained thoroughly on the reCAPTCHA site) is to gain value from user input in CAPTCHA texts.

Most spam protection systems are based on nonsense words, random strings of letters, or obscured text. Anything, fundamentally, which might be difficult for a computer to identify.

What the folks at reCAPTCHA observed was that scanning old books provides a wealth of resources in the realm of obscured text which can’t easily be understood by computers. To solve this problem, they pasted together the needs of a CAPTCHA and their scanning process to create a service which helps them identify these unknown texts.

Obviously, there’s an immediate problem: if the computer has already failed to identify the text, how do you test whether a human has read it correctly? Simply speaking, you don’t.

Instead, reCAPTCHA provides two words for the user: one they know, and one they don’t. The known word is the Turing test — the unknown word creates a source for the computer to identify the word they didn’t know.

From reCAPTCHA.com:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

[…]

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

The CAPTCHA itself is delivered via Javascript or iFrame. When Javascript is unavailable, a perfectly usable fallback is provided. reCAPTCHA also provides an audio alternative — which, I’ll confess, I found very difficult. I’d need to see some kind of user test results, however, to really know how difficult the audio version is overall. In general, as CAPTCHA technology goes, this is an admirable project. Not only because they have taken a reasonably conscientious path in preparing the interface, but simply because it’s a very good idea.

It’s unlikely I’ll implement it, I’ll confess. The fact that it’s delivered via an iFrame and the simple nature of a CAPTCHA go against my generally preferences in web development. However, should I be in a situation where I need to implement one — this will certainly be a strong candidate! (And even stronger if they fix their accessibility issues.)

More Information

• reCAPTCHA.net (sadly, a table-based layout with no DocTYPE.)
• reCAPTCHA on Tech Crunch
• Community MX: reCAPTCHA – Simple and Accessible
• reCAPTCHA Mailhide (Another product from reCAPTCHA)
• reCAPTCHA WordPress Plugin
• PHP Library for reCAPTCHA
• Other Application and API resources for reCAPTCHA

A useful CAPTCHA from reCAPTCHA
Copyright 2004 – 2010 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design

The changes to this version include:

• Fixed: various minor bugs
• Fixed: multipage results not available with quoted strings
• Fixed: full-text query problem
• Fixed: some compatibility issues with different PHP/MySQL configurations.
• Added: sortable results
• Added: configurable field label names
• Added: sample results page
• Added: test mode for troubleshooting.

It’s not a massive update; but the script should be easier to use and more reliable.

PHP/MySQL Boolean Search Script Updated
Copyright 2004 – 2010 Joseph C Dolson, Accessible Web Design