Khalid Alkelabi

Twitter

After trying many plug-ins for WordPress to publish my site’s posts on both Twitter & Facebook, I came to a simple conclusion: 3rd party plug-ins are useless! The best way to go is using plug-ins that truly integrate with WordPress. The ones I used were: Wordbook (integrates with Facebook) and WordTwit (integrates with twitter). The result is satysfying and practical: both plugins submit new posts directly to Twitter & Facebook.

Now, the only problem I encountered was with Wordbook: It requires PHP5. By default, my host (1and1) uses PHP4, you have to choose PHP5 when you create a new MySql database. To overcome this problem, I used a very simple solution that I found on  1and1 FAQ site (Link to original page):

By default Apache uses PHP 4 for .php extension. If you don’t want to rename all your
scripts to .php5 you can do the following:
Create a .htaccess file and place the following line AddType x-mapp-php5 .php in it.

Now I enjoy true integration with my 2 favorite social sites

Web 2.0

Trying to connect all my online activities and social connections into one place, my personal website, proved to be a challenge. Yet WordPress in addition to various plug-ins made it happen: at last I can rest assured my scattered info all over the inter webs are happily residing in one place!

This little experiment allowed me to connect: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, digg, etc.

Whenever I post something in here it gets published in twitter (as a tweet) and Facebook (as a ststus). When I update my profile on Facebook or update my status on Twitter, my website gets the info! Flickr images are integrated into my site!! And on top of it all, RSS feeds are generated for me!!!

One last thing, I have to applaud WordPress.org for their excellent iPhone app! Now I can update my site comfortably and in a meaningful way from my iPhone. Web 2.0 is a dream come true…