Some time ago I tried the DISQUS plug-in for WordPress and discovered it broke my RSS feed due to a JavaScript bug. DISQUS support didn’t have a solution at the time so I deactivated the plug-in.

A recent search unveiled a workaround by disabling the Comment Count setting in the Advanced Settings of the plug-in.

It works, although a genuine fix would be ideal. With version 3.0 on the horizon I doubt they are looking backward.

When Posterous released the PicPosterous iPhone app I took notice of their blogging platform. Posterous is your one-stop location for status updates, blog posts, and media sharing to (almost) every social web site on the net.

I made extensive use of PicPosterous during a recent trip and used the AutoPost feature to upload photos to my Facebook account in real-time. It worked very well although I was stumped why only 60 of the 240 images were uploaded.

I asked the question and Posterous support told me they have set that limit “to prevent spamming the Facebook servers too much.” Although they may be raising this number to 100 it seems odd they are concerned about image count instead of the speed of those updates hitting the Facebook servers. It’s the latter which tends to be problematic when using API calls.

Despite this limitation Posterous is an interesting service, free, and easy to use for keeping everyone – everywhere – updated.

UPDATE: my source suggests they might remove the 60 (or 100) limit altogether if the service isn’t abused.

WordPress 2.7 offers the ability to automatically upgrade plugins as they are released. No more downloading and FTP’ing.

My first experience upgrading a plugin was one of those head scratching moments. I clicked the “upgrade automatically” link and was presented a form asking for connection information.

What sort of connection information? To the plugin developer’s web site or WordPress.org? What user account? There is no documentation at WordPress.org for this feature and the forum posts were of little help.

The obvious solution was the last I tried; you must enter the information for your hosting platform where WordPress lives.

Hostname

myblog.com

Username

myblogadmin (try your hosting admin user account which should be the same as your FTP account for up/downloading of files to your web site)

Password

Password for the preceding user account

Connection Type

Normal (unsecured) FTP or Secure FTP

Behind the scenes WordPress will create a temporary folder inside of wp-content called upgrade.

If you are having trouble with downloading, unpacking, or installing the plugin you’ll need to look at file ownership and/or permissions on your web host. Chris Abernethy provides some helpful insight.

I was using Martin Fitzpatrick’s excellent plugin called AdSense Manager to handle Google ads on my blog. Version 2.x worked well but version 3.x stopped working properly with sidebar widgets and the admin interface failed to commit certain page changes.

My quest to find a solution was unsuccessful so I trashed the plugin and looked for an alternative. Other WordPress plugins looked weak in comparison so I went old-school and within 15 minutes I had a working replacement using a few lines of PHP and JavaScript code from Google. While it’s not as convenient as a plugin, it works fine with sidebar widgets.

Thanks to tamba2’s excellent (and brief) how-to guide.

Since January of this year I’ve been using Facebook to stay in touch with friends, colleagues, and other folks I don’t see often. There’s something to be said about seeing people’s faces every day which reminds you to stay in touch. Poke (and SuperPoke) is the greatest way to tell someone “hi” without getting into a dialog.

Since Facebook wants to make a few dollars in their effort to provide free services, they’ve initiated clandestine tactics to gather and distribute your surfing habits to others. Facebook’s Beacon software isn’t terribly popular for this reason but there are ways to keep it quiet.

wikiHow describes the proper way to disable Beacon in Facebook’s security settings as well as the BlockSite add-on for Firefox. Although the article doesn’t mention this you can use the BlockSite add-on in Flock (which, like Firefox, is based on Mozilla.

Manas Tungare describes how to filter out Beacon in the Mac version of Safari. I haven’t installed PithHelmet to test because it appears only in beta status for Safari 3 (which ships with Leopard).