photo credit: rafeejewell

If you have a blog, you should make sure it is easily shareable. As a person who likes to share content on Twitter and other social networks, it’s amazing how many blogs don’t have this. So it requires me to cut and paste link as well as the title and then tweet it. Make it easy for your readers to share!

If you have Wordpress this is pretty easy as there is a Facebook social plugin (and others). Facebook explains the Like button on their website. More and more actions around the web will be tied into social networking, what your friends like, are doing and even has e-commerce implications as 3rd party websites will know what you ‘like’. A very powerful trend that you need to be on top of.

Before you pay thousands of dollars to hire someone to design a new website for you please consider this: nowadays you can inexpensively set up your own website with one of the beautiful themes available these days thanks to Wordpress software which is free. Plus you can make your own changes anytime you want because with Wordpress it’s easy to edit your pages online with no technical skills whatsoever. Plus you get a free blog to with it if you want that on your website. Because most of us aren’t technically savvy I’m making a limited time offer to get your website site installed for free. All you need to do is:

• Get a domain name (or use an existing one)
• Sign up or a web hosting plan via HostGator or GoDaddy

I just need the login info to either HostGator or GoDaddy. Go to the contact page and send me:
-the transaction id for your purchase of hostgator web hosting plan
-the username and password to login into your hostgator account (to install wordpress and upload plugin)
-the username password to login into your domain account (to point domain at your webhost servers)

Want to use a different web host or domain registrar? Send me a note and we’ll talk!
Already have a web hosting plan and/or domain name? I can install Wordpress, and any theme you choose for $100. After that you’ll just need to add your content and configure your site which is easy! If you need help adding content or other setup I also also offer website consulting services.

Sometimes you want to get access to your Wordpress content (blog posts, pages, categories, etc) from external sources. for example if you want to use a different front end such as Flash, or edit your posts from different software (such as the Flock Browser).

Wordpress allows you to do this using Wordpress XML-RPC which are remote function calls using XML. If you are using Action Script (say via Flex) there is a as3 xml-rpc library you can use to make this simpler. As noted in my previous post, the library requires a small tweak or you can download my recompiled as3 xml-rpc library file. You need to put this in the libs directory in your project.

A typical call to Wordpress might be: makeCall(“metaWeblog.getRecentPosts”,[_blogid,_user,_password,count]). After doing some research the blog id isn’t used by a non-MU Wordpress website so I just put ‘1′ in there.

Here’s another good tutorial on using XML-RPC with Flex. You can get more information on what is XML-RPC.

To set up an inexpensive website that you can easily maintain yourself, as well as building email lists, shopping carts or membership sites, please see our internet consulting services.

If you’re a developer you’ve probably been frustrated with the concept of using a movie/timeline concept with keyframes in order to create a website or application. While it might be fine for animations it never made sense to me to use it for more static type applications.

Luckily Adobe came up with Flex 3 which also runs within the Eclipse IDE for developing rich internet applications.

I’ve recently been working with it to connect to Wordpress for its data (rather than hardcoding the content in the application or using some other database) using the XML-RPC apis.  Luckily there is an api for use with Flex over at Google code.

Of course right off the bat, we hit a snag – the api doesn’t work with Flex 3 without making code changes to the api and recompiling. Surprising since the api’s been out for a while. So I extracted the api zip file into a directory and went into a DOS command line and ran the following (using a flex executable from the install directory):

C:\Documents and Settings\Owner.WILL\My Documents\Workspaces\rpcLibrary>”c:\Prog
ram Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\3.2.0\bin”\compc.exe -source-path .\src -nam
espace http://ak33m.com/mxml .\src\manifest.xml -include-namespaces http://ak33m
.com/mxml -output=.\bin\as3-rpclib.swc

basically you’re using the compc.exe file wherever you installed flex. I ran this from the root of the xml-rpc directory (from the api zip file extraction). So the src directory was a child of this directory. My wordpress flex app now compiles! If you want to save yourself the trouble you can download my recompiled as3 xml-rpc library.

I’ll post more as I make discoveries!

To set up an inexpensive website that you can easily maintain yourself, as well as building email lists, shopping carts or membership sites, please see our internet consulting services.