Failed Login Attempts at NSpeaks by Malicious IPs

Simplest and one of the most effective ways is to simply install this plugin: Limit Login Attempts This plugin will block any id trying to login into your site after a given number of failed attempts. You can configure the number of retries, get email notifications of when someone gets locked ou and configure the time for which the IP remains blocked. Its one of the most basic ways to secure your blog and is highly recommended if you haven’t been using any security method till now.

Second recommended step is to change your username especially if your username is a common one like admin, administrator or the blog’s name. Just create a new user id with some unique letters or something which only you can know and make it an administrator account. Now login using this new id and delete the original default account. That’s it. You are set now.

I have told you the most basic and one of the most effective security methods which will take just 5 minutes of your time. I will be writing a full blown post on securing your WordPress blog soon. And if you haven’t upgraded your blog till now, its high time you should do it.

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | WordPress sites under attack

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | WordPress 3.6 Beta 1 is out

Comic Sans was designed because when I was working at Microsoft I received a beta version of Microsoft Bob. It was a comic software package that had a dog called Rover at the beginning and he had a balloon with messages using Times New Roman.

 

There was no intention to include the font in other applications other than those designed for children when I designed Comic Sans. The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.

Source: Vincent Connare’s Blog.

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Comic Sans Creator talks about the need for the font

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Why You Should NOT Remove Dates from Your WordPress Blog Posts

Two places – Those who are using the pirated version and those who buy, test and uninstall it. Once you login, you lock a token with the particular Twitter app which does not gets released even with a logout/uninstall. To release it you will need to go to Settings>>apps page from Twitter website and revoke the access manually.

This is your good deed for the day. Revoke access for all those Twitter clients which you don’t use. Free up the tokens so that who like the app can continue using it. Some say the tokens get lost when you root your phone or change roms or even when you buy a new phone. It should not happen theoretically because tokens are locked with your account. Still if you want to be safe, take full backups using Titanium Backup App on Android.

Want to do one more good deed? Support Falcon Pro by signing this petition. Well this petition is only for this app which should have been for every app but still a signature won’t hurt. Twitter needs to stop taking a shot at the very developers who are responsible in the first place for where Twitter stands now.

Note: Btw don’t sweat if you see an insane pricing currently on Falcon Pro. Developer has set that intentionally to prevent others from buying the app. Also very soon everyone will be kicked out from the app because developer is implementing hardened security to ensure it does not gets pirated. So if you have purchased it, keep an eye on that. You will need to access it back.

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Do your good deed of the day – Revoke access to Twitter clients you don’t use

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | WordPress 3.6 coming

Create a Child Theme

Making changes to your core theme files may be simple but not recommended. Because when you need to upgrade your theme, you will have to apply those changes again making the whole upgrade process cumbersome. This is where Child Theme steps in. Child Theme inherits everything from the Parent theme and if you want to make any change in the original theme, you can do it from the child theme without touching the actual theme. Here’s a more on Child Themes you can read from.

Theme Customizer

WordPress 3.4 shipped with a nifty little feature called the Theme Customizer. You can use it to test your theme before making it live. It basically shows how your theme will look if you had activated it. You can even make some of the changes on the fly like Implementing menus, changing header and background, site title description and front page settings. Some themes come up with their own customization options like color and layout.

Theme Test Drive Plugin

If you want to do exhaustive testing which might take a long time, then the inbuilt Theme Customizer may prove ineffective. Because for that you will have to fire up the Customizer everytime and browse your site inside that which can be cumbersome. Theme Test Drive plugin allows you to browse your site with a theme of your own choice which only you will see while others will see the old theme. This way you can browse your site and keep making changes without breaking anything for your audience.

Check all Pages

When I say all pages it doesn’t mean every single page on your site. You need to check for single post, front page, search page, 404 pages, sitemap/contact pages, date/day/month archives, category/taxonomy archives, custom post type pages/archives. Sometimes people just check frontpage and single post and think that if these are working, means site is working as well. You need to make sure all pages are loading properly and no bugs are encountered on these. Also check your archive pages for excerpts/content to see if they show up how you like them. Also check for title tags because title tags implementation is different in themes and you might end up with wrong or improper tags especially when they mess up with the settings of the SEO plugin you are using.

Plugin Compatiblity

You need to check for any plugins that might mess up your theme. Plugins like contact forms, archive/sitemap or any widget based plugins are the most common ones that need to be looked at when you install a new theme. You may need to make appropriate css changes to your theme to adjust your site’s look according to the plugin you use. Some themes also support some plugins which you might already be using. You need to check whether that is working properly or not.

Widgets and Menus

Whenever you change your theme, make sure the widgets and the menus are properly updated and are working with your new theme as well. Some widgets might need to be changed/updated or even redesigned according to the new theme. This is even more important if your widgets contain social media information or ads whose format needs to be adjusted with the new theme.

Customizations from Old Theme

Sometimes you have customizations made in your old theme which you might want to carry forward. Mostly such customizations are made in functions.php. Now this is a bad practice of using your theme’s function.php for customizing it if those changes should work irrespective of the theme you have. It would make sense to have a plugin for such customizations. Anyways if you have changes from old theme which you want to carry forward, make a note of them and apply theme in your new child theme’s function.php or create a new plugin if those changes are theme independent.

Speed Test

You should ensure your site is still loading as fast as it was before you changed your theme. This is one test you can only perform after making your theme live. I would suggest you to use these tools to test your site’s speed: PingDom Tools and Web Page Analyzer

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Post Theme Install Checklist – Things to do after you install a new theme

Either you modify the img tag manually each time and enter the title yourself or you can use the Restore Image Title plugin. Its a simple plugin and does nothing except that it adds the title field to your images by using the text you entered while uploading your images.

Note: It won’t add title to the images you have already published before installing this plugin. It works only on the images you upload after you install it.

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Restore Image Title in WordPress 3.5

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Twitter Archive Feature coming to all

On clicking this, twitter informs that they will mail you the download link when the archive is ready. Yes, its just like how Facebook’s archive system works. Once you get the mail and download it you will get a zip file with archive in html form. Extracting it and you will see all your tweets sorted in calendar format.

Some people are saying that few tweets are missing from the archive. Either Twitter is testing the feature or waiting to roll it out. Till now no official announcement has been made.

Thanks to @Psilosophy for reporting it.

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Twitter finally allows downloading of tweets

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” is out

WordPress 3.5 Beta 1 was announced few hours back. And Final version is still about 2 months away. Now is the appropriate time you should know what all to expect from it. Well the official release post must have given you some idea of what all you can expect from the release but here I will try to list out all the major and minor changes you should know about the upcoming release.

Media Upload WorkFlow Overhaul

The Biggest change we can expect in WordPress 3.5 is how you upload the images and insert them in the post. The new process will make the procedure of uploading the images and creating image galleries far easier and will take very few clicks. Here are few screenshots that will show you how it looks like currently.

The changes regarding Image management are not only in the uploading process but also under the hood as well. WordPress now uses ImageMagick Engine wherever its available which ensures better quality and faster editing. It will fall back to GD Image library if ImageMagick is not installed on your webhosting.

Link Manager Gone (Finally)

For New installations, you won’t see the link manager anymore. Also if you are upgrading to 3.5 and didn’t have any links before, you won’t see it anymore. But if you had links and are upgrading, it will continue to work fine as before. For those who want to use Link Manager in 3.5 new installations, you will need to download Link Manager plugin to re-enable it. WordPress may do away with the Link Manager permanently soon in an upcoming release but for now it has been well hidden.

New Default Theme

Yes 2012 is about to end but the new theme titled ‘Twenty Twelve’ is finally gonna ship with WordPress 3.5 as the new default theme. Twenty Twelve is a fully responsive theme and comes with a front page where you can add your own content. It even comes with two widget areas specifically for the front page. It has full support for Retina Displays and includes Open Sans Fonts. You can even test Twenty Twelve theme by signing up for WordPress.com service if you are not a member or can download it from WordPress.org directory if you want to delve deeper into it.

oEmbed Improvements – Add Instagram, SoundCloud and Slideshare links directly.

Finally you can embed all those Instagram, Soundcloud and Slideshare links directly in your blog posts without requiring an embed code. Moreover, https Links are now allowed. So no more issues with Vimeo.com embeds anymore.

Visual Changes

WordPress is getting major visual facelifts with each release in the past couple of years. 3.5 is no different. Here is a list of all the noticable visual changes you will get to see.

The first different thing you will notice is how the buttons have changed. Instead of the old oval shaped buttons, now they have gone for a flat square shaped look. Don’t know what was the need for this change though.

Other major difference which Apple users will notice is that Dashboard is completely Retina compatible.

You will also sport a new welcome screen which sports a much cleaner look while focussing on the essentials.

Post Editor Changes - TinyMCE Editor also has gone for a facelift and looks much better and in tandem with the post editor. Also the HTML Tab has been renamed to Text. Keyboard shortcut for DFW  Mode now shows correctly in TinyMCE. Earlier the button said full screen and showed the keyboard shortcut for TinyMCE Full screen view but now both the button text and the corresponding displayed shortcut refers to DFW(Distraction Free Writing) Mode.

Settings Page Overhaul – WordPress 3.5 seems to be focussed on minimising the settings to bare minimum. They have done away with quite a few settings this time.

• On the Writing page these settings have been done away with – Size of the post box(will depend on how you resize it yourself and the value will be saved in cookies) and Remote Publishing Settings(These settings are on by default now. You can still turn them off via xmlrpc_enabled filter.).
• On the reading page, Charset setting have been removed for new installations.
• Search Engine Privacy settings have been shifted from Privacy options page to the Reading page. So no more Privacy options page now.
• A minor change on Discussions page is that now Show Avatars option has been turned into a checkbox instead of showing Yes or no.
• On the Media page, options to turn on oEmbeds and to change their dimensions have been removed. oEmbeds are now turned on by default. Width for an embed will be inherited from the theme or the content frame and height will be set automatically to 1.5 times of the total content width or 1000px whichever is smaller. Though the shortcode can still receive the height/width attributes. Also options to set the custom upload directory/url have been removed. You will need to UPLOADS constant in wp-config.php to change it. 

  define ('UPLOADS', 'uploads');

   This will set your url as http://domain.com/uploads. Also remember, the path set via this constant will always be set with respect to your installation. You can’t shift your uploads directory outside your installation.

Attachment Editor has been given a facelift. It now works via post.php file. Which means when you will try to edit an attachment from the Media page it will open a page it will resemble the post editing screen. So now you will be able to add content to an attachment page using a proper post editor.

A New Color picker has been introduced on the Customize Theme’s page.

Favorite Plugins in DashBoard

Earlier this year, WordPress.org introduced the option to mark a plugin favorite in their plugin directory which allowed you to mark certain plugins as your favorite. No more trying to remember their names or bookmarking links. With WordPress 3.5 you will be able to access those favorite plugins from the dashboard and install them directly. Infact, not only your favorite plugins but you can access anyone’s favorite plugins as it just requires a username to access them.

Want to Try out WordPress 3.5?

If you want to try out the latest bleeding edge version you can do so via the official WordPress SVN or Git repositories. Or if you don’t want to get your hands dirty, you can just install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin and convert your existing blog to the latest bleeding edge trunk version. But you will need to constantly update it to keep up with the latest updates. You can find more changes in my other post titled “Things a developer should know about WordPress 3.5“.

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | WordPress 3.5 – What’s New?

1. XMLRPC will be turned on by default from now on and the setting to turn it off has been removed from the settings page. This is because according to the Dev team, XMLRPC is pretty secure and also has been improved a lot so there is no reason you should have to turn it off. But if for some reason you want to turn it off, you will need to use the following code.
   

   add_filter( 'xmlrpc_enabled', '__return_false' );

   
   For more on this, I recommend you to read WPEngineer’s post.
2. WordPress’s default memory consumption limit has been bumped to 40MB.
3. Its possible to add a rel=”me” tag in your author descriptions now.
4. Now its easier to display taxonomy columns on edit post pages. Just add show_admin_column => true for register_taxonomy() parameter to your register_taxonomy() code which will automatically display the taxonomy list on corresponding post types. And if you are looking to add it on your own, you can use manage_taxonomies_for_{$post_type}_columns filter. More Information here.
5. You can order images explicitly in your galleries by using id parameter to list the images in the order you want them to display.
6. You can specify a custom order when you include posts by id now. Order will be the same in which you will include the ids using post__in parameter.
7. Upload Directory settings have been removed from the Media Settings page. From now on, to change the default WordPress wp-content directory, you should use the UPLOADS constant or applying a filter to wp_upload_dir().
8. From now on, View Post link on Edit post page will open in the same tab/window while only the Preview Post will open it in the new tab/window.
9. You can now display post archives in Ascending or Descending order by using order = ASC or order = DESC arguments to the function wp_get_archives();
10. You can now remove an existing oEmbed Provider using wp_oembed_remove_provider() function.
11. You can add custom arguments for an oEmbed request by using the filter ‘oembed_fetch_url‘.
12. AutoDiscovery for Custom Post Type feeds has been enabled. This means you won’t have to add the feed links for custom post types in the head tag manually.
13. Earlier when you had multiple categories per post and your permalink contains category name then the category with the lowest id appears in the permalink for that post’s url. Now you can specify the category to be chosen in such cases using ‘post_link_category’ filter.
14. Imagemagick Support is coming finally in the core. Images will be processed using the Imagemagick library by default but if its not installed, then the editing functions will fallback to the GD Library. You can read post about editing functions at WordPress development blog.
15. Similar to get_edit_post_link(), WordPress 3.5 introduces a new function get_edit_user_link(). This function will redirect to the current author’s profile page.
16. Plugins can now add extra password validity/strength rules to be enforced during password reset process.
17. sticky_class() function has been deprecated in favor of post_class() function.
18. Canonical links for paged comments have been fixed finally. They now point to the corresponding comment page instead of the post.
19. Unused arguments like hierarchical, _edit_link and capability_type have been removed from register_post_status() function.
20. Incorrect search page links in Adminbar of multisite installs has been fixed.
21. WordPress 3.5 ships with the latest versions of libraries which includes jQuery 1.8.3, jQuery UI 1.9.2, SimplePie 1.3.1 and TinyMCE 3.5.8. Also now you can use Protocol relative links in your themes to enqueue external scripts. For usage on how to do it, see this patch file which shows how to do it in 3.5 and above while maintaining backward compatibility with older WP versions as well.
22. Since now the settings to change the default dimensions of oEmbeds has been removed, your content should have a max width set so that your Embeds can use that width. You can use the following code to do so
    

    if ( ! isset( $content_width ) ) $content_width = 600;

    
    Source: WPBeginner

Read WordPress’s 3.5 Beta release post for the rest of the changes and keep a check on WordPress Developer Blog for more resources.

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Things a developer should know about WordPress 3.5

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | 10 Things you need to know about WordPress 3.5

For the following tutorial consider this scenario:

Old Server url: http://olddomain.com/ Path: /home/olduser/public_html/olddomain/

New Server url: http://domain.com/ Path: /home/newuser/public_html/domain/

Step 1 – Take Backup

Now using Putty (on Windows) or Mac’s built in Terminal go through the following commands on your old server after logging in:

cd public_html/olddomain
mysqldump --add-drop-table -h host -u db_user -p db_name > olddomainwp.sql
tar -cvf olddomain.rar ./
exit

You will be asked for your mysql password used to connect. Now we have our blog files backed up in an archive named olddomain.rar and the database in a file olddomainwp.sql.

Step 2 – Import Data at New Host

Now login to the new server using SSH and enter the following commands:

cd public_html/domain
wget http://olddomain.com/olddomain.rar
tar -xvf  olddomain.rar
mysql -h host -u db_user -p db_name < domain.sql
rm olddomain.rar olddomain.sql
exit

Here we download the rar file to the new host using wget command. We don’t need to download the sql file because that was included in the archive which we created on the old host. We then extract all the files using tar command and then import the database. Using sed command we replace all entries of www.olddomain.com with www.domain.com. And at the end after verifying that everything is working properly, we can delete the downloaded files.

Step 3 – Edit Database Settings

Its Time to edit the wp-config.php file to edit the database settings according to the new host. You can edit the file right from your SSH terminal by using Vim Editor. To invoke the editor type

vi ./wp-config.php

You will see something like this screen

Press the ‘I’ key to enter into ‘insert mode’ and arrow keys to move around the file. Once you have made your edits, press the Esc key to exit ‘insert mode’. To exit Vim type ‘:’ (without the quotes) and then type ‘wq’ and press enter, this will save your changes and quit Vim.

Step 4 – Fix Urls in Database

We now need to change the old urls saved inside the database so that attachments and links keep working like they were working on the old server. Now we can use some simple MySQL commands for this but the safest method is to use a Search and replace tool written by Devs at Interconnect.com. This is because at times the url of your site might have been saved inside a serialized array in the database. When you perform simple search and replace via an SQL command, it only replaces the url but does not take care of the fact that length of the string might change if your new url is shorter or longer than the old url and your site might break. Now this might happen rarely but one should never take a risk. Download the tool from Interconnect.com or their you can grab the latest trunk from their github page.

Now extract the files to the root directory of your wordpress blog on the new server. Now you can run this tool inside a browser by going to this url: http://newdomain.com/searchreplacedb2.php or you can run this via command line(Command line version is available only via their github page) using the file searchreplacedb2cli.php as the following command

./searchreplacedb2cli.php -h localhost -u root -d test -c utf\-8 -s "olddomain.com" -r "newdomain.com"

Note

1. MySQL commands on Shell: You may need to perform some sql commands too as per the following points. You can either perform them via phpMyAdmin or by running them straight away via command prompt. For that enter the following command
   

   mysql -u username -p

   
   You will be asked to enter your password and then something like below will come up.
   
   Now you can enter MySQL commands normally at the prompt. Make sure each command ends with a semi-colon(;).
2. If you want to keep your wordpress install in a different directorybut blog’s url different, then use the following MySQL command instead to change the siteurl and home.
   

   UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'http://domain.com' WHERE option_name = 'home';
   UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'http://domain.com/wp' WHERE option_name = 'siteurl'

   
   ‘siteurl’ here refers to the location of the actual WP installation files where ‘home’ refers to the public blog url.
3. If you are getting User permissions erroron accessing the dashboard, most probably you changed the table prefix from the default one and probably set incorrectly. Implement the following command to rectify it.
   

   UPDATE `{new prefix}_usermeta` SET `meta_key` = REPLACE( `meta_key` , '{old prefix}_', '{new prefix}_' ); UPDATE `{new prefix}_options` SET `option_name` = '{new prefix}_user_roles' WHERE `option_name` = '{old prefix}_user_roles';

4. Permalinks Update: If your blog was in a directory before shifting or shifting to a directory then you will need to save your permalinks again after logging into your dashboard panel so that it works correctly. Make sure its writable. If its not, then you can paste the code provided on the Permalinks settings page.
5. Traffic Redirect: You want people to get redirected from the old url automatically to the new url so that you don’t lose your traffic. For that enter the following code in your .htaccess file on the old host

   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Move your WordPress blog using SSH

What are these changes and should they matter to you? Yes, they will impact you in a big way. We use so many apps that interact with Twitter daily. Majority of them include those third party clients which are far far better than Twitter’s own official ones. Then there are apps which interact with Twitter like Storify, IFFFT, Instagram, Tumblr etc. These changes affect all these apps in one or the other way. So yes, they will affect you as well.

Below I am listing all the important changes which have been introduced and how will they affect you.

Rate Limit Change

The first big change is the change in rate limits. Earlier apps could make 350 requests in an hour no matter what the operation is. These requests were in the form of making a search, requesting profile information, checking timeline for tweets, accessing your mentions or direct messages. The new limit is about 15 calls every 15 minutes. Yes. From 350 requests to 60 requests. And worst part is that its not like you can use those 60 requests in your first 15 minutes because of the limit being applied in 15 minute intervals. Only the user profile lookup, profile search, tweet search, show a tweet type requests will be allowed to make 180 requests every 15 minutes. So if you are check your timeline, mentions or dms too often, you are likely to get locked out or land up in twitter jail pretty often.

Compulsory Authentication

Earlier some of the apps could perform certain operations like searching for tweets without performing an authentication. But with the new api, every operation will require an authentication. This means that certain apps will get locked out unless they change their methods. Though this change is actually for the better as it will help keeping the spammy applications in check.

Dropping RSS Support

Now this may hit some of you. Twitter has dropped support for RSS, XML and Atom technologies. Some of you may have usen RSS feeds of your account to access tweets via your RSS readers. Many apps also use RSS and XML technologies to access the tweets which will get locked out.

Limiting 3rd Party clients

Its clear that Twitter doesn’t want competition. They have limited all the 3rd party clients by imposing a 100,000 token limit. Every user who authenticates with a 3rd party client using 1.1 API, will be counted as a token. This token won’t be released even if the user logs out. So once an app reaches this limit, it can’t add more users unless previous users deauthenticate (via Settings>apps) or it asks twitter for increasing its limit. Those clients who already have more than 100,000 tokens will be limited to the double of what they have as of now. After that, they will require the permission of Twitter.

Tweets cannot be posted to Cloud Services

Apps cannot access tweets and post them to cloud services. This has already started showing impacts. IFFFT is a great service to automate your tasks. Many such tasks involved twitter. For example you could you could export your tweets to dropbox or other services. But with this restriction in place, that’s not possible anymore. IFFFT has already removed Twitter based triggers. It can still post to twitter but won’t use tweets and post them anywhere for you. This restriction isn’t new actually but is being enforced strictly now. You can expect more such services to go soon.

Deprecation of @Anywhere API

Anywhere API of Twitter allowed you to hyperlink tweets, usernames and twitter related content automatically on a webpage. It was a very easy way to embed twitter based content. But that’s not possible as the API has been deprecated. To embed tweets or usernames, you can either use web intents or use the Embed Tweet/Embed Timelines feature.

Display Requirements

Twitter has published a long article about how the tweets should be displayed. Basically it just tells that you have to replicate the tweet in its entirety as it appears on Twitter.com. You can’t remove or add items to a tweet on your own. This may effect many websites. To embed tweets on your website, you can use only the official methods. Some of the display requirements can be irritating like absolute time cannot be displayed on the timeline but only on the individual tweet. Users are already complaining. Check the screenshot of a review posted at Twicca’s play store link which recently implemented these requirements.

Also username and both the name of the person should be displayed side by side. On small mobile screens with longer names/ids, this won’t look good.

Not only these but there are other type of restrictions too like you can’t inform users that a tweet has been unfavorited or deleted. Hotot for Chrome tells you when a tweet gets deleted by marking it separately. So I guess this feature has to go if it has to comply with the guidelines.

Why is Twitter doing this?

Well Twitter till now had not much revenues to boast of. The only revenues it was getting was from promoted tweets service. To show ads and to become a full media company, it needs to control the content and how its displayed. Also Twitter’s official website and clients are not that much uses as much as the 3rd party apps. So by putting a restriction on them, it can direct users to its own website and clients from where it can push ads. Well earning money is good but doing it by alienating the developers and your users is not a good move. Well as of now, Some developers are appealing or even trying to find out workaround these problems. One can only hope that Twitter may relax some of these restrictions but the true effect of these changes will be felt after March 5, 2013 when all these changes come into effect.

What Twitter could have done?

Instead of alienating and restricting developers, it could have charged the developers to make apps. This would also have helped in restricting malicious apps and would also have helped them earn some revenue while maintaining a healthy developer ecosystem.

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | What Twitter’s recent changes can mean for you?

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | WordPress 3.5 Beta 2 out.

add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'my_get_posts' );
function my_get_posts( $query ) {
if ( is_home() && false == $query->query_vars['suppress_filters'] )
$query->set( 'post_type', array( 'post', 'page', 'album', 'movie', 'quote', 'attachment' ) );
return $query;
}

This code you can put in either your theme’s function.php file or a custom plugin file you created for your site. This code is all good but not many sites will tell you that this might break just any other loop that you might be using on your homepage. For instance if your homepage is showing a custom menu, then they will stop working. This code infact converted all my custom loop widgets to use this very loop. So practically all widgets started showing the same posts as were shown on the homepage and my custom menu disappeared.

So my suggestion is to not to use this code to show custom post types on your homepage. Stephen Harris in the comments has suggested an even better solution. Here is the code

add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'my_get_posts' );
function my_get_posts( $query ) {
	if ( is_home() && $query->is_main_query())
		$query->set( 'post_type', array( 'post', 'page', 'album', 'movie', 'quote', 'attachment' ) );
	return $query;
}

In the above code, we check that the query we want to modify is the main query or not. All other queries are left untouched in this process. Since is_main_query() function was introduced with WordPress 3.3, so the above method won’t work with versions below it.

I have removed my original alternative in wake of the above solution as it is good enough and does not require you to modify the queries. You can check the full solution mentioned at WordPress StackExchange.

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Custom Post Types on Homepage – Correct way

Usage:

---Display the author info and box--

Note: Since this function was released with WordPress 3.2, wrap this function inside a function_exists() conditional tag if you are working on an old version of WordPress or if you are working on a theme which you want it to work with old versions.

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© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Quick Tip: Hide Author Tags automatically on Single author blogs

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | What WordPress Theme Developers can learn from Twenty Twelve theme