Since yesterday, newsPage has gone from version 1.0 to 1.01 to 1.0.1b to 1.1 and now today it is 1.2 It has seen quite a few changes and additions, including the ability to create topics and the ability to do more customizing in the settings area. Some changes:

• Choose whether to use the newsPage CSS file or your theme’s CSS
• Assign keywords to each feed to act as a topic (basically, a tag), you can then display feeds on a page based on that topic.
• Choose to use the feed’s title, or the title you specify.
• And several minor fixes throughout the script. Thanks to all who provided feedback and ideas, and let’s keep the ideas coming :)

Today, I launched the new design of this blog. It’s been in the works for the past month and a half.Trying to get all the various ideas together in one place. I started off with a theme I bought from themeforest, and moved from there to change it to have the look and feel I was most comfortable with. The end result is one I’m pretty pleased with.

Ok, so today newsPage got another quick update, as I added a feature that was requested by a few users. That feature is the ability to choose to open links from RSS feeds in new windows. I promise to keep the updates down for the next couple days.

When I redid this blog, I wanted to make a “tweet this” button, but I didn’t want to send the regular URL to twitter, between my name and some of my articles, you can reach the 140 character limit pretty quick.

I also didn’t want to have to rely on a url shortening service for the shorter URLs, as that can cause it’s own problems since people aren’t seeing your domain name in the URL and what happens if that URL service closes it’s doors or decides to delete all links that are older than x number of days? You have links to your blog that don’t go anywhere.

So I decided to cut out the middle man and create my own functions. There are 2 functions, one handles creating the shorter URLs, and the other function handles the redirect. Place them in your functions.php file in your theme:

function get_shorter_url(){
    global  $wp_query, $post; 
    $post_id = $wp_query->post->ID;
    $tinyURL = get_post_meta($post_id, 'Shorter URL', true);
    if ( $tinyURL == ''){
        $tinyURL =  '/' . base_convert($post_id, 10, 36) . '.goto';
        add_post_meta($post_id, 'Shorter URL', $tinyURL, true); 
    }
    $tinyurl = get_bloginfo('wpurl').$tinyURL;
    $tinyurl = str_replace("www.","",$tinyurl);
    return $tinyurl;
}
function redirect_shorter_url() {
    if(is_404()){
        global $wpdb;
        $postmetaquery = "SELECT `post_id`, `meta_value` FROM `$wpdb->postmeta` WHERE meta_key LIKE 'Shorter URL' AND meta_value != ''";
        $postarr = $wpdb->get_results($postmetaquery,ARRAY_A);      
        foreach($postarr as $arr){
            if((get_bloginfo('wpurl') .$arr['meta_value']) == ('http://' . $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"])){
                $url = get_permalink($arr['post_id']);
                header("HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently");
                header ("Location: $url");
                exit;
            }
        }   
    }
}
add_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_shorter_url');    

Now, whenever you want to use a shorter url, you just call the function in your theme, like so:

echo get_shorter_url();

So for example, if I wanted to add a tweet this link to the bottom of my article, I would open single.php and add this link:

<A href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php echo get_shorter_url() ?>" title="Click to send this page to Twitter!" target="_blank">Tweet this</a>

Sorry for the lack of updates this past week. The wife and I were gone for a few days to Vancouver and then we were getting ready for Kaitlyn’s first birthday. Hard to believe she’s a year old already. Time does fly which I’m sure every new parent discovers when the first birthday rolls around.

Well, after a few weeks of testing, DBStract has now been moved to it’s new home at mediatemple. Also for DBSract, we have some new changes happening very soon so keep your eyes peeled.