Tag Archives: WordPress

Composer posts images

In our biggest release since launch, we’ve just deployed the ability to publish images.

Today, images are posted to Facebook, Twitter and WordPress. If you send an image post to other services, we’ll send just the text, without the image. We’re working on sending a link to the image to other services.

We send the image as a normal image post to both Facebook and Twitter. For WordPress, we get a bit creative. First, we upload the full original file to your WordPress site. Then, we get the image details back from WordPress, and insert the medium sized image into the post. This way, you can choose what size your Composer posted images appear in WordPress, by editing your “medium size” in your Media settings on your WordPress site.

To celebrate, I posted this picture of our office elephant to Facebook, Twitter and WordPress!

Office Elephant

WordPress links

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As part of the same deploy that introduced plurk, I also snuck in an update to the WordPress service. If you post a url in a message, it will now automatically be converted to a link before being posted to WordPress.

Also, all posts to WordPress are appended with a small “Posted by Composer” link. Eventually premium users will have the option to disable this, but right now that’s not a feature I’ve built! If you’re passionate about this issue, and don’t have the coding skills to remote it on the WordPress end, shoot over a comment and offer me a $50 Amazon gift voucher, then I’ll build it just for you!

Remember me and other tweaks

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The remember me function now works. If you’re having issues, I recommend clearing cookies for this domain. The “remember me” text on the login page is also now a label, so clicking it will tick the checkbox. The devil’s in the details.

I’ve also deployed some behind the scenes changes that bring encryption to the application. If you created a link to WordPress before today, then the data you submitted was stored in plain text in the database. From today forward, this data is encrypted.

There was some discussion about whether or not this feature is important. Most people felt it was overkill to focus on security so early. I’m a big fan of the “better safe than sorry” philosophy when it comes to security, so I’m pleased that this code is live.

I also found a new deployment process, so bzr-upload replaces good old rsync! Deployments are now as simple as `bzr upload`.

Composer speaks SMS

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Today I built an SMS API for Composer. It’s very basic, but it works. I just sent a text, had the message published, and got an SMS reply telling me which services succeeded (and sadly, failed).

Twitter failed because it wants to make every domain a link, and then wants to “shorten” that link to a 20 or 21 character t.co link. Very stupid. So twilio.com (10 characters) became http://t.co/Mnj6d4ZX (20 characters). With 3 domains (not urls) in my message, I gained at least 20 characters, and went over the 140 limit. But that’s another story!

I started out this morning (technically afternoon, but my morning 😉 ) building an SMS API for Composer. I wanted to be able to post from my mobile, without internet, and update my statuses. I chose Tropo because they’re free while in development. I figured it would be a while before I’d have the whole thing production ready, so a few months of free SMS gateway seemed appealing.

Alas, too many hours later, none of my texts reached Tropo, I couldn’t get a reply to work by IM or SMS, and so finally I decided to get agile and instead try Twilio. Bingo. It just worked. No issues, no bother. There are a couple of downsides. First, I got $30 bonus when signing up, but to “activate” my account I need to add a credit card. Second, it’s not free, it’s $1 a month per number plus 1c per text received and 1c to 7c or more per SMS sent, depending on the destination. But it works, and it worked in less than an hour.

I hard coded the mobile number to account id link, so if you want to use the SMS API, just let me know, tell me your mobile number, and I’ll add you to it! I’ll work on a better system where folks can register in time, but for now, it works. This is an MVP after all! 🙂

Now I can send one text message to Composer and update Facebook, Twitter, Identica and WordPress all at once. Happy days.