lineTwit - A PHP Twitter Reader – Original developed at my work (Line Digital) and is based on myTwit by Ralph Slooten

wpTwit -  A WordPress Plugin build using lineTwit to show how it can be incorporated into proper projects.  This site is live example of this plugin in action as I am using wpTwit for the twitter feed in the sidebar.

Many thanks to both Line Digital and Ralph Slooten for allowing me to make these available for everyone to use.

Enjoy!

The section I was working on was a form submission (within the wordpress administation) which saved the form values into the database and then redirected the user upon success to another page (using wp_redirect) but this resulted in a blank content pane.

This seems very strange to me as it showed some of the page contents i.e. the header and left navigation but the content pane was completely blank.

I searched around for a few hours trying various suggestions to similar problems, downloading other wordpress plugins and examining how they used the wp_redirect function to see if the authors of these other wordpress plugins had done anything different, only to find that there was no difference.

I eventually managed to figure out the issue after I read a post regarding a problem another user was having where they were getting a completely blank screen and another member suggested the problem could be due to whitespace which was sent to the browser before the redirect was called resulting in a “headers already sent” problem.

This got me thinking that I did not have output buffering enabled which was strange as I usually have output buffering enabled to resolve this issue, however, in this case I did not have output buffering turned on and this turned out to be exactly the problem. I added the following line to my .htaccess file and the redirection now works perfectly.

php_flag output_buffering on

I was glad to get this one resolved as I had to spend far too much time on something that I have resolved time and time again. Certainly one I’ll be aware of should there be a next time!

My main reason for doing this was that when I comment on some of my friends blogs (mainly those on blogspot) I have posted the comment using my WordPress profile which only allows me to enter my wordpress username which then links to username.wordpress.com.  As a result I would have to be adding my new blogs entries to 2 blogs which would be a waste of time and bad in terms or SEO (duplicated content resulting in a lower search engine listings).

Fortunately, I’m not the only person who was wanting to do this and I stumbled upon a PDF written by BlogWell which tells you how to do this in simple and easy to understand terms and also features illustrations which show you exactly how the process works.

The general idea is that you need to pay WordPress $10 a year for this and you also need to temporarily change your domain name servers to the ones for WordPress.  This may not be too good if you are trying to put the redirect in for a domain which is already up and running but is perfect for setting up with a brand new domain.  Due to processes involve in changing domain name servers the whole process could take several days to complete but I managed to get the whole thing done in 10 minutes although I’ll need to keep an eye on things overs the next few days as these changes aren’t normally reflected as quickly.