Blackbird Pie, WordPress.com and New Twitter

November 15, 2010 by bradvin | 32 Comments

UPDATE : check out the new Blackbird Pie plugin page

WOW, the Twitter Blackbird Pie WordPress plugin had an interesting past couple of days! On Friday 5th November, the guys from WordPress.com took the plugin & modified it a bit, and then added it to all WordPress.com sites! The story also got featured on Mashable & Techcrunch, 2 of THE LARGEST tech blogs on the internet, where they linked back to our original plugin. That was just awesome news, and the plugin downloads doubled in about 3 days!

With the increase in users, some issues were found. The biggest probably being that the New Twitter status URL formats did not work with the plugin, so people were happily pasting their tweet URLs into the post editor and nothing was showing up on their live sites. The new Twitter URLs contain an extra “#!” e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/MarcForrest/status/4259838024482817

I have just uploaded a new version of the plugin to overcome this issue. Version 0.3.4 is available from WordPress.org for download, so please upgrade or download to the latest version. Other changes include renaming the Autolink.php file to autolinker.php and adding a donate button into the tinyMCE popup.

Again, if you like the plugin and feel that it deserves some kudos then please donate me some beer money

version 0.3.4 of the Blackbird Pie #WordPress plugin released http://ow.ly/3aakT

November 15, 2010 10:55 pm via HootSuite ReplyRetweetFavorite

Themergency

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Manda

Is this supposed to work in comments as well? I've been trying to find a plugin that will allow people to post their http://twitter.com/#!/toxidlotus/status/3159598585... link and have it embed blackbird pie.

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admin

Hi Manda
The blackbird pie shortcodes do not work in the comments. But you can try something like this to get it working:

http://beerpla.net/2010/10/15/how-to-add-shortcode...

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Mel

getting a similar error

Fatal error: Call to undefined function mb_strlen() in /home/xxxxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/twitter-blackbird-pie/unicode.php on line 21

Using WP. 3.0.4 on The Planet

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Mel

Also I'm using PHP Version 5.2.9

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admin

check this article out : http://www.honk.com.au/index.php/2009/10/24/php-ca...

It seems you need to enable the PHP extension mbstring which is not enabled by default.

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mdhenshaw

I downloaded the plugin. When I tried to use it I got the following error and it broke the post:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or '}' in path//plugins/twitter-blackbird-pie/unicode.php on line 9

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admin

hi mdhenshaw,

Can you give me some info about your WP install please :
OS, WP version, PHP version etc

I need to try and replicate your issue on my side so I can fix this problem
thanks
Brad

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mdhenshaw

wordpress 3.0.4, hosted on media temple. php ver. 4, win. 7

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mdhenshaw

Any word on this issue?

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bokeen

I am receiving the exact same error on my site. Any movement on this?

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admin

Hi Bokeen,

It seems that twitter has taken down their tweetproxy found at (http://media.twitter.com/tweetproxy/). That was how I was connecting to the twitter API. I have removed this now and uploaded a new version (0.4.1) which should be available for download soon.

That will fix the problem.
cheers
Brad

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bokeen

I was getting the error message before Twitter made the API changes. I found that upgrading to PHP 5 did the trick. (The same fix worked for mdhenshaw, per a conversation that we had on the Twitter.)

And THANK YOU for posting the 0.4.1 update so quickly, it is greatly appreciated!

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Rafael Fischmann

@admin: Thanks, I'm glad to hear that. But how come it's showing up perfectly in TechCrunch's RSS feed? Have they done any manual tweaking?

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Daniel Bröckerhoff

Hi there,

great plugin! But i got problem with my wordpress-theme (its "Elegant Grunge"). The userpics are not embedded inside the tweet but are shown like a foto i posted, hovering half above the tweet. i'll send you a screenshot if you like. pretty much makes blackbirdpie unusable for me :-(

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admin

Hi Daniel,

it seems that the theme's CSS is overriding the tweet styles. You can counteract what the theme is doing by adding in some custom CSS into your theme with !important tacted on the end. Do you have a test page I can check out so I can see what style is misbehaving??

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Rafael Fischmann

Hey, congrats for the great plugin! It's working fine in my site, but the tweets are showing up broken in my RSS feed. Can you help me to fix that, please?

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admin

Hi Rafael
That is one thing I want to fix in the next version : better RSS tweets
thanks for using the plugin
cheers :)

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Tad Hunt

Hey there,

LOVE the plugin! Excellent job! Everything works well except the new Twitter (#!) url detection. Which is a shame as that is SUCH an amazing feature and though it may have been fixed in the previous version (0.3.4). It currently isn't working in 0.3.5. I'm making due with the myriad of other options you afforded us (again, great job!), I just thought you'd want to know that the issue is alive and well in the most current release of the plugin.

To clarify, if you paste the following into the rich text editor:

https://twitter.com/#!/BGR/status/6369075433316354

...nothing shows up except the link.

If you'd like me to test something for you, feel free to hit me up. I'd be happy to.

Best,

Tad

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admin

Hi Tad.
It seems yr tweets are using HTTPS and the plugin only checks for HTTP.
I have emailed you a new version to do some testing on. Pls let me know if it all goes well your side and I will release version 0.3.6
thanks :)

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Romain

Hi!
Very good plugin!

But.. I saw problems with "hashtags":

e.g.My tweet: "Irish Prime Minister Says Budget..."
The plugin is making Irish as a twitter name, and making a link which goes to a page: http://twitter.com/rish ... I never make any tag or tweeter name with Irish.. And it is getting off the "I" of Irish.

An other one: e.g."On Religion: A Long Road From ‘Come by.."
Is making "From" as twitter search and making a link : http://twitter.com/search?q=%23rom getting of the F.

I think you have a little problem with autolinker.php .. I was looking for it, but I can't understand how "preg_replace" works.. :S
Do you have any ideas what the problem is?

(Sorry for my english :/ !! :) ) Thanks!
Bye!

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admin

Hi Romain
Thanks for letting me know - can you give me the actual tweet URLs so I can do some testing my side. Thanks :)

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Erich

Maybe stupid question for you experts:
How di I get that Twitter URLs with the ID?

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admin

hi Erich
You can embed your tweet with either a URL OR the ID. E.g.
[blackbirdpie id="13794126295"]
or
[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/themergency/status/13968912427"]
or..
Its MUCH easier to add the tweet via the post editor "blackbird" button

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