New(ish) Tannock.net

So, it turns out that when one has a WordPress site that is so old that its content predates WordPress itself (indeed, WordPress is, I believe, the 4th in a series of CMS/publishing platforms that I’ve used to maintain this site), it gets some cruft. And when it is additionally sitting on a server that was new sometime in the 90s, occasionally bad things happened. And so, it came to my attention last week that the site was riddled with malware. Some investigation lead me to discover that while the current, immediate threat was easily contained, there were someĀ 1400 suspicious files on the server that I wasn’t sure what they were doing – most were contained by the server itself, but, still – I clearly wasn’t being a good site owner.

So, rather than try to clean that all up in place, on a server that often chokes whenever I click a button, I simply exported the data, moved the site and re-launched it the least amount of time possible. So now I’m using the default WordPress theme for a while, and there’s likely tonnes of things missing. But the site’s now up on a Digital Ocean Droplet, so, in theory, modern technology that will keep it up and running smoothly.

It’s probably time to actually move platforms again, but I have neither the time nor the inclination at the moment, so this’ll have to do.

Wanted: A twitter/comment plugin combo

When I post an entry (such as this one), I have a wordpress plugin (called Twitter Tools) that sends out a tweet (meta-linking update: like this) telling everyone that I’ve posted something. To manage comments, I use Disqus, which, amongst other systems, allows people to authenticate at twitter to then post a comment. Which is nice, and I like it.

But! Sometimes, seemingly more often than not, people will @-reply to me on twitter with a comment on my post. And I will often @-reply someone else about their post (that was announced on twitter). So here’s what I want:

  1. When I post an entry that sends a tweet, capture and store the ID of the tweet that I sent.
  2. Whenever someone @-replies or retweets that stored tweet, aggregate that to the comment-section of my blog, so that the entire related conversation is visible in one place.
  3. For bonus points, given that everything I post is also pushed as a post to Facebook & everything I tweet ends up as a status update on there too, it would be great to extract any responses to those as well, in the comments section of my site.

Does anyone know if such a thing exists?

%d bloggers like this: