[scenicoregonParticipant]

Seems to work fine for me, on Gate.com.

Gave me:
Modify Date : 2009:12:11 08:53:41
Copyright : Leo Blanchette
Color Space : sRGB
Exif Image Width : 3600
Exif Image Height : 2400
XP Title : Credit Card Trap, Predatory Lending

and a ton of other stuff.

Delete the plugin now?

Thanks for your work on this.

[scenicoregonParticipant]

I’d really like to be able to Twitter, FB, and G+ all in one place, but I know that Google is stingy with giving out access. I’ve been fooling around all day with Hootsuite (which has G+ access), dlvr.it, Buffer, IFTTT, and others, and I’m finding that either the service doesn’t really have G+ access (at least for free) or in Hootsuite’s case, ends up shortening the image url in such a way that Twitter doesn’t display it as an image, which I want. Twitter also did away with their rss feed, so that doesn’t help, either, and FB’s rss feed points to the wrong page (goes to the profile, not the page, even though the rss I used was for the page, not the profile), not particularly helpful. So, no good solutions, at least at a bargain.

Again, I’d really want G+ as part of the capability, without it I’d end up having to post everything twice, which is exactly where I am now– I use the autoposter for Twitter, and Hootsuite for G+ and FB.

So, if G+ capability was part of the package, I’d want:
1. Ability to post to a specific FB page, not just the profile. (can do that now with available tools)
2. Ability to post to a specific G+ business page. (can do that now with available tools)
3. Ability to post to Twitter
4. Nice, large images in all three, not just thumbnails
5. A good search engine for the autoposter for searching the portfolio. The one in the pro plugin seems to re-search when you click next or back on multi-page results, showing you duplicate results sometimes, and making it hard to be sure you’ve seen the whole of the collection.
6. An accurate character counter for Twitter (the current one seems to always undercount), and something that doesn’t lose the last word of the post, like the current autotweeter does.
7. Ideally, the ability to write different posts for the same image being sent out– a short one for Twitter, longer for FB, etc.
8. Ability to add hashtags en masse, like the current autotweeter. Also, user-entered default hashtags that are always added.
9. Url shortener for Twitter that doesn’t make the image go away.
10. Adaptable scheduling for the posts– you set the times, up to a few times a day, it follows the schedule. Ability to “humanize” the times would be helpful, to vary the times a bit randomly.
11. Ability to automatically add new images to the queue if wanted.
12. Ability to reorder the queue.
13. This is pie-in-the-sky, but some of these automated things let you keep a pool of posts that they keep cycling through, for posts that never go out of date. They even let you have say three different wordings for each post (image), so that the posts aren’t always the same– it chooses a different wording each time. I could see this being a bit much for the current plugin idea.
14. Ability to post immediately.
15. Something that retains the origin as being from the users Symbiostock site, not changing it– but this might not work completely with the url shortener. Some sort of compromise?
16. Some sort of output (maybe RSS?) so that we can utilize it to trigger other services which the plugin itself doesn’t accomplish, via Hootsuite or something similar.

I’m too tired now to really think straight anymore, so let’s call it good at that.

[scenicoregonParticipant]

From what I’ve just learned, I think a plugin to automatically post to social media is even now more important. Here’s what I’ve learned:
I was thinking that through Jetpack, since it connects to G+, FB, and Twitter, I could have it automatically post when I added new images. I could never get it to work. I contacted Jetpack about this, asking if Jetpack was incompatible with Symbiostock, and just received this reply:

Jetpack’s Publicize module was designed to automatically publish Posts to your favorite social networks. You cannot, however, push updates from Pages.

If Symbiostock allows you to publish Posts instead of Pages, you should be able to use Publicize to automatically publish your images to Facebook and Google+.

You can find out more about the differences between Posts and Pages here:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/post-vs-page/

So, assuming that is all correct, then when we publish a new picture (it is a page, not a post, correct?), Jetpack can NOT automatically repost it to social media. That leaves us with nothing, then, that can– and thus we now have a big need for something that can publish our pages as posts to social media automatically, much preferably something that can be scheduled to do so automatically, rather than just when we publish.

[scenicoregonParticipant]

So Leo-
Are you saying that this seems to be a plugin idea worthy of development and you’re planning on doing so in order to market it, or are you asking if I’d like to purchase the development of it? And I guess I’d need to know if we’re talkin’ just the rss feed or a social media posting plugin that’ll do at least G+, FB, and Twitter? (I use Pinterest too, but it is not as important)
Thanks

[scenicoregonParticipant]

All the previous mentioned, except I don’t know what the “dublin core is”, and I’ve not used the cart manager so no opinion on that. My adds to take away:
-all the Symbiostock network/news stuff that a customer won’t care about, specifically on the image pages (already mentioned)
-the twitter and facebook icons that show up in the footer with Leo’s credits– don’t mind giving him credit, but those icons there make it seem like that ‘s how to get ahold of me, not Leo
-can we lose the finickyness of the image processor?
-the slowness of searches and page-loading
-that customers have no way of editing their user profiles? Am I missing something here?
-that the exclusivity default has never worked
-That a header image can never be made as wide as the header menu bar– it is automatically sized down to a size that is shorter

hmmmm, this is really very hard
Rick

[scenicoregonParticipant]

This is very hard to answer, because I’ve no idea what is expected to stay no matter what, and what might disappear if no one speaks up because they didn’t think to mention that item.

But for what it is:
-All of the previously mentioned items
-payment and download system built-in at least as much as it is now
-ability to adjust appearance and add content on every page
-batch editing/processing
-automatic watermarking
-automatic sizing of download choices
-defaults that work (pricing, sizing, exclusivity)
-customizable menus, layouts
-twitter poster, even better if it includes other social media as well
-customizable header and footer (adding menus to footer is helpful)
-control over who else shows up in your searches is nice
-a search engine that doesn’t exclude images for “waterfalls” if you search for “waterfall”, as an example– a smarter search, that’d give the same result for each of those
-a less finicky image processing engine would be nice, but can live with what we’ve got
-being able to set our own keywords for images
-automatic image sitemap generation
-built-in sharing buttons
-automated emailer
-user account management

That’s all I can think of for now.
Rick

[scenicoregonParticipant]

I got mine to work now, no generation of random password, customer-selected password works. The bug occurred when I updated from 2.x to 3.x, but had not deleted the old emailer per these instructions:
http://www.symbiostock.org/community/viewtopic.php?p=4683#p4683

To fix, I switched the theme to a WP default theme, deleted the email pluglin (**that’s important!**), then turned my Symbiostock child theme back on. It wanted to reinstall the email plugin right away, let it and it’ll put the correct new one in.

Also, the “a password will be emailed to you” message on the registration can be changed by going to Appearance>editor>Symbiostock (on the right in blue)>register_symbiostock.php (again, on the right in blue). Look through the code there and you change the note at the bottom of the registration form to whatever you want. I believe this is editing a parent theme template, so when it updates I’d gather that you’ll have to go change it again. Also, I have the Pro version, I don’t know if you have access to edit these templates without the Pro version.

Works for me, now, much thanks to Jo Ann Snover who spent a lot of time helping me out with it.

[scenicoregonParticipant]

@leo wrote:

In the last few days people have been mentioning that registration is a little funky for some people.

First, do these checks:

1. Upgrade WordPress to the latest version.
2. Upgrade ALL plugins.
3. Turn the Symbiostock theme OFF
4. Turn premium plugin OFF and remove the emailer plugin *important*
5. Reactivate the theme, and the emailer plugin should be updated.

Now try signing up with a test account via the usual way.

Toggling your theme simply ensures (in case you’ve missed it) that the latest email plugin for Symbio is installed.

I noticed a small hickup in my own registration process, the password not registering properly, but since doing the above it works for me.

Please do the same and let me know via the pole above where you stand.

Leo

---

User registration used to work fine, but I’ve discovered it is now broken, so I am assuming it is since the last update.

When the user registration pops up, it says “password does not match” on the button even though nothing has been entered into the fields, and a note at the bottom that says *a password will be emailed to you. If you put in matching passwords, the button changes to “create account”, but it still emails a random password to the user!

This is one thing many customers find extremely annoying, to not be able to use their preferred password, but rather be forced to use a randomly generated one. It makes them not want to (or be able to) come back. And I’ve found no way for them to edit their profile, to change their password.
ADDENDUM: I have just discovered that the emailed random password does NOT work, but the customer-entered one does. Even more confusing.

I had just the day before discovering this enabled the WP Supercache plugin, and thought that the form was being served from the cache and that that was the problem, but the problem persists even though I’ve disabled the plugin and deleted the supercache.

Solutions?

[scenicoregonParticipant]

Here’s an update to the saga– I found a problem in the user registration that I thought might be due to caching, so I turned off caching then turned it back on. That one single action deleted my entire supercache, SIX HOURS of preloading work gone just like that. I don’t know about this plugin, I’m thinking of dropping it.

[scenicoregonParticipant]

Well, I’ve figured out part of this, thought I’d leave it up in case it benefits someone else.

I still don’t know about the settings question, but here’s what I’ve found out since on the amount of time (and some other issues along the way):

I let ended up cancelling the preload job, deleted the cache, turned on debug mode, and ran it again. After three hours, it had gotten less than half way through the job, was still running- but when I checked, it had only supercached only about half a dozen images. I saw in the debug log that it seemed to be skipping most of the images because of the default user agents it skips (including Google bot), and the Supercache support forums seemed split on just deleting the default user agent settings to get more pages cached and leaving them in because caching a lot of pages takes up a lot of server space (but then what is the point of preloading?).

I cancelled this preload job, deleted the cache, and deleted all of the default user agent settings but saved them so I could put them back in after the job ran, and ran the preload again. This time it was supercaching more images, so I let it run until it finished– it took over SIX HOURS, and all told still only supercached about 90 of my approx. 540 images. Figuring that was as good as it was going to get, I re-added the default user agent settings, and my plan is now:
1. As an unlogged-in user, visit home and all the major destinations so that it builds cached pages of those for any it missed in the preload.
2. Check things along the way to be sure everything is working right, like registration, image selection, purchasing– all the stuff that shouldn’t be completely static.
3. If everything’s OK, run a few benchmark tests (Google has some tools) to see if the site is faster and whether this was all worth it.
Here’s hoping.

[scenicoregonParticipant]

OK, thanks Leo.

[scenicoregonParticipant]

That was a big help. I’m finding those widgets quite handy today– added footers, too.

[scenicoregonParticipant]

That worked very well. Just remember to check the box that says “automatically add paragraphs”. I was also able to add widgets for follow buttons (Twitter, etc.) this way.

[scenicoregonParticipant]

Hi JoAnn- I really appreciate words of wisdom from those who have gone before me. So…right now I’m doing one post a day, and don’t plan on upping that. Each of these posts fits within a theme. That doesn’t seem like “a huge stream” to me– does it to you? By the way, I’ve been seeing a lot of your stuff lately on Twitter. If anyone reading this is interested in following me, look for ScenicOregoncom.

[scenicoregonParticipant]

OK, thanks for the info. So, being a newbie to Twitter, I don’t have a firm understanding of what the twitter “CARDS” are that this plugin wants to generate. Is there an example you can point me to so that I know what it is creating?
Thanks

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