Rivendell B&B - Dumfries

This required some admin work - sorting out Facebook accounts and pages, TripAdvisor accounts and widgets, customising Wordpress themes, and inevitably the transfer of hosting to Callisti services from the legacy provider (see earlier posts.)

The B&B website features an online booking widget and calendar for visitors to book without having to speak to a human directly and in their own time. Not all the rooms are available online so if you're looking for a Bed and Breakfast break you can resort to telephone calls and emails. Or like they did in olden days, turn up at the door and ask.

The design was influenced mainly by the Rivendell team to match their existing offline marketing materials.

Chime.in (beta)

The third way in 'rich-media' posting - this can link with facebook and twitter accounts. Currently trying it out (chime.in beta) tentatively after an automated email from Mixx. Naturally there's a mobile app and you can edit your profile, etc.

Kind of like twitter UI but nicer looking. Not sure where it will fit alongside linkedin, google+, facebook and twitter but maybe it offers something more holistic.

Claim your usernames now before they get taken!

Waste of public money?

Callisti has been using the BuddyPress plug-in for WordPress to set up community frameworks (notably Dumfries and Galloway For Sale Free and Wanted) and recently revised the phpBB forum experiment on Wasting Public Money with a similar WordPress and BuddyPress installation for a more pleasant user interface.

There is also the added feature of being able to use the WP-FB connect tool (recently updated after Facebook's change to acceptable authentication methods) which allows greater accessibility to those already familiar or at home in a Facebook environment.

Visitors are welcome to contribute to the website with relevant content...

Facebook frustration

Gah. Nothing is free with Facebook. Money doesn't always change hands but information does.

Dependencies also are affected so anyone using WP-FB AutoConnect will be getting an email something like this: (Justin Klein developer of WP-FB AutoConnect is aware of this recent Facebook issue as of 15th May 2011!)

Dear Developer of Dumfries And Galloway - For Sale Free And Wanted,

Our automated systems have detected that you may be inadvertently allowing authentication data to be passed to 3rd parties. Allowing user ids and access tokens to be passed to 3rd parties, even inadvertently, could allow these 3rd parties to access the data the user made available to your site. This violates our policies and undermines user trust in your site and Facebook Platform.

In every case that we have examined, this information is passed via the HTTP Referer Header by the user's browser. This can happen when using our legacy authentication system and including < iframe >, < img > or < script > content from 3rd parties in the page that receives authentication data from Facebook. Our legacy mechanism passes authentication information in the URL query string which, if handled incorrectly, can be passed to 3rd parties by the browser. Our current OAuth 2.0 authentication system, released over a year ago, passes this information in the URL fragment, which is not passed to 3rd parties by the browser.

Please ensure that you are not allowing this data to be passed immediately. Accessing your site as a test user while running a HTTP proxy/monitor like Charles or Fiddler is the best way to determine if you are allowing this information to be passed. If you discover the issue, you can do one of two things:

1. Migrate your site to use our OAuth 2.0 authentication system. We are requiring all apps and sites to update to this mechanism by Sept. 1, 2011. Migrating now will address this issue and ensure that you are one of the first to meet the deadline. For more details, please see our Authentication Guide.

2. Create and use an interstitial page to remove the authentication data before redirecting to your page with 3rd party content. This approach is used by many of our largest developers today (although they are all migrating to OAuth 2.0 shortly). This is a simple and straightforward change that should have minimal impact on your site. For more details on this approach, see our Legacy Connect Auth doc.

Because of the importance of ensuring user trust and privacy, we are asking you to complete one of the above steps in the next 48 hours. If you fail to do so, your site may be subject to one of the enforcement actions outlined in our policies.

If you have any questions or believe you have received this message in error, please contact us.
Facebook Developer Relations

Excalibur Wedding Cars - Mk2

This was fun! A complete revamp of the wedding limousine website using some CSS3 stuff, background image shenanigans, a touch of wordpress plugin-ery and some more experience of using custom themes and menus the way wordpress 3 suggests.

Playing with the custom header images using the set thumbnail function is rewarding but unless you re-define the dimensions of the header image in the wordpress settings, you need to think letterbox or panoramic landscape when selecting images that are going to look right.

Naturally :) there were some editions to functions.php as it still uses the parent theme for this file. The nod to social networking includes facebook like buttons and a recent activity widget.

To ease migration from the previous website, 301 redirects were employed - the xml sitemaps were updated with Yahoo and Google once the SEO-friendly URLs were set.

Wedding Lounge

The Wedding Lounge (Dumfries) is a new wordpress-based website built using child themes, custom menus and CSS3 - more in line with the way a wordpress framework ought to be customised. There is still a concession to the functions.php file as the parent theme version takes precedence over the child theme in this respect but this may change in future.

The Weddding Lounge website is to promote the services of an upcoming wedding photographer and wedding planner. The site is ready for the start of the wedding shows and fairs being held in Dumfries and Galloway in 2011 so provides an online source of information, as well as linking with the existing facebook profile and image galleries.

Out of the blue and into the black

Work is now starting on the Thornhill Blues website for the Dumfries and Galloway blues festival to be held in 2011. The organisation are bringing well-known blues bands to Thornhill over the holiday weekend in spring so fans that follow the blue trail will have a new date in their calendar.

The organisation is keen to promote its presence on facebook and myspace.