Wanderer LLC

Wanderer LLC just released a brand new plugin for WordPress called “AutoTopo” which allows you to display USGS topographical maps on your site.  Hiking, climbing, and general wilderness exploration sites should find this plugin quite useful.  It’s still in the early stages of development and supports three map sizes and one zoom level.

AutoChimp 1.00 included some new big features, but many folks complained that it broke the standard MailChimp widget plugin.  I verified this was true and have fixed the issue, although I think this is something that the good folks at MailChimp should address:  improving their API versioning.

AutoChimp 1.00 moved to the brand new 1.3 version of the API which made it much better for gathering and managing merge variables.  MailChimp recommends checking for the existence of existing MailChimp API files with the following code:

if ( !class_exists('MCAPI') )
{
	require_once( str_replace('//','/',dirname(__FILE__).'/') .
                      'MCAPI.class.php');
}

The problem here is that the “MCAPI” name is too generic.  It just means that any class named “MCAPI” qualifies.  So, AutoChimp was first loading the 1.3 version of the API class and then the MailChimp plugin, which was written against version 1.2, was using the 1.3 version of the API.

One of the results of this, I discovered, was that the MailChimp software was now inadvertently writing the username to the API key option field.  Naturally, it’s impossible to retrieve mailing lists when your API key is set to your user name.  That’s why everyone was seeing empty mailing lists.

The fix was to change the name of the MailChimp API class in AutoChimp to:  “MCAPI_13″ and update all affected code.  For example, the check for the API now becomes:

if ( !class_exists( 'MCAPI_13' ) )

Actually, if the class is renamed, there’s no real reason to do this check, but, for consistency, I decided to keep it in place. The good news is, of course:  AutoChimp and the MailChimp widget plugin work nicely together again.

As of today there’s a 100% free trial for Call Me in China.  No need to plunk down a credit card or Paypal info.  All you need is an email address and a China phone number.  Visit here.

Call Me in China version 2.0 was released today!  There are no external feature changes; this release simply signifies a complete rewrite on a more robust and feature-rich platform.  This will ensure us that future features and fixes will happen more quickly.