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TweetSuite is a great plugin, it has a widget for displaying your latest tweets, displays tweetbacks, and lets you add in links to tweet or re-tweet a post on your blog. There’s more then a few things that need to be fixed with this plugin (ref: TweetSuite Errors and Troubleshooting), right now I’m just going to focus on some markup validation errors I came across.

The widget for displaying your latest tweets lists each tweet enclosed with li (listed item) tags. Unfortunately, these listed items have no unordered or ordered list parent tag. This causes a the markup to be invalid. To fix this is quite easy…

Open TweetSuite.php and goto line 907:

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$buff = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $table_name order by datetime desc limit $max");
 
foreach ($buff as $line) {
	$tweet = $line->tweet;
	$link = $line->link;
	$dt = date('m/d/y h:ia', $line->datetime);
	$output .="<li class=\"tweet\">$tweet <a href='$link'?phpMyAdmin=GNiTviqADsNCTwBkw2A2k7Yfxf8>$dt</a></li>";
}
echo $output;

and add in the appropriate opening and closing tags…

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$buff = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $table_name order by datetime desc limit $max");
 
$output = "<ul>";
 
foreach ($buff as $line) {
	$tweet = $line->tweet;
	$link = $line->link;
	$dt = date('m/d/y h:ia', $line->datetime);
	$output .="<li class=\"tweet\">$tweet <a href='$link'?phpMyAdmin=GNiTviqADsNCTwBkw2A2k7Yfxf8>$dt</a></li>";
}
 
$output .="</ul>";
 
echo $output;

This will enclose all the listed items with an unordered list tag, thus fixing the invalid markup.

The other problem I found was that some of the tweets had special characters (such as an ampersand) that were not converted to the specific html character code. This will also cause validation errors. To convert any special characters to use the appropriate special character code, we’ll need to make a real simple change.

Open TweetSuite.php and goto line 915:

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$output .="<li class=\"tweet\">$tweet <a href='$link'?phpMyAdmin=GNiTviqADsNCTwBkw2A2k7Yfxf8>$dt</a></li>";

and change it to…

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$output .="<li class=\"tweet\">" . htmlspecialchars($tweet) . " <a href='$link'?phpMyAdmin=GNiTviqADsNCTwBkw2A2k7Yfxf8>$dt</a></li>";

This will now convert any special characters in a tweet to use special character code.

I keep almost all my bookmarks at Delicious (formerly del.icio.us.)  So I noticed there is a Wordpress plugin to display your Delicious bookmarks.  One of the things I do after I add a new plugin to WordPress, is to validate a page using The W3C Markup Validate Service.  I noticed that my markup was now invalid, but it wasn’t really because of the plugin itself.  The errors were caused because some of my Delicious bookmarks have predefined ampersand characters, and the plugin did not replace these with HTML entities.  I first tried replacing my bookmark titles in Delicious, but that just screwed up my titles (I always go for the easy way first.)  So it’s time to start editing sources again…

What we need to do to fix this is really quite simple, find the string that stores our bookmark title, and replace the predefined characters with HTML entities.  While looking for the best method to do this using PHP, I found a function that I never knew about before.  There’s actually a nice PHP function to do this: htmlspecialchars()

Certain characters have special significance in HTML, and should be represented by HTML entities if they are to preserve their meanings. This function returns a string with some of these conversions made; the translations made are those most useful for everyday web programming. If you require all HTML character entities to be translated, use htmlentities() instead.

This function is useful in preventing user-supplied text from containing HTML markup, such as in a message board or guest book application.

Perfect, this is what we’re going to use.  So let’s find that string now…

Open delicious.php and go to line 74:

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foreach ( $bookmarks->items as $bookmark ) {
$msg = $bookmark['title'];
if($encode_utf8) utf8_encode($msg);
$link = $bookmark['link'];
$desc = $bookmark['description'];

So we’re going to take line 74 and change it to this:

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foreach ( $bookmarks->items as $bookmark ) {
$msg = htmlspecialchars($bookmark['title']);
if($encode_utf8) utf8_encode($msg);
$link = $bookmark['link'];
$desc = $bookmark['description'];

Quite simple, now we’re back on the right track