I recently switched my domain from danny.gb.net to danny.gg – all was well and good, until I realised my comments were missing.

After some extensive Google-fu, I couldn’t find any proper solutions on migrating a domain and keeping all comments intact.  So I had to hack the Facebook plugin a little.

I’ve always used this plugin to enable Facebook comments.  Seemed like a great idea at the time.  If you’ve switched domain and encountered a similar issue, you’ll find that the problem is caused by having a data-href attribute on the comments box.  This basically means that Facebook uses your URL as a “unique ID” of sorts, so it knows which comments belong to which page.

Logically, you’d think it’d just be the request URI (the bit after the domain), maybe with a setting in the app itself on the developer console.  Nope.

The easiest fix, which is quick and dirty, is to edit the Facebook plugin directly and add the following bit of code:

Of course, you’d need to tweak this a bit specifically for your website.  I used the Unix Timestamp Converter to calculate a timestamp somewhere between the last post on my old domain and the first one on my new domain (in my case, the first of July 2015)

What this basically does is replace the new domain with the old one for any posts published prior to the domain switchover.  Of course, if you’ve had comments since switching your domain, you’ll have to decide whether to use the old comments or the new – there’s unfortunately no way of merging them.

I think I’ll be finding a way to export comments and going back to standard WordPress.

Not only have I recently come back to the whole blogging thing, I also want to start streaming myself playing Starcraft on Twitch.

Well, I’m a master of procrastination so instead of actually streaming, I decided to make a small WordPress plugin which adds a banner to the bottom of your website to let your readers know when you’re online.

And since I’m probably too busy procrastinating instead of streaming, here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Edit: It previously didn’t look this good.  I’m good at making things work, I’m bad at making them pretty.  That’s where Chris came in – I work with Chris, and he does the pretty side of things.  Thanks to his input, I’ve added options for opacity, padding, and also a “glow” colour – making it possible to “pulse” different colours.

WP-Members is a fantastic plugin for securing various areas of your WordPress site for access by registered users.  While extremely versatile, not everything can be controlled through the settings alone.

An often-requested feature is for the plugin to automatically login a user after they have registered.  Unfortunately, this functionality is unavailable in the current version of the plugin.  However, by adding an action to WP-Members’ wpmem_post_register_data tag, it becomes possible to add this extra functionality.  The following can be added to your plugin file, or even to your theme’s functions.php file:

Note: At the time of writing, the current production version of WP-Members is 2.8.2