12:03 PM
Kamiel Choi
Just experienced a problem on an old Drupal 6 installation I use for www.kindmankind.net. The search stopped working and complained that “you need a keyword of at least 3 chars”. As usual, I googled this sentence, and as usual, the answer popped up. In the file search-module.php, a few chars had to be changed. In case you have Drupal 6 and for no reason your side-wide search suddenly stopped working, here is the patch: diff --git a/modules/search/search.module b/modules/search/search.module index cb6d0f7..fbd4438 100644 --- a/modules/search/search.module +++ b/modules/search/search.module @@ -43,7 +43,7 @@ define('PREG_CLASS_SEARCH_EXCLUDE', '\x{2ce5}-\x{2cff}\x{2d6f}\x{2e00}-\x{3005}\x{3007}-\x{303b}\x{303d}-\x{303f}'. '\x{3099}-\x{309e}\x{30a0}\x{30fb}\x{30fd}\x{30fe}\x{3190}-\x{319f}\x{31c0}-'....
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Beware of Naughty Plugins
I was working on my WordPress empire, and got a bit too careless with updating plugins. I tried out a host of new things for collaborative editing, multilingual WordPress, slideshows, backups, and so on. And then: snap! The back end was inaccessible, even to me, the superadmin. I googled the error message, as you should always do, but to no avail. En passant I found a useful tip on the site of WPML: If you haven’t done yet, generate your Nonces and Salts in wp-config. (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, safely ignore until your site starts acting strangely, then pay a geek a lot of money to fix it Anyway, in my case (a regular...
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Multilingual translations
For some language obsessed people, alright let’s call them language geeks, like myself, it is a slight disappointment that Google Translate’s Web Interface, translate.google.com only translates into one language simultaneously. Sometimes I want to know it all at once (and I do believe that this has benefits for language learning, because learning an expression in different languages creates an extra association, which in turn eases memorizing the words associated). Of course there are websites for that. The easiest is www.nicetranslator.com, which simply uses Google Translate to produce results in some 37 languages. I use it to check a word...
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Wordpress stuck in maintenance mode
Problem: You are using WordPress’ great feature of automatic theme or plugin updates, but the AJAX throbber doesn’t stop moving – your site seems to be stuck. You hit the reload button of your browser and this is what you get: “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” Solution: Open your (S)FTP program and delete the file called “.maintenance” in the root of the WordPress folder. This lets WordPress ignore the failed update, which you can then try again. It might be useful to update plugins one by one, or to check if some of them have become unstable. ...
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Moving Wordpress, the Dirty Way
Sometimes it’s time to say goodbye. To a Web Host for example. But we want to take our beloved WordPress website with us. If the relocation is urgent (for example because the old host charges a ridiculous yearly fee) this can cause quite some stress. Calm down. Here is a short list of how to move any WordPress site in no time. Prepare some coffee and just follow these steps.
Grab your files. I normally use SFTP to copy the files from my old host to my new host. This takes about 5 minutes if your WordPress installation is not too large. Transfer mode “auto” should be fine. In case you have a lot of large plugins installed you could use yet another plugin to backup your files and download them as a zip, that you upload to your new host later. (Of course, if you have shell-access to your...
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Web Stats with Piwik
Yesterday I started using the open source alternative to Google Analytics, Piwik (www.piwik.org) on my WordPress multisite network. Setup is fast and easy. Here are some comments on the setup steps and possible issues: Download the piwik zip (about 6 MB, fast); Upload to your browser. I placed it at {root}/piwik. SSH/SFTP is recommended as there are many thousands of files and it would take a long time using FTP. Make sure transfer mode is set to “binary”, because “ascii” or “auto” would result in messing up line breaks, so that you don’t pass the file integrity check of Piwik; Creating a database is trivial. I used a separate DB that I...
Friday, February 1, 2013
.htaccess rules
… or does it? I found this list of things you can do with .htaccess that I want to share with you. http://devmoose.com/coding/20-htaccess-hacks-every-web-developer-should-know-about Have a look if you like to prevent spammy commenters ban IP addresses protect files or directories with a password redirect to another site without being punished by the big G create custom error pages remove filename extensions from your URL and more ...
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
jQRangeSlider
Some really well made jquery plugin today: jQRangeSlider: fully customizable UI slider elements to select a range of values. Nothing is hard coded, it integrates easily (although I had a little struggle integrating it in WordPress today – don’t ask why), it supports mousewheel actions and more. Kudos to GHusse By the way, if you’re working with the Javascript Date-object: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_obj_date.asp Don’t confuse getDay() and getDate() as I did today because it was used wrongly in the documentation for JQDateRange, triggering a lenghty and useless debugging tract, and eventually the writing of this little note....
Friday, January 25, 2013
E-mail posting to Wordpress.com
Here's the situation: You've managed a Wordpress.com blog and it looks kind of neat, it has a lot of followers, and your heart grew attached to it. But you're too long in this game to ignore the obvious limitations of Wordpress.com, and you have moved to a self-hosted site. But you want to keep the old blog going... This can be done effortlessly using the posting by e-mail function of Wordpress.com. IT not only allows you to send HTML E-mails (provided the markup is correct), but it also accepts a number of shortcodes like so [tag cool, e-mail, posting, geek] [category Wordpress] [delay +2 hours] [more] [geotag on] [publicize on] Check out the full list of possibilities here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/post-by-email/ So, when sending these e-mails with a plugin...
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Graigfind.com
Okay, I'm not going to mimic what dozens of writers have done before and compile a list of the best websites to find decently paid online work. It has been done, and it has been done well and the first five google results will get you were you want to go. It turns out that craigslist.org is very useful for the online workforce, because many job posters don't care where someone is located - they just want to get the job done. So we just do a keyword search on good old craigslist? Almost. We use the API, or rather make use of the work some other fine geek (thanks!) out there did and go to www.craigfind.com I don't know about bandwitdh limitations or how long this is going to be around, so just check it out for yourself. ...
Monday, January 21, 2013
FoxReplace
Did it ever happen that you couldn't stand a word or a phrase? Just don't like the ring of it, or the associations? Would it be nice to just replace all these expressions with things that we experience as more honest? I googled this three minutes ago and, flash! there it was: I found a Firefox plugin today that does just that: FoxReplace. Works like a charm. There are options to auto replace on page load, replace HTML or URLs, and it comes with a mechanism to match any URL like "http://*.example.net/| ". Here are a few words that I am replacing in order to make my news websites digestible:
worker > slave
NRA > gun fanatics
growth > expansion at all costs
capitalism > planetary rape
banker > wanker
the system > the corrupt system
You get the idea. And because...
Friday, January 18, 2013
Top 8 Best Wordpress Tutorial Sites
Okay, this is a subjective thing. I'm a very chaotic occasional wordpress developer and I google everything. Tons of good sites and some junk has turned up in those searches, and an occasional miss. Anyway, here are the sites that helped me most with Wordpress, fresh from my bookmarks, so all the links are pointing to some useful tuturial as a bonus DigWP Six Revisions Makeuseof Pippins Plugins CatsWhoCode.com Wptuts+ How to use Ajax in WordPress Deluxe Blog Tips ...
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
www.imagesplitter.net: Online image splitting
Was searching today for a tool to split an image in many parts, for some web design idea. I know, that is something Photoshop or the Gimp do in a whim. I don't have these programs because my netbook is not powerful enough and its screen to small. I use paint.net and haven't yet figured out how to write macros/scripts or download a plugin for "splitting a photo into many equal parts" (hence my search string). What I found is www.imagesplitter.net that does this exact job well, along with resizing, cropping, and conversion. ...
