Posts filed under Website

S40 Support for CA Certificate Import

Someone requested S40 support for the CA certificate Import 'Wizard'. This 'tool' is being used over 50 times a day, so I guess that it works :-). Knowing that it is being used, I added S40 support (theoretically that is, since I don't have such a device). Just select the type of device you have (S60 or S40 based). Depending on the selection the extension, and MIME type will be changed. The S40 devices expect a different MIME type (application/vnd.wap.hashed-certificate). So I added this MIME type to my webserver and associated it with .cer files. More information on this page. Note, that you need to upload a WPKI certificate instead of a normal one. I'm still figuring out what the exact difference is, so I might do a conversion.... UPDATE: import on a S40 doesn't work, so don't bother.
Posted on July 14, 2007 and filed under Symbian, Website.

Wordpress Search Engine Not Working

I installed Ultimate Tag Warrior recently, because I liked the tag clouds I saw on other blogs. Unfortunately,  the plugin seems to cripple the search capabilities on the website. If the plugin is activated, you can't find any posts with a search query. Disabling the plugin make things work again. So, I want to humbly apologize to all those people trying to find important stuff on this blog :-)
Posted on April 28, 2007 and filed under Annoying, Website, WordPress.

Webserver Upgrade

100Mbps is soooooo 1993, and fully insufficient in copying lot's of Linux images :wink: over my internal network. So, today I upgraded to Gigabit. Even with the purchased el-cheapo hardware (Intel Pro NIC's, and a 3COM 10/100/1000 switch) the speed increase is noticeable (70-80Mbps versus 300-350Mbps). Too bad that my DSL connection doesn't go that fast :-(
Posted on April 5, 2007 and filed under Hardware, Website, WordPress.

Blog Spam (part deux)

The last couple of weeks my blog was under some sort of spam attack. I got about 50 to 80 spam comments a day. Thankfully, Askimet intercepted 99% of those messages. But Askimet shouldn't be getting these messages, because my captcha plugin should keep them out... well, it didn't. Yesterday, I found Wordpress Hashcash. A plugin which uses crypto to keep automated spammers away. So far it's working. UPDATE: ever since I installed WP-Hashcash it has been awfully quiet on the spamming front :-) Never mind... Thankfully Askimet is catching them all (50 per day at this moment)
Posted on April 5, 2007 and filed under Annoying, Website, WordPress.

Blog Spam

I've got this blog running for a couple of months now. Even though not many comments are left behind (I don't care), the spammers definitely found my blog. I receive over 30 spam comments a day now. Thanks to the Askimet Anti-spam plugin for Wordpress, the spam entries are quarantined.

Blog Spam

Every spam entry looks the same, and all the links the f*ckers try to leave behind won't work (I must admin that I try some of the links they are leaving behind). So I ask you; What's the point in spamming useless links? If a link won't work, you won't even try a (spammed) link in the future, because it's a waist of time. Same goes for e-mail spam. I receive lots of spam in my inbox, but what is the use in advertising viagra, if the shop is offline.I guess that there are just too many people with too much spare time on there hands. But not enough to create, or host a decent online drugstore :-)
Posted on March 31, 2007 and filed under Annoying, Website, WordPress.

Wordpress 2.1.2 Update

I upgraded my version of Wordpress to version 2.1.2. This went the usual 'problems'. First of all I 'forgot' to make a recent backup. Second, I used Transmit (an OSX FTP Client) to upload the new pages. Transmit has the possibility to overwrite files. No worries (I thought), I just renamed the files I editted, do I could rename them back when I had uploaded the new files. It seems that I didn't read the warning very well. When I overwrote the directories, Transmit removed them first and uploaded the new files afterwards. This meant that all my uploads, and customized files were gone..... aaaaargh. Fortunatelly, I had a backup from two weeks ago, so I could get the old files. This reminds me to make a decent backup before doing anything about my Wordpress installation in the future....
Posted on March 22, 2007 and filed under Annoying, Personal, Website, WordPress.

WP Movie Review Ratings

I added a new plugin to Wordpress v2.1. It's called WP Movie Review Ratings. It enables you to place movie reviews on you Wordpress blog. At this time it's fairly empty, but I'll try to migrate my older existing movie database to this one, so it'll be filled soon (I hope). B.t.w. many thanks to the developer Paul Goscicki in assisting me in getting it to work. Seemed that I had a small misconfiguration in my PHP config.
Posted on January 30, 2007 and filed under Website, WordPress.

Upgraded to Wordpress v2.1

The highly anticipated version Wordpress v2.1 has been released today. This meant upgrading my older version (v2.05). The upgrading itself was quite easy (if you follow the upgrade instructions to the letter). I also upgraded my hacked TinyMCE Wordpress Editor with an 'official' upgrade.... Let the posting begin Update: 'unhacked' it again because of erratic behaviour of the editor, and manipulated the original included TinyMCE editor (see the end of my earlier post regarding this).
Posted on January 23, 2007 and filed under Website, WordPress.

Pixelpost stress

Pixelpost is a PHP based image gallery for showing photos. It includes displaying EXIF info, and (according to the website) is VERY EASY to install. Since I'm not a PHP guru (yet), and needed to have a (customizable, and not too overpowered) photo gallery for my photos. Downloaded the 'install kit' from the website, and followed the instructions. When I installed Wordpress on my Windows server, I ran into some problems with permissions on directories. Especially on directories which were used to upload stuff to. Armed with that piece of knowledge, it shouldn't be too difficult to get it up and running (I thought). The installation itself was a piece of cake. The Pixelpost admin tool has an overview (General Info) which said that all settings were made correctly, and therefor should work. All directories were in place and were writable. The MySQL database was also set up correctly, because the initial tables were created by the PixelPost install script, and the config table was filled with the correct settings. Time to upload my first test image.... Nothing happend. No matter what I tried, no images were uploaded to the server. Still the General Info page of the Pixelpost admin tool said that everything was OK:
Configured Imagepath: ../images/ Image Directory: OK - Can we write to the directory? YES. CHMOD: 0777 Thumbnails Directory: OK - Can we write to the directory? YES. CHMOD: 0777 Language Directory: OK Addons Directory: OK Includes Directory: OK Templates Directory: OK
Even after setting the security for the entire PixelPost directory structure to allow the Internet User Account (IUSR_MACHINENAME) full control over the structure, nothing happend. Well, that was another 3 hours well spent..... Off to find another PHP gallery.
Posted on November 12, 2006 and filed under Website.

Expanding TinyMCE for WordPress

The default TinyMCE rich editor for WordPress lacks a lot of functionality (IMO). I wanted to use other fonts, and be able to change font sizes in posts. At first I started to look for an alternative rich text editor for WordPress, but I didn't find any usefull alternatives. Most of them are suitable for older WordPress versions, and are not compatible with the latest WordPress releases. While I was developing my former blog in Coldfusion, I used FCKEditor. This editor had the possibility to add extra functionality by editting the source files. So I started digging through the sources of the WordPress files, and found the file where the TinyMCE configuration was stored. Although the changes are not that hard, it would be nice to have a more user friendly interface for changing the capabilities of the rich text editor. The following paragraphs explain the changes I made to add fonts and font sizes to the editor. The file for displaying the editor is called "tiny_mce_gzip.php" (located in wp-includes/js/tinymce/). Open this file in a texteditor (BBEdit/Notepad/UltraEdit), or a HTML editor (I used Macromedia Dreamweaver). Find the string "mce_buttons" (without the quotes). It's located near the end of the file. The line that holds the string also defines the buttons / options for the TinyMCE editor. The default line is:
$mce_buttons = apply_filters('mce_buttons', array('bold', 'italic', 'strikethrough', 'separator', 'bullist', 'numlist', 'outdent', 'indent', 'separator', 'justifyleft', 'justifycenter', 'justifyright' ,'separator', 'link', 'unlink', 'image', 'wordpress', 'separator', 'undo', 'redo', 'code', 'wphelp'));
This line can be editted, to add extra functionality. The problem is that the file doesn't mention all possible options, so I had to do some reseach on the TinyMCE editor itself. On the website are some examples showing the capabilities of the editor. The TinyMCE website has an overview of the available buttons / options which can be used with the editor. Note that not all options may work with WordPress. I added "fontselect", "fontsizeselect", and "forecolor" to the editor;
$mce_buttons = apply_filters('mce_buttons', array('bold', 'italic', 'strikethrough', 'fontselect', 'fontsizeselect', 'forecolor', 'separator', 'bullist', 'numlist', 'outdent', 'indent', 'separator', 'justifyleft', 'justifycenter', 'justifyright' ,'separator', 'link', 'unlink', 'image', 'wordpress', 'separator', 'undo', 'redo', 'code', 'wphelp'));
After editting the file, save it and launch the WordPress admin page and start creating posts with the newly added functionality. UPDATE: it seems that the added functionality removes the TinyMCE functions if you use Safari as a browser :( (this is probably a "feature"). No problemo if you use FireFox UPDATE 2: This won't work with Wordpress 2.1 :(. You have to do the following if you want extra functionality in Wordpress 2.1:
  • Open the tiny_mce_config.php (located in wp-includes/js/tinymce/).
  • Find the line that starts with $mce_buttons_2 = apply_filters (around line 34)
  • Add extra functions on that line Example: $mce_buttons_2 = apply_filters('mce_buttons_2', array('formatselect', 'fontselect', 'fontsizeselect', 'styleselect', 'separator', 'forecolor', 'backcolor'));
This adds the ability to change fonts and use colors in your blogs. There is also a third line you can use to add other stuff, but you got to figure that one out for yourself.
Posted on October 3, 2006 and filed under Website, WordPress.