klkl » Blog Stuff

Wordpress App for iPad

klkl — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:39:11 +0000

So I just downloaded the Wordpress app for my iPad and I’m really impressed with it. I previously thought that it was only for Wordpress hosted sites but that isn’t the case. You can use it if you host the site yourself like I do.

It has all the main things you’d want from an app like this. You can view your existing posts and pages as well as view comments and if you have the stats plugin then you can even view some of them on there too.

In fact to test it out I’m using the app to write this post now. It seems to work well. It there are a couple of things to note.

You’re not going to want to type long posts on your iPad because it’s just not great for that and could cause some serious RSI issues.
The comments section will tell you which post a comment was made about but there’s no link to that post or page which I think is an obvious shortcoming as you might not remember the content to which the comment refers from just the title of the post.

Apart from that though then yeah this seems like quite a useful app to have.

How to Fix: Open Flash Chart, IE & SSL Not Working

klkl — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:00:07 +0000

//Headers Required for SSL in IE
header(”Cache-Control: cache, must-revalidate”);
header(”Pragma: public”);

Normally I don’t bother with making sure my projects are Internet Explorer compliant but the Open Flash Charts are just so pretty, and it’s not that difficult to fix, I felt I had to make sure they displayed correctly.

Easy FAQ, a New Wordpress Plugin for Frequently Asked Questions

klkl — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:58:06 +0000

I’ve created a Wordpress plugin to create and manage lists of frequently asked questions. Currently its a work in progress but you can download the beta if you want a preview. If you want more information or to download a copy then check out the Easy FAQ page above.

Screenshot:

Getting Margin:Auto; To Work In Internet Explorer

klkl — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:21:05 +0000

I’ve been doing a bit of web design in my spare time lately and before long I came across the issue of using margin: auto; in my stylesheet not working in internet explorer. Meeehhhh! I couldn’t be doing with that and given that the best way to attack an unknown problem is to search for knowledge I hit google (not literally of course).

Turns out, that you can force Internet Explorer (and other browsers) to parse your cascading style sheets strictly by using a strict doctype definition. I used the one below for my project;

This was news to me, but welcome, because now I can center my divs in a cross-browser compatible way and move on to other problems like why background images for input elements aren’t loading on https pages (please let me know if you know why).

Oh and if you’re interested in more information http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/ has a useful table of which doctype definitions trigger what behaviour in the popular browsers.

Wordpress Plugin: DBC Backup

klkl — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:20:54 +0000

So after last night’s terrible loss of data I decided something had to be done. My host has already arranged for binary backups to be made but I thought there must be some wordpress plugins that keep a copy of your wordpress tables so I began my search. There were a couple that caught my attention so I installed them and had a play and now I’ve made my choice, DBC Backup.

It can be found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dbc-backup/ I tried three in total one was BackUpWordPress but I had to abandon that because it wouldn’t let me save my backups outside the webroot. Another was WP-DB-Backup which required that I ‘temporarily’ changed the permissions of my
wp-content folder so it could create its own for backups. The hassle of installing that one put me off it. One of them although I don’t remember which had a paypal donation button on all the pages which I didn’t really like either. I think that’s the sort of thing that you put on your website not in a plugin but that’s just my opinion.

Finally I settled on DBC Backup because;

It’s nice and clean
It creates backups at set intervals or manually
It doesn’t handle restoration just the dump
It backs up all the tables in the database not just the wordpress ones
I can configure the backups to be stored outside the webroot

My only issue was that it decided to create its menu using add_menu_page(…) which creates a top-level page. I thought this was unnecessary considering the plugin only has one page to interact with and the wordpress codex recommends that you only add these for plugins which require many screens.

I much preffered the idea of it being a sub-menu of Manage (edit.php) so I decided to edit the plugin. The desired modification takes place in the dbcbackup.php file in the DBC plugin directory. I made the following changes;

On line 80
- Change “if(function_exists(’add_menu_page))”
- To “if(function_exists(’add_submenu_page))”
On line 82
- Change “add_menu_page(xxx)”
- To “add_submenu_page(’edit.php’, xxx)”
- Where xxx represents the existing arguments to the function

The arguments to the function add_submenu_page are the same as for add_menu_page except that there is a new initial argument that specifies which page to add the sub-menu to. I also changed the ‘DB Cron Backup’ value to just ‘Backup’ because that’s all I wanted to see in the sub-menu.

That’s it, I think its a great plugin and now that I’ve got it set up how I like it I’m happy.

eBay to Go

klkl — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:52:56 +0000

A few days ago I wrote a post about unlocking my new Armani phone so it would work on other networks and originally I just put a link to the auction I had going at the time but then I came across ebay to go.

The site is part of eBay and is all about creating flash widgets to display auction and store items on websites and blogs (or anywhere that renders html) and is at http://togo.ebay.com/. It lets you chose from one of their formats then you choose an item or store and then it creates the html you can post on your blog or wherever to show a flash widget of the item(s) like the one below…

I think it looks cool, especially the countdown to the end of the auction, and a lot more enticing than a plain and dull link.

Note: This one shown is eBay’s own sample its not interactive like the regular ones.

Accidental Drop!

klkl — Wed, 28 May 2008 01:17:50 +0000

So last night I was trying to remove some tables from a database and I accidentally dropped the database instead of the tables in phpmyadmin. Argh! I couldn’t believe it and there was no backup

So I shamefully recreated the wordpress tables and used Google’s cache to recreate my posts and comments (that was a lot of effort) and now I think I’ve got most of my posts back except a couple and now I need to sort out some backups!