klkl

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.

<?php

//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.

Gritter is a really good extension of jQuery’s functionality that is used to display information boxes to users. If you use firefox’s extension Firebug though or you look in your server logs then you may see that it’s causing 404 errors.

Whilst annoying the errors aren’t fatal. My applications have worked for long enough without solving the problem but it IS annoying and finally today I decided to do something about it. I found the solution on this blog and Duck Ranger gives much more sensible reasons for fixing the problem.

The error is caused by a Gritter’s CSS file creating a GET request to solve an IE bug but the request is for the current (CSS) directory which is forbidden.

Read the rest of this entry »

While playing with my /etc/hosts file for testing a new server setup I needed to flush my DNS cache. As ever, terminal came to my aid.

dscacheutil -flushcache

Now all is well in the world of DNS.

The last couple of days I’ve been thinking about setting up a local copy of my websites on my laptop so that I can develop them before I make them live.

Last night I enabled PHP on the apache server built into Mac OSX on my new laptop and installed MySQL on it. I also set up some bash aliases to rsync commands so that I could synchronise the websites from the server to the laptop and back again.

Now that I had local copies of the sites that are synchronised it was time to turn my attention to synchronising the databases between the server and my local machine. I could of configured the server’s MySQL installation to allow remote connections, however, I did not want to do this for security reasons. I decided that I would connect to the MySQL server over SSH by forwarding a port on my local machine to a remote port on the server.

First I needed to create an SSH tunnel using the following command

ssh -fNg -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 server.host.name Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I’ve had a bother with the Mac firewall asking me if I want it to accept incomming network connections every time I open a particular application.

The appropriate setting can be found under:

System Preferences : Personal > Security > Firewall

I have mine configured to “Set access for specific services and applications” which normally asks me if I want to allow an application to accept incoming connections the first time I run it and that’s normally the end of it. The trouble comes when you try and update certain applications using Software Update. I’m not exactly sure what causes the problem but for some reason with specific applications the firewall then proceeds to ask you, each time, if you would like it to accept incoming network connections. This you can imagine is superlatively tedious.

The answer though is to just delete the application from you applications folder and reinstall it. The first time you open the freshly installed application it will ask the question and then bug you no more. Then all you have to worry about is not updating it via software update again.

To Test POP3

telnet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 110 (xxx = mailserver)
+OK Hello there.
user USERNAME
+OK Password required.
pass PASSWORD
+OK logged in.
stat
+OK (Information about your mail)
quit
+OK Bye-bye.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working on some sites locally on my Mac but by default the files are stored in a directory in the individuals user account called Sites and the address you’ve got to type into your browser is http://localhost/~username/etc… this annoyed me because I didn’t want to have to type the tilde character in the address and also that I had to have the files showing in a subdirectories of my user. I couldn’t be doing with it, I wanted to have addresses like ‘http://localhost/subdomain/’ and the solution of course is to use symbolic links.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been meaning to try Joomla for some time and a friend mentioning it last night was the impetus for me to give it a go. I downloaded the latest stable version just now and decided to give it a go.

I was very impressed by the installation script and how it guides you through the installation process with handy guidance, however, I feel it falls down in one area.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been doing some work involving an application that needs to query databases on separate servers however one of the servers will only accept mysql connections locally so the way round it is to forward connections from a port on one system to a port on a remote system. That way the connection to the remote database will appear as though it originated locally and be accepted.

To set up a tunneled connection you issue the following command on any client:

ssh -fNg -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 myuser@remotehost.com

The first command tells ssh to log in to remotehost.com as myuser, go into the background (-f) and not execute any remote command (-N), and set up port-forwarding (-L localport:localhost:remoteport ). In this case, we forward port 3307 on localhost to port 3306 on remotehost.com.