Insane October

Sun, 01 Nov 2009

By far the most insane month of 2009, October included the following activities:

1st week: Trip to the East Coast, beginning with some business in Connecticut.

2nd week: East Coast trip continues with much pleasure in downtown Manhattan.

3rd week: Photo and art excursions with good friend visiting from Portland, OR.

4th week: Marathon book-editing and fine-tuning for Digging into WordPress.

Now that November is here, things remain busy, but I am hoping to get a chance to restore some balance and regain my equilibrium. Of course, the holidays are right around the corner..

Import Feeds to Facebook

Mon, 07 Sep 2009

Seems like a lot of misinformation and confusion out there on how to import and display your feeds on Facebook. Here is what worked for me:

1. In the lower left-hand corner of your Facebook account, click on “Applications” > “Notes”.

2. In the upper mid-right column, click on “Import a blog” in the “Notes Settings” panel.

3. In the “Import an External Blog” panel, enter your feed URL and check the little box.

4. Click the “Start importing” button and then click on “Confirm Import” on the preview page.

That’s all there is to it. Don’t forget to edit your “Notes Privacy” settings to ensure that people can see and comment on your imported feed items.

Once you successfully import your feed(s), they will appear by clicking on the “Notes” button in the left sidebar of your Home page. Also, your timeline or “Wall” will also display the most recent post from each of your feeds as they are published and pulled into Facebook. This makes it easy for your “Friends” to see what you have been up to elsewhere on the Web.

help me in plain english

Mon, 31 Aug 2009

This has got to be the most ironic comment I have ever read:

“hi i dun a stupid noooby mistake and dint think about encrytion i just put a pass in the change pass box and now when i attempt to see my main.php or index.php its sayin password no and error how can i reset back to having no password or were can i edit the bit so that a pass is automattically seen or if not posable how can i make it so i can put in the pass i made at some point so i can login this way? the 3rd is most prefered as this will help me with other projects i am planning as i am a php noob :s plz sum1 hu is clever help me in plain english”

Thanks, “jay” — you made my week with that one.

Redirection After Registration

Tue, 04 Aug 2009

After searching high and low for an unobtrusive method of redirecting users to a custom URL after registering at a WordPress-powered site, I finally resorted to (gasp) hacking the core. I simply could not find a better way of doing it that didn’t require a ton of additional code. I found several ways of redirecting users to various URLs after logging in and out, but absolutely nothing seems to exist on redirecting users to, say, the home page, or better yet, back to the current page after registering as a subscriber (or whatever role the Admin has set for new registrations). Indeed, the only way to direct a user to some page other than the default WordPress “Registration complete. Please check your e-mail.” screen (which looks just like the WP Login page, btw) is to hack the wp-login.php file.

Thus, for the sake of remembering this technique, helping others, and/or “inspiring” someone to find a solution, here’s how to hack WordPress to change the page that users are directed to after they register (via submission of a username and email address). First, open the wp-login.php file and find the line that says, “wp_redirect('wp-login.php?checkemail=registered');”. That’s the key right there. To change the location, replace the part that says, “wp-login.php?checkemail=registered” with the URL to which you would like to direct the newly registered users. You may use full URLs or even relative paths to a specific file. That’s all there is to it. It’s still hacking the core, but not by much ;)

Remember, if you’re going to hack the core, make a note of the change(s) and refer to it before/after each subsequent upgrade.

A 500KB wp_options Table is Too Much

Thu, 09 Jul 2009

After my server crashed, I found myself restoring my site’s WordPress database. While there, I decided to dig around a bit and make sure everything was up to snuff. While looking through the wp_options table, I was surprised to discover that WordPress seems to cache around 400KB of “Planet WordPress” dashboard feeds (among other things). That’s a little extreme if you ask me, so I decided to clean things up and reduce my overall database size by around half a megabyte. Here’s how I did it using my archaic 2.3 version of WordPress and phpMyAdmin.

Step One: Take Some Notes

Before doing anything, copy and paste a few text snippets from your dashboard feeds. This will enable you to easily locate the oversize options fields for removal in Step Three. Note: permalinks from the various feed entries make for good search candidates.

Step Two: Kill the Feed

Place this in your theme’s functions.php file (props to Michael Shadle for the code):

function remove_dashboard_feeds() {
remove_action(‘admin_head’, ‘index_js’);
}
add_action(‘admin_head’, ‘remove_dashboard_feeds’, 1);

Step Three: Clean up Your wp_options Table

Once that is done, you may clean up your database by doing a quick search for some of the text snippets (permalinks work great) that you copied from the dashboard feeds in Step One. The field(s) that you find should be named something like “rss_123abc…”, where the “123abc…” is some long, apparently random alphanumeric string. Once you have disabled the feed via functions.php, feel free to reduce the size of your database by deleting the field(s) used to store data for the dashboard feed.

Doing this saved me an extra ~400KB of space, which is much-needed as the size of my Perishable Press database continues to grow.