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Posted July 22nd, 2011, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology| WordPress

One of clients recently wrote me about some strange formatting appearing on a WordPress site.  Example of the strange HTML follows:

<p id="[object]">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed et nunc vitae nibh semper luctus.</p>
<p id="[object]">Sed et nunc vitae nibh semper luctus. Cras gravida semper magna, sit amet varius purus dictum non. Cras eget dolor est. Vestibulum dui ligula, adipiscing eget vestibulum dignissim, congue sed turpis.</p>

<div id="[object]" class="mceTemp mceIEcenter"><dl id="attachment_1234" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width: 510px;"><dt class="wp-caption-dt"><a href="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/example.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-1234" title="etc" src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/example.jpg" alt="Suspendisse erat tortor, auctor sit amet dapibus a, sodales non massa. Integer viverra ornare purus non sodales." width="500" height="281" /></a></dt><dd class="wp-caption-dd">Suspendisse erat tortor, auctor sit amet dapibus a, sodales non massa. Integer viverra ornare purus non sodales.</dd></dl></div>
<p id="[object]">

<p id="[object]"> </p>
<p id="[object]"> </p>

To summarize the oddities:

  • What normally would be <p class=”wp-caption-text”> becomes <dd class=”wp-caption-dd”>
  • image’s link tag is surrounded by <dt class=”wp-caption-dt”>
  • ““ becomes <dl id=”attachment_1234″>
  • the whole thing gets wrapped in a <div id=”[object]“>
  • and paragraph tags become <p id=”[object]“>

I suspect this has to do with TinyMCE‘s built-in on-the-fly code re-writing going haywire somehow. Incidentally, the person who was having these issues was running a pretty old version: WordPress 2.6.3

Anyone know what this is all about?  Leave a comment and together we’ll fix the world (or at least help others with a very frustrating bug)


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Posted July 19th, 2011, in: Technology| Videos

I have enjoyed discovering this band. I have several of their tracks.  I like them.  I think they’re from South Africa, but I’m not sure.

 

Here’s another clip… It shows some of the trickery involved with this type of music, but I still love this stuff, even if it’s dependent on pre-recorded material and lip-syncing to make it fun in concert.


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Posted June 3rd, 2011, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| Semantic Web| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)

The ‘Semantic Web’ is not nearly as hot of a topic as it was a few years ago, but if you remember, some of the efforts being made back in the old days (2008?) had to do with embedding semantic identifiers into regular old HTML.  The two examples that come to mind are RDFa and Microformats.  I haven’t heard a lot of buzz about embedded ‘linked data’ in HTML lately, but I heard today that a new project, called schema.org has been launched to enable developers to add markup to sites which will help search services glean meaning from markup.  Apparently, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are all on board with this project.

I guess we should call this Keywords 2.0

Anyway, they have a whole taxonomy of ‘things’ laid out.  Check out “The Type Hierarchy” page.  A great start.

I guess this means that a lot of SEO people are gonna start getting work again. It’ll be interesting to me to see if people start actually putting this stuff into their CMSs.  I suspect not.  I suspect that the kinds of companies that have such rich data that they can just rebuild the hooks they use as their apps render HTML will already be benefitting enough in organic search that they wont find a need to actually clutter up their code with this stuff.  I mean I find it very unlikely that a site like Disney’s would get out-ranked by some spammer because the spammer used these newer HTML attributes.

Then again, the fact that the major players are on board with this makes me wonder if there isn’t a reason that’s profitable to search companies to finally start getting rid of all the garbage from SERPs.  Touch-screen finger fatigue?  Even so, it’s all the damn spammers in eastern Europe that’ll have the resources to recode everything, at least in the near future.

Above all, I’m glad to see any attempt at making information more granular.  And deep down, I still want the universal distributed database we were all so excited about back in web2.0  when the semantic web seemed like it was on the horizon, before facebook and the mobile app-o-sphere took over.

What do we call this current era?  The API-o-sphere?  The Walled-garden-o-sphere?  Maybe we should just call it Facebook.

Intrigued and disappointed at the same time.

 


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Posted May 6th, 2011, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Evil Robots| Technology

OK.  If you’re reading this you’re probably pretty frustrated already so let me offer my condolences and say that you’re probably really close to being out of the woods now that you’re here.  I just successfully removed this little bugger from an Windows XP machine, and it only took about 15 minutes.

I found several sites explaining how to manually remove this malware by editing the windows registry but I intend to make the instructions a little more clear so you can do this with a little more confidence.

And keep in mind, if you’re not dealing with XP, my instructions might not work exactly.  But you can probably apply my clarification to the popular instructions to whatever iteration of those instructions you need to work with.

Here are the popular instructions (in this case from removeit.info), but please keep reading before trying to follow them.

Remove AntiMalware GO files and folders:
%Temp%\[random]\[random].exe

Remove AntiMalware GO registry entries:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\[random]
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run “[random].exe”
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\PhishingFilter “Enabled” = “0?
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings “ProxyOverride” = “”

Clarifications and Precautions:

  1. You can screw things up by making a mistake editing your registry, but you can minimize the risk by making a backup of the registry first.  Google it.  Sorry, I can’t make a tutorial on this, partly because I’m writing this on a Mac.
  2. There are no files that actually say “[random]“.  What they say is something like “vhrdtmn1d” …In other words, in each of these steps, you’re looking for a registry entry or file that has a random string of characters.

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Posted February 15th, 2011, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology| WordPress

If you’re seeing this and not liking it: Maximum upload file size: 2MB

…the trick is generally to either upload a php.ini file with ammendments to the server’s default php settings, or in the case of some hosting providers, iPage included, you need to find a special settings page where you can edit your php.ini file.

Where is it?  I certainly couldn’t find it.  But after calling iPage, the secret is revealed.  Here’s how you get to iPage’s php.ini editor:

iPage  Customer Login (takes you to control panel…)>>Control Panel>>Scripting and Add-Ons>>CGI and Scripted Language Support>>PHP Scripting

You will need to find certain lines and replace their default values.

post_max_size =
upload_max_filesize =
max_execution_time =
memory_limit =

the values I use are these:

post_max_size = 30M

upload_max_filesize = 100M

max_execution_time = 900

memory_limit = 100M


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Posted February 12th, 2011, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology| WordPress

I thought I was losing my mind.  About half the time, when making adjustment to a stylesheet, the site would not update.  This was causing development work that should take about ten times as long.  Not good.

UPDATE: I got a comment from someone named ‘Whit’ which reads:

I have also had this problem. Though you guys might like a clearer answer as I got from iPage. They told me the following, “We use Varnish Caching technology. Hence, your website may not display the changes immediately.”

Very annoying. Either way, the simplest answer is to add no cache code to your .htaccess file like below:

Header set Cache-Control: “private, pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0?
Header set Expires: 0
Header set Pragma: no-cache

Thanks, Whit!!!  [now back to my story]

After finding this, I finally called iPage. After debating with their “tech support” person about whether or not this could be their fault (which it clearly is), the person finally found that he could turn off some sort of caching that iPage has running by default on shared hosting accounts.  Eureka!  Unfortunately, it took 20 minutes to get thru to support.  More unfortunately, I had to plea and argue with the person for fifteen minutes before I could inspire him to discover that indeed, the caching is happening.  And most unfortunately of all, before I finally convinced the person to to look for the solution, the person tried to convince me that I should be willing to put up with it taking “ten minutes” or more  for a CSS update to take affect.  His words, “ten minutes.”  Seriously?  Ten minutes for a CSS tweak to take effect?  I can’t believe someone would say such a thing.  We’re talking about changes that take five seconds to make.  We’re talking about the workflow that virtually every web developer relies on: upload a change to the server, view the change in a browser, rinse repeat.  Ugh!

Oh, and the kid also said that this caching that he turned off on iPage’s end might take up to 24 hours to actually turn off… WTF!

So while I’m at it let me just say this about iPage also:  FTP times out a lot with them.  Very annoying, but I can deal with that.

I don’t think the money  you save by going with iPage (a few dollars a month) rather than another hosting provider ( bluehost or hostgator, for instance) is worth it.

I’m angry at them for

  1. Having support staff that are completely ignorant to the daily reality of all developers
  2. Having caching turned on by default and not making this known to their support people
  3. Having slow servers that drop or stall ftp connections constantly

OK.  I’m done now.  Back to work.


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Posted February 10th, 2011, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology| WordPress

Mailpress is rad, but apparently they need to make an update to their plugin.

I use it and love it but with wordpress 3.05, I’ve found that I’m not able to approve comments.  When I click on the ‘approve’ link for a comment, the comment turns white for a second, like it has become ‘approved’ but suddenly goes red right after.  Weird bug.

Whenever you encounter weird bugs like these, it’s a good idea to make sure all your plugins are up to date and then, if you still have a problem, turn your plugins off one at a time to see if one of them is causing the problem.


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Posted October 19th, 2010, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| Viral Marketing

The maximum number of friend requests you can send per day, as far as I can tell, is 100.  I may be slightly off.  Here’s the thing:

When you run out of friend-requests, it doesn’t tell you!   So you can end up spending an hour (or hours) adding people without realizing you are accomplishing nothing!  The way to tell is you refresh that user’s page, and it doesn’t say ‘friendship requested,’ or you just send the request twice and the second time, it will say the same thing it did the first time: “Do you want to make friends?” instead of “you already requested this person’s friendship” (or whatever the specific wording is, you get the point.)

Diclaimer:  I may be blocked or something rather than just hitting a preset speed-bump. I did sent a lot of requests.  I’ll know tonight at either Midnight somewhere in the US or in the UK.

Recently I found an awesome user group on Last.FM that had showcased one of my tracks as the “sound of the year…”

So I figured I’d better add all of the members as friends.

I know that back in the day, MySpace had a policy that allowed somewhere around 400 actions per day, that is to say, if you sent 400 friend requests, you wouldn’t be able to message anyone or anything…

LastFM doesn’t seem to have much trouble with unwanted spam.  I have a few friends on Last.fm that spam me, but it’s all good spam (decent or great music to check out).

I’m basing my number, 100 on the fact that I got through two, fifty-user pages before the requests stopped working.

UPDATE: Two days later

After Midnight PST,  was able to send 100 more friend requests.

But after Midnight the following night, I was only able to send around before they stopped working.  I added a thread on Last.FM’s community/support forum here.

Maybe someone will shed some light on this.  Search engine results for this problem are horrible.


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Posted September 30th, 2010, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| WordPress

(Thanks for the tip-off, Kim Flournoy!) MailPress seemed to be causing an error whenever someone would try to post a comment to my site.  The comments were actually getting through, but the commentor would see the mess of PHP errors below.

Upon deactivating MailPress, submitting a comment would result in a blank white screen (called a white screen of death in some parts).  I deactivated AJAX Comments (just a hunch) and the blank screen was fixed, and I was able to re-activate MailPress without any problems.  To summarize,

The problem is AJAX Comments, not MailPress, or at least the two don’t play nice together.  I choose MailPress as the one to keep and AC as the one to blame.

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to ssl://mail.my-website.com:0 (Failed to parse address "mail.my-website.com") in /my-website/path/public_html/etc/wp-content/plugins/mailpress/mp-includes/Swiftmailer/classes/Swift/Transport/StreamBuffer.php on line 233

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /my-website/path/public_html/etc/wp-content/plugins/mailpress/mp-includes/Swiftmailer/classes/Swift/Transport/StreamBuffer.php:233) in /my-website/path/public_html/etc/wp-comments-post.php on line 95

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /my-website/path/public_html/etc/wp-content/plugins/mailpress/mp-includes/Swiftmailer/classes/Swift/Transport/StreamBuffer.php:233) in /my-website/path/public_html/etc/wp-comments-post.php on line 96

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /my-website/path/public_html/etc/wp-content/plugins/mailpress/mp-includes/Swiftmailer/classes/Swift/Transport/StreamBuffer.php:233) in /my-website/path/public_html/etc/wp-comments-post.php on line 97

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /my-website/path/public_html/etc/wp-content/plugins/mailpress/mp-includes/Swiftmailer/classes/Swift/Transport/StreamBuffer.php:233) in /my-website/path/public_html/etc/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 890


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