Ellis Web

Mint Popular Posts Release 1.0

I just posted the files for release 1.0 of the Mint Popular Posts plugin.

I am calling it 1.0 (instead of 0.97 which had been the next sequential release number) since this is adding some nice, shiny functionality (options panel in admin to control caching and external DB, widget-capable) and since the initial release was over a year and a half ago and it is about time that it comes out of “beta”. (And since the version numbers are basically arbitrary, it doesn’t really matter anyways).

Special thanks for Ernie Oporto for his contributions of the bulk of the widget and options code.

Posted in Code, WP Plugins | 1 Comment »

Resetting a Lost MySQL Password

I sometimes use a Debian Ubuntu VMWare build to do some LAMP development. Due to my inexperience administering anything having to do with Linux, while trying to reset the root password, I accidentally put in some bad information into the password field (I forgot to use the password() function to generate encrypted password text), and ended up being locked out of the DB. After wading through a dozen different pages giving advice on how to reset a lost MySQL root password, I ended up finding a solution that worked for me:

1. In terminal window with root access (in my case, using the sudo su command)
2. # killall mysqld
3. # mysqld –skip-grant-tables –user=root &
4. Open new terminal window with root access
5. # mysql (I am now logged into mysql as root)
6. mysql> use mysql
7. mysql> update user set password = password(”NEWPASSWORD”) where user=”root”;
8. mysql> flush privileges;
9. mysql> exit;
10. # killall mysqld
11. # /etc/init.d/mysql start
    

Definitely a relief to be able to successfully log back in again (and a good thing that this happened to me on my private test box and not on the public testing server).

Posted in Misc | No Comments »

New Photo Blog - Israel Photos

For the past three and a half years, my wife and I have been using a pocket-sized point-and-shoot digital camera to try and capture our future memories. Although it has and continues to serve us well, we are very often frustrated with the amount of time it takes to capture a picture, from start to finish. While it is fine for taking shots of landscapes, when taking pictures of little kids, we often have less than a second in which to get what we want on film before the moment is lost (and more often than not, we are not able to capture it in time). So using some gift money we just purchased our new camera, a Nikon D40 (I wanted to get a DSLR, and according to reviews that I read, it is a very goof "beginner" camera for this class of cameras. So far it has lived up to expectations). It takes awesome, crisp pictures, and works fast (instant start-up, up to 2.5 pictures per second).

Of course, with such a fun new toy at my disposal, I can’t help but try out my hand at some amateur photography. And since I just can’t help but do so whenever I inaugurate a new hobby or area of interest, I have created a new blog to share my work: Israel Photos (RSS). The common theme with all of the pictures displayed is that all are taken in Israel (where I live). Beyond that, the subject matter will be quite varied.

I researched some of the different options for photo blogs, and in the end settled on using Wordpress with the YAPB (Yet Another PhotoBlog) plugin. I am used to setting up and customizing Wordpress blogs, and I like how the plugin leverages the strengths of Wordpress while adding the functionality needed to modify the default operation of the software as required. And since this is running off of Wordpress, I could integrate other WP plugins down the line, if necessary. Although I will probably change some of the colors down the line, I am right now using the Grain theme, a theme specifically designed to work with YAPB. Setup for all of these components (including some minor customization of the theme) was very straightforward.

Please let me know what you think - I would appreciate the feedback. (An easy way to see thumbnails of all photos posted so far is through the mosaic page. My favorites to date: Rotting Pomegranate, Purple Flower with Dew and Old Woman Swinging).

Posted in Announcements, Links | 3 Comments »

Forgot your Zooomr password?

Good luck finding a way to get it back? Seriously, head over to zooomr.com and try to find a way to retrieve or reset a password (if you find it, I will be humbled and thankful).

I was going to go and try to use your site. I know that I created an account in the past and I don’t want to create another one. There is no excuse nowadays to leave off basic functions like this. A good way to lose potential users and publicity.

Lesson to be learned: when designing web sites, it is not cool to leave off common user interface elements, or move them around on your own initiative to places on the page where a user does not expect them to be. ("But I thought that the title banner would look good in the footer!"). Even if you have really neat Ajax and mobile features, and your site is internationalized and socialized to the hilt, you will still just be left with with frustrated (or no) users.

(Read Defensive Design for Web or Jakob Neilsen if you want some more advice in this area. Also worth reading about what you can learn about typical user behavior from eye-tracking studies.)

Posted in Design | 1 Comment »

Custom DateTime Format Strings for .Net

I have had to look up on DateTime formatting on MSDN so many times, I have lost track. So I am putting the links and some of the key information here for my own future reference.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Code, c# | No Comments »

Trying out Windows Live Writer

In honor of its officially coming out of beta, I decided to download and try out Windows Live Writer.

Some of the features that attracted me are the ability to use one interface to publish on a number of different blogs at the same time, through a desktop client, without having to log in and out of different admin sites (I currently write or contribute to 4-5 different WordPress blogs with varying degrees of frequency, and the ability to post from one place makes it much easier to add content to different sites).

I was also curious to see how well Microsoft has gotten one of their products to interact with software of non-MS origin (and with PHP open source systems like Wordpress). Compared with others, Microsoft very often seems to have a hard time opening up their products to others (just look at the new Live email vs. Gmail: Gmail lets you forward your email anywhere, and retrieve your email through any program using POP or IMAP, while Live email only lets you forward to an email address that is part of another Microsoft domain, like msn.com, hotmail.com, but other than that gives no options to extracting your email automatically outside of the Microsoft servers).

Here are some things worth noting so far:

Download and Setup: Easy and painless. Install went quickly. I entered the url for my homepage, my username and password. The software automatically determined that I was using WordPress, downloaded theme information and set itself up. From when I clicked download, I was ready to write to my blog using Live Writer in less than 10 minutes.

Web Preview: A very handy feature, allowing you to preview your post within your current blog theme. It actually did a very decent job of rendering the post the way it should (judging by Firefox). (This is in Web Preview mode, giving you a read-only snapshot of how your page would look. The Web Layout view mode however did not work so well for me. From what I gather, this is supposed to let you compose your post inside your blog theme. In my case, it put the title of my post inside the header, making it impossible to see what I was typing.

The Basic Stuff: Hyperlinks, pictures, trackbacks, basic editing functions - all of it works well, and is pretty easy to figure out. Though this is not something that will make a product shine in the market (even spell check is common nowadays, both in Firefox and Wordpress), lack of these features (or a bad implementation) will kill a product from the get-go. (One Wordpress caveat: although WLW includes native support for different tagging systems, it does not yet allow you to post tags to Wordpress 2.3+. There are workarounds for this.)

Plugins: Although Wordpress features a very powerful plugin system, it is most often used to improve the output of your blog, not the UI for entering posts. WLW plugins on the other hand are all centered on helping you get different types of data easily into your posts. I see this (as well as the automatic connectivity to different blogging systems and accounts) as the feature that will make this product really stand out. So far I have installed two different plugins (automatically replacing text formatting methods that I had previously had to code into my template, css and html):

Insert Code:

public static string HelloWorld() {
  string s = "Hello World";
  return s.ToUpper();
}

(Note: I first tried using the Insert Source Code Snippet plugin, but this was buggy and added a whole bunch of superfluous brackets. Afterwards I looked some more and found the Insert Code plugin by shahineo - easy to use and as you can see, produces some nice output).

Insert LTR Text:

זה יעזור לי הרבה לכתוב בעברית בבלוג שלי

All things considered, I am pretty satisfied with my first experience using Windows Live Writer. If you are reading this, it means that the post was also successfully posted to my blog through the interface (yay!). I think that I will be making it my primary blogging platform over the next couple of months. Now, if only I could use this to post to Newsvine…

Posted in Web, wordpress | No Comments »