Entries Tagged 'Internet' ↓

Update: Great news. The Wordpress pretty URLs problem has been fixed by the guys at Netfirms. One of the employees from Netfirms has posted a comment that they have fixed the issue and one of my friends who is on Netfirms confirmed it. Good job guys.

I have been with Netfirms for the past 7 months and i never had a problem with them, but last week i upgraded my Wordpress to 2.1.2 and now my blog is broken, any link on my blog brings me back to the homepage which is really frustating becasue even the comment link doenst work. I started searching for possible solutions when i found too many frustated Netfrims users complaining about the problem and many others suggesting fixes and then they reply back with no success.

The problem as some say is Netfrims has not enabled the Allow Override option for .htaccess rules to be considered so adding a /index.php before the Date and Name structure does the job, even the Netfirms support page says that you should use this

/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

instead of the regular

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

for Date and Name permalink structure. So what you get won’t be exactly the date and name structure but with an extra index.php.

The problem with this is every post and every page and worse every category (every internal link to be exact) on your blog will have the index.php string added in the URL. It would be like http://mydomain.com/blog/index.php/about instead of the pretty http://mydomain.com/blog/about For me the situation was worse, Date and Name structure worked for me earlier but now it doesnt so all backlinks i got for individual posts now redirect to the homepage so the visitor doesnot see what he was expecting to see.

I went through a few Wordpress support topics, some of them very old to be considered as useful anymore. I even found a frustated Netfirms user who went as far as switching to another provider, ofcourse Permalinks was not the only reason for the switch but it was one of the main reasons. She really took off her anger by writing a lot about how bad netfrims was. That was just one persons case but most of us are having a good time with Netfrims arent we?

Now getting to what i have done to get my Date and Name permalinks back, i tried the workaround provided by Joel, who is another frustated Netfrims-Wordpress user. And the result is it didnt work. But i suggest you go try Joel’s workaround and the comments, he is really quick in giving you any kind of feedback if you tried his method to fix your permalinks.

I tried a part of what Joel did and it worked. Here is exactly what i did

Changed the permission for .htaccess file in my wordpress directory or the blog directory to 666 and then applied the Date and Name permalink structure through the Admin panel and then edited my .htaccess to this

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !index.php
RewriteRule (.*) index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

where blog is the directory in which i installed wordpress and finally changed the permission of .htaccess file to 444.

Some more Wordpress specific rules i leant during this operation are

• What ever may be the permalink structure you use, .htaccess content doenot change
• Prepending /index.php to your structure should work irrespective of the contenets of .htaccess
• Change your .htaccess after you apply a new permalink structure because when ever you choose a new structure, wordpress replaces the #WordPress section of the .htaccess file with the default content which is

# BEGIN WordPress<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

• Incase you edit the Wordpress part of the .htaccess file, you should lock it down with 444 permission so that wordpress doesnot replace it with the default contents. (Thanks Joel)

Now finally what exactly my settings look like

Permalink structure set to Date and Name

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Contenets of .htaccess

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !index.php
RewriteRule (.*) index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

PHP 4

Wordpress 2.1.2

.htaccess Enabled in NetFirms Control Panel

Alright Google has been playing prank with us every April 1st since April 2000 when they said they were going to introduce the Google Mentalplex, a new search technology. Its April 1st again and we now have a new feature on GMail, GMail Paper, sounds really really prank like.

You Click, We stack, You Get. Ok so the site says you can order any number of prints 1 or thousand or ten thousand, but what about the cost of printing and mailing them? They have and anser for this too

The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations

What if your e-mail has music files as attachments?

MP3 and WAV files will not be printed

Ok now doesnt that sound funny enough? Who prints ads in 36pt. Helvetica except when its APril 1st and we obviously know that MP3 and WAV files cannot be printed, do they have to answer question? And just image the privacy concerns, anyone on the way could possibly read the e-mail, people were just uneasy when bots were reading their email so that targeted advertising could be possible but now when your email goes to print someone has to put it in the envelope and there is a very good chance that they may get curious sometime or the other.]

Even if it is really true that Google will send us our email via regular mail on request, just image the amount of abuse the service is going to face, there are very few good people in the world who use free services only when it is necessary and apparently you and me are not one of them. The world would be just so curious to see if the mail will really reach them and will end up seding unnecessary requests. And image the amount of paper required to print all this, even if they use recyclabla paper what about the envelopes and stamps? Going by the size of the pacage the woman in the picture is receiving this is just another April fool’s prank from Google.

This April there is more for us, we have another new service from Google, Google Teaspoon (Google TiSP)

Apparently Google TiSP is a high speed internet service which works through your toilet !

Take a look at this diagram and you will know

You should actually go read this one on the Google website, its just hilarious, there is a comparsion chart too so that you can easily choose the plan. This is how the final setup will look like

Haha this was a good one Google, it was really fun to read through the service and its Press Release !

Links

GMail Paper

GMail TiSP

And if you feel like you didnt get enough, you can go have a look at the list of Google pranks at Wikipedia

2000: Google MentalPlex
2002: Pigeon Rank
2004: Google Lunar/Copernicus Center
2005: Google Gulp
2006: Google Romance
2007: Gmail Paper
2007: Google TiSP

Update: Here is the Official announcement that GMail Paper is not a real service but just an April fools’ joke.

Im not a programming freak but programming simple things intrests me. I prefer learning by example rather than getting all the concept, thats how I learnt HTML and CSS, ofcourse CSS and HTML are not programming languages, anyone who has some common sense and who is not afraid of computer code should be able to write CSS and HTML.

But lately I have been thinking of building some web application, you know Im also inspired by the Web 2.0 boom . And where ever I go, I see people praising Ruby on Rails (not really) So I thought of giving it a shot.

I have already installed Ruby on Rails (RoR or just Rails) and tried out some tutorials by Onlamp. Felt it was pretty powerful as they said, it can do a lot of things for you!

What I think is a good installation guide was lacking on the Ruby on Rails website

I thought of writing one the next time I find time so here Im to tell you Im not able to write one now so will do the next time

I dont know how you feel but I really didnt like the Firefox 2 visual updates named as FX2 Visual Update/Default Theme Update by Mozilla and you can see that they have put a lot of effort into this. The only thing I liked is the glow around the feed button in the address bar
I was expecting Mozilla to include the old theme along with Firefox 2.0 so that those who liked the Classic version would switch to it but they didnt. There is not much to worry about because it is Firefox not IE. There are some hacks and a theme which allow your FF 2 to look just like FF 1.5

Initially to change the look of icons to Firefox 1.5 use this theme

Tip: Theme files (and Extensions) can be saved to the harddisk(instead of installing it) by Right clicking on the download link and selecting Save Link As option. The theme can be installed later on by dragging the .jar file into the Add-Ons window of Firefox

Then there are a few more things which you may not like. Im not forcing you, change if you want to

For all the hacks below you need to open about:config in Firefox (Just type about:config in addressbar and press enter)

The first one that irritated me the most was the Close button on every tab and no common Close button for tabs like in 1.5 then the Tab scrolling and the easy-to-read list of all your open tabs was no relief either.

• Common Close

To remove individual close button for each tab and display a common close button like in 1.5

change browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3

• No Tab Scrolling

change browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 (zero)

• Remove Easy-to-view list

Add

/* Disable Container box for "List all Tabs" Button */
.tabs-alltabs-stack {
display: none !important;
}

to userChrome.css

This file sets the display rules for various elements in the Firefox user interface and is located in the sub-folder called chrome in your profile folder. This file does not exist by default, so you need to create it before you can start adding your preferences. There’s actually an example file that exists by default, called userChrome-example.css. Basically, you can just rename that file by removing the -example part

To know more see this Mozilla help page

Update: The inbuilt Import feature works now for the new version of blogger or the blogger beta. Read more here

Ever since I switched to Blogger Beta, I have been having compatibility problems which put me at a do-nothing but wait situation.

Initially I was trapped behind the development cycle of Windows Live Writer because the initial release was not compatible with Blogger Beta but Microsoft was quick in releasing an update to that with a few more cool features added. I felt relieved.

Now again there was this big deadlock! Really big one this time. I was all ready with my new website, Wordpress installed, Template custom modded for some style changes and some scripts installed but the posts from my old blog wont Import! Wordpress Import feature doesnot yet work with Blogger Beta and the great thing with Blogger is that you cant switch back from Beta. What a frustration it was
When I did a simple search for “Import from Blogger Beta” I found there were a lot of other people who were also trapped and were praying for a fix, but there was a solution too which I didnt even care to try because it had too much labour like saving each months posts in a folder and so on :!:. In the middle of the prayer I thought of trying the ‘ Import from RSS’ feature in Wordpress a try. My hope was soon washed away when I found that Blogger didnt have an RSS feed but only an Atom feed or atleast that’s what Firefox detected. I browsed through the code in my Blogger template and found only one XML file which obviously corresponded to the Atom feed. But still i tried imported using the Atom XML file but no use, nothing no posts were imported. I even tried a converter to convert the Atom feed into RSS, it didnt work either.

But then when I opened my blog in IE7, the next generation Internet Explorer from Microsoft, it intelligently detected an Atom feed and an RSS feed tooooo!
I quickly saved the XML file corresponding to the RSS feed and imported it into Wordpress. Bingo! Import Successful! and here Im blogging on my Wordpress blog with all my old posts moved. I felt so happy when I accomplished this task that I recalled the saying

Fruits of Hardship are always Sweet

or may be I made it up
I have separated the Import from Blogger Beta tutorial from this post and put it here. What I did here may not be the only way to Import from Blogger Beta but it works for sure.