Northern Irish Blogs.com

Some of you may have noticed the above message appearing where my recent posts should have been for the last week or two.  It turns out the “Post-Plugin Library missing” message can be fixed by downloading the latest copy of the Post-Plugin Library (shocking, I know). I can’t remember if I upgraded Wordpress or the Recent Posts plugin or both, but I’m guessing it was an upgrade to the Recent Post plugin that caused the problem. The new version requires a “Post-Plugin library” (written by the same guy). I found the link on my Wordpress Admin Plugins page in the description of the Recent Posts plugin as part of a message telling me the plugin: Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed Oops. Apparently I didn’t have any...

I need a quick bitch. I love PHP. It’s everywhere. All my sites are written in it. My CMS is written in it. My blog engines, Wordpress and b2evolution, are written in it. It’s free. It runs on any platform. Hosts all support it. With PHP 5 they’ve even done a lot of work on PHP4’s main downfall - lack of OOP support. One thing really pisses me off though - it’s totally inconsistent.  Consider these two functions: strstr — Find first occurrence of a string in_array — Checks if a value exists in an array Take a close look. See the signatures? string strstr ( string $haystack , mixed $needle [, bool $before_needle ] ) bool in_array ( mixed $needle , array $haystack [, bool $strict ] ) In in_array the first parameter is what you’re looking...

I haven’t come across anything truly groundbreaking in Firefox 3, possibly because I’ve become accustomed to much of the feature set through the Betas and RCs, but there are one or two improvements that are quite useful (as well as a couple of regressions unfortunately). Wee Niggles First the bad. When you view Page Info from the context menu it doesn’t give a link to the CSS file in the Media tab any more. I was sure it was there in 2 and a quick google confirmed this. This really sucks - I can’t see why they’ve taken it out. Secondly, when I was looking through the options to try and return the aforementioned CSS links, I discovered Firefox had decided it was going to automatically download any future updates when they were discovered (I promptly switched...

Mozilla, the makers of popular web browser Firefox want to break the record for the most software downloads in one day. Download Day 2008 will coincide with the launch of Firefox3 (codename “Gran Paradiso”). You can try-out Release candidate by downloading from the Mozilla website.  However I suggest using the  Firefox 3 RC1 Portable Edition, as it won’t overwrite your existing Firefox install and your Add-ons won’t get messed up. I’ve had a go with the latest beta release and I have to say it’s all rather impressive. The new look is quite nice but depends on which Operating System, as it’s designed to blend in with the OS interface. The password reminder is no longer an annoying pop-up, it now appears across the top of a page much like the...

I recently moved this site to a new host because of ongoing problems with my previous hosts. Thanks to some intermittent database errors I’d decided it would be prudent to do my first backup in some time at the start of last week. By the end of that week they’d deleted my account, so I suppose I should be grateful their database server was so f**ked. Nevertheless, the move caused a few issues when my new hosts told me the complete backup I uploaded to them was corrupt. I can only assume (because some backups were corrupt and others weren’t) that it was due either to encrypting the archives using AES in Winzip or decrypting them in 7zip. Anyway, that meant manually creating the accounts, setting up the mail accounts and subdomains in them, extracting the root folders...

I upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.5 today, and installed a new copy of Wordpress on a subdomain too. Both these actions were carried out using cPanel & Fantastico. When I logged into the backend of the new subdomain there were no images - including no buttons on the rich-text editor (TinyMCE) and no Wordpress logo on the login screen.  I later noticed there were also background images missing on the public part of the new blog.  When I right clicked “View background image” on the missing image, it took me to an HTTP 403 (Forbidden) meaning there was a permissions problem. The strange thing was the problem didn’t occur in the nerd. backend. And the solution…? In this instance it was because I’d enabled hotlink protection in my server to stop other...

I was getting the above error message when I recently tried to set up and try out Windows Live Writer to let me publish to a blog from my desktop without logging into the Admin section of the site. I was felled at the first hurdle when, after entering my b2evolution blog’s details, I was presented with a message informing me that: The server reported an error with the following URL: http://www.blog-domain.com/b2evo-path/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php 403 Forbidden Thinking it might be a problem with b2evolution, I tried with a Wordpress blog. A different message appeared, both on this blog and another:......

Finally I can have events from my Outlook calendar in work sync with my Thunderbird calendar (enabled using the Lightning plugin) automatically. It’s wonderful… or at least it nearly is. How It Works I read some time back of a plugin that allows you to sync your Thunderbird/Lightning calendar (or Sunbird if you prefer to use Mozilla’s calendar in a standalone application) with your Google calendar, which I’m sure is useful for some people, but not me. I’ve never used a Google calendar really. However that memory proved useful when I heard that a Google have released a utility to allow you to sync your Google calendar with your Outlook calendar. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this…......

I have my Acer Aspire laptop dual booting Ubuntu Linux with Windows XP but, despite being sympathetic to Linux and interested in learning more about it, I don’t use Ubuntu very often.  One major reason for this was the amount of time it takes to boot up.  Over time I noticed an error message and looking at it began to suspect that this error was partially responsible for the long load times. There are differences between boot sector and its backup … [sequences of numbers]… Not automatically fixing this According to this forum thread, it seems like this error may have been let loose when I changed the grub configuration to make the OS names a bit more user-friendly and have the system stop booting into Ubuntu by default (the girlfriend isn’t converted yet and...

I’ve just upgraded another blog from b2Evolution 1.10 to 2.4, which means reworking the skin I developed to work with the new “Skins 2.0″ framework. It also means that instead of hacking html into my _main.php file, I’m going to use the customisable ‘widgets’ to create my sidebars. This is in the Blog Settings -> Widgets panel. It seems to work pretty well. I copied a default skin (the asevo one) to a directory called proto, installed the copied skin and began changing it. I decided I wanted to keep the 3-column layout from my old 1.10 skin and luckily there is already a default container called Sidebar and another called Sidebar 2. The problem was my skin didn’t use Sidebar 2. It was easily fixed, I created a new <div> and used the...

I’ve just upgraded a Wordpress blog to the latest version 2.3.2 and when I went to write a new post I realised all my categories had disappeared. They were still in the database but the list to the right of where you type your posts was empty. Adding new comments was giving a 404 error in the middle of the page. The issue was reminiscent of another one I had (and solved) upgrading to 2.2 - the errors were actually 403 errors, but redirecting to 404 error pages because there was no 403 error page defined (i.e. the 404 was happening when the server looked for the 403 page). I noticed a file called error_log (no extension) in the wp-admin directory and had a look. Apparently some database tables (’wp_term_taxonomy’ and ‘.wp_terms’) were missing. After reading...

Shareaza, a popular file-sharing application that allows users to access Gnutella, Gnutella 2, ED2K (eDonkey) and BitTorrent networks has been hijacked by a company aiming to spread malware throughout the internet. The Shareaza.com site had been down since 22nd October 2007, however since 20th December, the domain has been hosting a scam site. Straight away you can tell something fishy is going on by the copyright notice on Shareaza.com: © 1999-2008 Discordia Ltd. All rights reserved. See our Privacy Policy & License Agreement. Users should be aware that Shareaza was always an open-source community project and so no company should have copyright to the web site and certainly “all rights reserved” looks out of place. Worst of all, the bastards changed the flag on the...

Inspired by Tech Chick (aka Gabrielle Atticus), I’ve decided to start listing some interesting if well-hidden sites on the internet so this will be the first in a series of nerd. links. This one resolves a long-standing issue with Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client, ie the way it forwards messages.  Whereas Outlook, Outlook Express etc. forward some headers (to, from, subject, date etc) all you ever get in Thunderbird is “Sendername said:”.  It’s pretty pathetic really, especially the fact that there’s no date. Luckily someone has made an add-on with the descriptive but not exactly ‘roll-off-the-tongue’ name “Change quote and reply format” to fix this problem. Now the quote header is much more useful: —- Original message...