artiss.blog

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  • WordPress Plugins and File Fetching

    A number of my recent plugins have provided a facility to read files from other sites. However, errors were being reported by some users and so I attempted a change in one such plugin to address this.

    Unfortunately, that didn’t quite work as I intended. Kind of. In this case, I swapped to using a different file routine, but one which now only works with PHP 5. So I’ve now published a newer version of the same plugin using another new method, and one that should now be compatible with PHP 4.

    The problem here is that there are security implications with reading files externally, so there is a way for hosts to turn this ability off.

    My new plugin, I suspect, doesn’t actually resolve this and there isn’t a great amount I can do about this – if your host has decided to prevent you from reading external files then, well, you’re stuffed. My host doesn’t, which might explain why I didn’t recognise the problem at first.

    The file system I’ve used now, however, should allow you to specify local file names – at least that way files hosted by yourself should be readable. I’ve not tested it though, so feel free to provide feedback.

    I’m now going to upgrade my other plugins with the same code process.

  • Nothing to see here

    A while ago, work provided me with a mobile phone holder for my car. It’s chunky, clunky and naff looking but it works a treat – it holds both my fat N95 (including, at a push, in landscape mode) and thin MP3 player.

    Anyway, I was on the look out for something a bit, erm, better looking. And maybe even better to use. As it’s a Friday I therefore popped out to a nearby mobile phone shop.

    Like most mobile phone shops these days, it was trying to be “trendy”. Lots of blank space, with a smattering of phones and accessories around the walls. This reduced their range of stock and, in a lot of case, accessories were hanging behind the counter. Both of the shop workers were busy and there was a long queue waiting to speak to them, so I decided to just peruse.

    But, as hard as I tried, I could not find a single car holder. Not, for that matter, any other car accessory, other than in-car chargers. Lots of trendy phone “socks”, laptops and even broadband routers, but no holders or Bluetooth accessories intended for the car. Both of which is weird considering recent laws about mobile phone use in the car – you’d have thought such items were even more essential.

    And where was I? The Carphone Warehouse.

    Oh.

  • Windows Hibernate Button

    If you’re using the Hibernate function (and I’m talking XP here, not sure if this applies to Vista as well) one of the things desperately missing is a matching button in the “Turn Off Computer” menu. You click on it and get options for everything else, but not to hibernate.

    Well, not very well known, is that if you press the Shift key whilst on this menu the Standby option will magically change to Hibernate (this is assuming you have the hibernate option activated!).

    OR you can add the missing button to the menu. Here’s the code to do this…

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsSystem]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsSystemShutdown]
"ShowHibernateButton"=dword:00000001

    And to turn it off again…

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsSystem]

    Both should be saved as .reg extensions and executed – they need to be run only once. The first script adds a new entry into the registry and the second script removes it again.

    Alternatively, download the scripts here from.

  • Change logs for WordPress plugins

    The standard readme.txt for WordPress plugins has been updated to allow for changelogs. This is excellent news and has happened at just the right time – I’m currently updating my readme.txt files to reflect that my plugins are compatible with WordPress 2.8!

    Therefore, and slowly for now, I’m updating all my plugin readme.txt files. The appropriate pages for each plugin on this site, however, will change only if/when a new release of a plugin is released.

  • Further WordPress upgrade issues

    Since upgrading to 2.8 I’ve come across another issue. However, I’ve seen numerous people reporting the same problem after upgrades to previous WordPress versions, so I don’t think this is 2.8 specific.

    Anyway, I couldn’t automatically update any of my plugins. I was getting an error along the lines of…

    Could not copy file: /public_html/wp-content/upgrade/.....

    This was also the error that stopped me from automatically updating WordPress as well. Anyway, the fix was simple – I used my FTP application to change the permissions on the upgrade folder. This seemed to cure it.