CSS is one of the most useful tools I have in my toolbox as a Web Developer. Having a CSS Toolbox containing good CSS Classes that you repeatedly use is quite helpful for us XHTML / web-standards / best-practices developers. Check out 10 of my favorite CSS classes.
The story behind this plugin is sorta wack, but in a good way :). While doing tons of security research on permissions, authorization, access, etc.. for the Password Protection plugin (still being worked on), I needed to have unheard of debugging capabilities while working on the plugin on the various websites, webhosts, and test servers that I use to test in different environments. So I hacked together a bunch of php code that helped me debug, actually I pretty much went overkill and tried to get as much debugging info as programmatically possible, and it ended up being so much code that I took it out of my Password Protection code and made it its own plugin.
This is really useful for me because I work with dozens of different database servers. The first thing I do is run this command and paste it into the servers /etc/my.cnf file. That way I will always know the original value and it just makes life much easier.
$ mysql -NBe 'SHOW VARIABLES' |sed 's,\t,^=,'|column -ts^|tr "\n" '@'|eval $(echo "sed '" "s,@\("{a..z}"\),\n\n\1,;" "'")|tr '@' "\n"|sed 's,^,# ,g'
Find and Replace tool in Adobe DreamWeaver is useful of course, but you aren't using a fraction of the power until you use REGEX.
To prepare for several upcoming articles on AskApache that are focused on optimizing Servers and Sites from a server admin level, here is an article to introduce the main tools that we will be using. These tools are used to optimize CPU time for each process using nice and renice, and other tools like ionice are used to optimize the Disk IO, or Disk speed / Disk traffic for each process. Then you can make sure your mysqld and httpd processes are always fast and prioritized.
Enumerating Permissions can be Annoying
Don’t ask me how because I won’t tell you, but on one of the hosts I was testing on that did not allow direct access I was able to get the Apache server running as dhapache to erroneously write a file into my users blog directory. This is a big security no-no and I now have my .htaccess file written into the blog directory where it should go, but instead of my php script’s user having write access to the file so I can modify it, its owned by dhapache! Because the file is owned by dhapache I shouldn’t even be allowed to know it exists, but there it is. So the next step was to try and take ownership of the .htaccess file so that I could modify it. I tried and tried but was unsuccessful, I couldn’t modify it so that was another dead end. Actually it took me awhile to figure out how to remove the file from my directory. Being that it was owned by dhapache I couldn’t delete or modify it using my php process or even through ftp/ssh! Sysadmins regularly run find commands that search the servers for any files owned by dhapache that should not be there as this is a big red flag that someone has found a way to manipulate dhapache which could potentially lead to modifying dhapache-owned server config files, which sometimes is all it takes to hack your website and server.. Luckily I was able to delete it by basically running the hack again to overwrite the file.
The bottom line for this article is that I want to make WordPress as fast, secure, and easy to install, run, and manage because I am using it more and more for client production sites, I will work for days in order to solve an issue so that I never have to spend time on that issue again. Time is money in this industry and that is ultimately (time) what there is to gain by tweaking WordPress.
Note: I spent no time on readability, this is primarily a read the code and figure it out article.. This is for advanced users looking for a reference or discussion and for those of you looking to advance. Feedback would be great if you make it that far..
Here's the problem I was having while working on a custom theme for a client. Certain pages, posts, tag pages, archive pages, and custom pages either had the sidebar, or did not have the sidebar. The main content div #ContentW had a 72% width when the sidebar was present, otherwise it was 96%. The problem was that I dislike having to do things manually when they can be automated through code. What I was having to do was manually add/remove page-specific classes to the css file to reflect whether the sidebar was present on that page or not.
Ultimate Redirect Cheatsheet for multiple programming languages. Redirecting Users with Javascript redirect, meta refresh redirect, and php redirect, also htaccess methods, python, coldfusion, asp, perl, etc.
Grab the latest php.ini developmental version and discover new or previously hidden php runtime configuration settings... ahead of everyone else!
PoshCSS.com has links to nice and new CSS Articles. Don't worry, they aren't snobs. ;)
The proponents of this scheme have given it names such as "trusted computing" and "palladium". We call it "treacherous computing", because the effect is to make your computer obey companies instead of you. This was implemented in 2007 as part of Windows Vista; we expect Apple to do something similar. In this scheme, it is the manufacturer that keeps the secret code, but the FBI would have little trouble getting it.
PHP's fsockopen function lets you open an Internet or Unix domain socket connection for connecting to a resource, and is one of the most powerful functions available in the php language.
Using FastCGI on DreamHost and .htaccess
Oh ya lets get it on! short but sweet
I am now about 1 week away from publishing the much-anticipated 4.7 update to the AskApache Password Protection WordPress plugin. It's an upgrade I've been working on for almost 2 years (off and on)! I have been using the new version for quite some time now, and have made a lot of improvements to it, and finally I decided enough users have suffered with the old version. I am very excited for this release, it fixes all known bugs in the older versions, and brings some heavy-duty improvements to all facets of this plugin.. not to mention way better security modules (Lots more COOKIE use) based on code I use with clients.
I used to have a problem of controlling flash elements on my sites.. On one site we have 6 different flash flv movies that are all the same size and are in the same position on the page. But only 1 is displayed at a time based on what the user wants to watch. So the selected flash movie needs to have the highest stacking order/zIndex.
How I was able to preload many flash flv and swf files on one of my clients sites that has a lot of online video and relatively small traffic. Their site visitors would usually watch 3-10 videos per visit and so to make the videos load almost instantly on every page I came up with a way to preload the top 10 .flv files and the swf flv player files as soon as the visitor successfully started watching the 1st video. Of course I also setup .htaccess caching on the server so that once they downloaded the files into their cache they would never request them from the server again. I was having fun with this so its pretty funky and uses some really cool combinations of javascript, swf preloader from xml, css classes to help automate it all..