Blog | Dallas Clark - Web Developer, Facebook Developer, iPhone Developer, iPad Developer

How to Disable Wordpress Plugins

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Monday, January 25th, 2010
Tags: disable, disable wordpress plugin, disable wordpress plugin manually, manually disable wordpress plugin, plugin, wordpress, wordpress plugin disable

I recently used a new Wordpress plugin which crashed my whole site, couldn't do a thing and I definitely couldn't access the admin site to disable the new plugin. So to disable the plugin, you need to access your database.

Using a tool like phpMyAdmin or if you're an experienced user you can access the database directly. Go to the 'wp_options' table, find the row 'active_plugins', you will see something similar to the following, depending on the number and type of plugins you have installed: a:1:{i:0;s:19:"akismet/akismet.php";}

That value represents every active plugin on your site, so to quickly disable all your plugins, copy this string to a safe place for backup (just in case), clear the value completely and save. All your WordPress plugins are now deactivated, now you can reactivate all the plugins except the one that was causing you problems.

Firebug make huge improvements

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Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Tags: bug fixes, bugs, enhancements, firebug, firefox, improvements

The Firebug team have released Firebug 1.5, with many bug fixes and new great features below:-

Mike Radcliffeâ€™s Inspector. Firebug's key feature, now solid as a rock,
Jan â€˜Honzaâ€™ Odvarkoâ€™s expanded and refined the Net panel, with more accurate timings,
Steve Rousseyâ€™s reworking of HTML editing and entity support,
Kevin Deckerâ€™s CSS and Style side panel improvements,
Support for dynamic, graphical breakpoints throughout Firebug.
It works with the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.6

Most importantly, it is released before Firefox 3.6. The biggest problem is upgrading Firefox and finding Firebug no longer works.

How to get Flash working within the Safari Browser on the iPhone

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Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Tags: chrome, firefox, flash, flash runtime, html5, iphone, javascript, open source, safari, tobias schneider, webkit

Tobias Schneider has built an open source Flash runtime written in pure JavaScript and HTML5, quite impressive. Hosted on GitHub for everyone to download and use.

Works well in the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (and, yes, iPhone Safari). Very useful for desktop users as well, if the user doesn't have Flash installed you can call Gordon to run the Flash files instead (great for users who do not have privileges to install Flash on their computer).

Quick and Easy Installation Instructions

Download Gordon
Insert a script tag in the head of your HTML file to the Gordon javascript file
```
<script type="text/javascript" src="../gordon.js"></script>
```
Insert a div or span tag where you would like the Flash file to appear within the body of your HTML file
```
 
<div id="stage"></div>
 
```

Add a JavaScript onload event to insert the flash file within your div or span

<body onload="new Gordon.Movie('flash-file.swf',
{id: 'stage', width: 500, height: 400})">

Enjoy !

Forbidden Issues with Apache2 on Mac Snow Leopard (10.6)

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Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
Tags: apache forbidden, forbidden error message, forbidden message, mac apache forbidden, mac forbidden error, snow leopard, vhost

There's a common issue people are experiencing when they upgrade their Mac to Snow Leopard (10.6) with forbidden issues whilst accessing websites created through Apache's virtual hosts. The problem is simple, the new httpd.conf file in Snow Leopard is a bit more strict, and so it should be, simply follow the steps below to fix the problem.

Assuming you have Apache2 running and you have your vhost file setup and working. Open your vhost file and make the following modifications:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Opens your httpd-vhosts.conf file with vi

   <Directory /path/to/your/website>
      Options FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride All
      Order Allow,Deny
      Allow from all
   </Directory>

Add the block above within your tags, save the file, and restart apache (sudo apachectl restart).

That's it, you simply need to tell Apache to allow access from all. If you want to secure this further you may Allow from your own computer only (127.0.0.1).

Full List of Countries in a CSV File

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Sunday, November 15th, 2009

A full list of countries in a CSV file.

Full Country List (CSV) - Zip Archive

Your site is becoming slow, slower, and slooooowwwwer

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Sunday, November 15th, 2009

Developing websites today requires interaction with users and 'something' to keep users coming back. Creating a website is no longer simply throwing up images, copy, and hope your site achieves everything you desire.

Adobe Flash used to be widely used to achieve a rich user experience with websites, but JavaScript has made a reappearance and taken charge of creating the desired user experiences. Once a website has been launched, you simply can't help it but enhance it - and don't be shamed, it's worth it. But often we add too much way too quickly and everyone may not have a super fast Internet connection like you do.

Whilst writing JavaScript or CSS, it's good practice to keep your files separate, but when a user downloads all your files, it's all the initial server requests for each file that are slowing down the page the most. You could develop all your JavaScript and CSS in two files, but you can easily go over 5000 lines before you know it - which makes it extremely difficult to develop more, test and debug.

Unfortunately, the more you add to a website the slower it becomes to download and view. Fortunately, there are a million methods or probably just 20 (I haven't counted) to enhance the speed of your website.

Firstly, install YSlow from Yahoo, it also requires Firebug. YSlow offers suggestions for improving the page's performance, summarises the page's components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.itâ„¢ and JSLint.

Read through each suggestion YSlow supplies and you will find your site's download and viewing speeds increase with every change. As to speeding up the JavaScript and CSS files, I recommend Minify to combine the multiple CSS or Javascript files, remove unnecessary whitespace and comments, and serve them with gzip encoding and optimal client-side cache headers.

By using Minify, you can reduce the time taken to download your site by over 300% simply reducing the number of files to download.

Delete Thumbs.db files in your shared network folders on a Linux File Server

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Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
Tags: automatically, cron, delete, find, remove, scan, thumbs, thumbs.db

If you have Linux server with shared folders or drives on your network, and you have Microsoft Windows machines accessing these folders, chances are you will have Thumbs.db files all over the shop. Easy to fix with this simple Cron setup.

# crontab -e

First you will need to access your Cron jobs

0 0 * * * find /location/of/your/shared/folder(s)/ -name
 "Thumbs.db" -delete

Insert the above Cron job on one line and make changes wherever necessary. This script will remove the Thumbs.db files every day at midnight.

Save the file (":x") and walla you're done.

Bottle Domains wins injunction against auDA

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Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Tags: accreditation, au, auda, bottle, court, domains, legal, registrar, supreme, terminate

auDA terminated Bottle Domains accreditation to sell .AU domains and Bottle Domains took legal proceedings in the Supreme Court today and won, which could see its reinstatement as early as tomorrow. auDA could have avoided the legal action taken by Bottle Domains, but they are now left with huge legal costs and possibility of paying damages.

Well done Bottle and Nick. This was always going to happen. auDA should have ensured that their actions were proportionate and minimised negative impacts to domain name holders. The chaos and confusion continues. I've said it before, how on earth is this situation a better outcome than auDA maintaining Bottle's accreditation whilst the matter is resolved between them? Bottle may or may not have breached their Accreditation Agreement, but by taking the action they did, auDA have precipitated an expensive legal battle with the domain name owners they sought to protect in the middle. Larry Bloch - CEO NetRegistry

After terminating Bottle Domain's accreditation, auDA issued advice to Bottle Domain's customers to shift to another registrar which is going to cost auDA quite a lot in damages, and any .au domain holders. auDA will most likely have to increase prices to cope with the expenses.

Resources
* BREAKING NEWS: Bottle Domains wins injunction against auDA
* Bottle Domains given the boot by auDA

The Bradz meet their neighbour

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Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
Tags: bradz, hijack, meet, neighbour, steal, wifi

A small comic of the Bradz meeting their neighbour.

Domain	Feb-08	Jan-09	Feb-09	Year-Over-Year Percentage Change
www.google.com	66.47%	72.09%	72.11%	8%
search.yahoo.com	20.60%	17.81%	17.04%	-17%
search.msn.com	6.95%	5.44%	5.56%	-20%
www.ask.com	4.16%	3.31%	3.74%	-10%

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