Category — Blogging

Some interesting ideas in this conglomeration of Social Media thought…

Here’s an easy way to make your own custom login page for WordPress!  Takes 10 min tops, if you know the look you want.

Its a simple idea that makes this administrative task so much easier for an active site. This little WordPress plugin is great!

About the plugin from the Binary Moon page:

BM Custom Login is a plugin I developed to give people an easy way to add a custom WordPress login screen to their WordPress powered blogs. The idea of the plugin is to ease WP upgrading since you will not need to repeatedly make the same changes; this is particularly useful when working with clients. The download contains the plugin and a handy little login screen Photoshop kit to speed up development of your own screens.

Custom login screen that I made in about 10 minutes...

All you have to do is use the Photoshop template to create your custom image.  Then you upload the new image to the appropriate plugin sub-directory.  That’s it!  Presto-change-o, your new login page is now active and upgrade proof.  Simple, elegant, easy.  What more can you ask for?

While I don’t use the plugin for this blog (I’m the only one that logs in here!), I do use it for other WordPress installs that are interactive with clients.  Its a very nice, easy to use addition to make your WP site look that much more refined.

Fantastic job Ben!

You may have noticed the “enhanced” comments section that is now featured on my blog.

It allows for the threading of comments – meaning that you can reply to a SPECIFIC comment, so it keeps the any discussion more organized.  This is using a new standard feature of WordPress 2.7 that utilizes embedded Javascript handling of comment handling.  It does require certain changes to your theme though.  Once you’ve followed the theme change directions, you need to add style handlers to your CSS file to get the most out of the new enhanced display.  It can be overwhelming at first, but it is pretty simple over all.

Check out these two great places to start for examples of the comment styling: Performancing and CDHarrison.   Props to CDHarrison for my wholesale rip of his stylesheet for the comments section here.  I’ll undoubtably play with it to make it my own, but his example is so good it may be a while. 

Leave a comment below to see it in action!

There is a lot of information available on the net for how to use a 301 redirect in a .htaccess file.

But, largely it all tells you how to do the same 4 or 5 things.  What if I needed something different?  SOL, baby.

Recently I worked on migrating an old ASP based website to a new WordPress installation.  Everything went pretty well, except that the old site was pretty darn popular and there are literally thousands of links to it all over the net.  We didn’t want to lose those links and dump them all into an ugly 404 not-found error page, but yet given the fairly sweeping changes that were made, there was no real way to do a one-to-one mapping from the old pages to the new.

As a result, we wanted to take any ASP page call and simply redirect it to the root of the site.  There is an added challenge in that the site actually has multiple domains pointing to it, which added a bit of complexity.  I had tried modrewrite changes, but they didn’t seem to be working very well.  It also seemed a bit heavy handed, when what I really wanted to do was a “simple” redirect.

As you may know, there is a mechanism to do that, and it is simply called Redirect, and it works as follows:

Redirect 301 oldfile newfile


Unfortunately, the syntax only works for explicit matches, meaning that you have to specify EVERY .asp page and explicitly point it to another location. UGH. Not good for a site with well over a hundred pages of content. Even if I was willing to type them all in, since we wanted to redirect everything to the root anyway, adding all of these redirects would be huge waste of processing overhead.

What to do? After reading way too much information online and slogging through the Apache docs for a few hours, I stumbled across RedirectMatch, a great way to add a little regular expression logic to your redirect calls.

Using this simple tool, I was easily able to redirect ANY .asp file to the root.

RedirectMatch 301 (.*).asp /

Simple. Elegant. No modrewrite.

Of course, now that I know what I’m looking for, finding it again would be pretty easy.    Googling 301 redirect regex match gives me the right answer on the second hit.  Go figure!

Unfortunately, that’s actually NOT where I found the info.  That was a much more convoluted process.  A shout out to WebWeaver for introducing me to RedirectMatch!

I’m testing out MS Word 2007 as a Blog Editor.

I previously had used Adobe Contribute, but that was horrible. Maybe Word will be better. My feeling though is that it will create a ton of stylistic crapware in each post.

Here’s hoping not.

This is probably not what someone had in mind for whatever change they were making at Facebook.   Unless of course it was malicious, in which case it probably WAS what they had in mind.

Either way…  OUCH.

Facebook is looking a bit pale today.

When developing web sites, sometimes things change from how they were in development to how they need to be in production, especially when it comes to machine names and IP addresses, etc.  If these values are stored in a database, chances are you’ll need some quick SQL magic to help finalize the migration.

For those of you that just want the info, here you go.  This is a quick and easy way to directly replace one string with another for all rows in a column/field.  DISCLAIMER: If you don’t know what you are doing, you can really screw up your database.  Please take care to do a backup and by all means, if you can’t fix what you break, don’t attempt this.

UPDATE MyDB.MyTable
SET MyDB.MyTable
= REPLACE(MyDB.MyTable.MyField,'OldString','NewString')
WHERE MyDB.MyTable.MyField like '%OldString%';


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