Category — Web Dev

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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Have you ever used Wikipedia? I do – all the time.

If you don’t contribute articles, information or services to them in direct proportion to your usage, please consider giving a small donation to help them stay afloat and advertisement free.

Wikipedia has changed the face of collective global information. While it certainly has some flaws, the overall benefit to humanity is quite considerable. Do your part and pitch in where you can!

Well, it was bound to happen one day – I got a drive-by virus.

A friend of mine was moving an older program from one PC to another and didn’t have the disk any longer and asked me if I still had a copy. No luck there – so, I figured I’d search the net to see if you could buy old copies of the program on the cheap. A few Google searches later had me browsing a couple of link-trawler sites that didn’t provide much useful information.

One site – I believe it was oldapps.com, I really can’t be certain – left me with a little present that I won’t soon forget: a brand spanking new copy of Virtumonde (aka Trojan.Vundo.H).

Unfortunately, that present was left with nary a blip on my screen.  Minding my own business, I suddenly got an authentic Windows message stating that my Windows Firewall was no longer active. You know that sinking feeling you get in your gut when something horrible has just happened and you start to slowly comprehend the far reaching ramifications of what you have just witnessed? Yeah…  I wish I could say that I felt that way and immediately disconnected my PC from the net, but no luck. I was a real Noob, and actually thought, “Dang Microsoft, when are you going to straighten out your crapware once and for all?”.

Seriously, I thought Windows Update had pooped the bed or something…  I simply re-enabled the firewall, and everything was fine. No harm done, right? Ahem…

I kept browsing around, and then got another Windows Security Center message saying that my Virus protection was no longer active…

WTF?

NOW you can queue the sinking feeling…

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Apparently my blogging is an evil that shan’t be unleashed upon the world, or so say the folks at Technorati.

Why have my insane ramblings been banned?  I know not why.

I first noticed something was up when I logged in to Technorati to update a few items in my profile.  For some reason my blog claim was gone!?  I looked around to see if I could spot a reason why, but there was nothing there indicating the reason why my little patch of cyberspace had disappeared.

Oh well, no problem, I figured I’d just reclaim my blog, as I’m not one of those evil “Authority” wranglers who does things to specifically increase their ranking, and frankly didn’t care if I had to start afresh with my ranking.  Truly, I don’t care much about my ranking on Technorati, but I do like being listed.

You can imagine my surprise when I was greeted by the above message!   I’VE been flagged!?  Good heavens, why?

Surfing on over the the Blog Quality Guidelines yields a fairly benign list of DO’s and DON’Ts that I believe I am absolutely in compliance with.  My use of WordPress covers most of the technical requirements, so the easily drawn conclusion is that they somehow dislike my content, style or topics?

I don’t over-tag, post spam or over-link.   I don’t post with commercial intent.  I don’t belong to even a single affiliate system.  In short, I don’t do ANYTHING to try to game their damn system.   Yet, I’m banned.

So, I figured it was a simple case of misunderstanding.  As their “Troubleshooting” section advises, I filled out their support contact form and have waited for a response.  A month has gone by and I haven’t heard a thing.  Google can respond within a day to issues, despite being used by 10 bazillion times the number of people.  In fact, they sometimes respond within minutes.  Technorati?  Not within a month.

Well Technorati, you can take your haughty attitude and stick it up your ass, right next to your head.

Consider yourselves BANNED TOO!  Never will a Technorati tag be used on this site again.  HA!  Take that you arrogant bastards!

And, if YOU have a complaint, you can use MY complaint form below.

This is a neat tool if you like to mess around with WordPress Plugins.

Its a Plugin Generator that will generate a customized code skeleton for your newest plugin idea – pretty neat!

The little web app asks you a bunch of questions, like what the plug in should be named, does it require saved settings, etc. and then it spits out a tidy zip file that contains a new plugin.php file along with any other files that are required based upon your answers.   It supports a number of neat options, like making a new DB table, Shortcodes, Filters, Admin Menu Integration, etc.

Of course, the resulting code doesn’t DO very much – its just the structure that you need to make a plugin.  You have to add the actual functionality with your coding wizardry.  Still, this is a nice way to make sure that you’ve covered all your bases when writing a new plugin.  It simply shortcuts the process of Idea -> Reality, which is always welcome in my book.

Check it out!

UPDATE:  Check out the new URL:  http://www.funwithwizards.com/ for the latest version and some other cool tools!

My original post on this topic got a lot of traffic, so it seems that people are interested in this topic.

As a result, I’ve written a new WordPress plugin called Postcasa to help people add a simple Picasa Slideshows inline to their posts.

It is extremely simple to use. All you have to do is put the Picasa RSS link between this simple shortcode, and the plugin does the rest.

Example:

[postcasa]http://MyRSSurl[/postcasa]

easily becomes:

Head on over to the Postcasa homepage to get the code and peruse the options! Adding Picasa slideshows to your posts has never been easier!

Examples of what’s possible:

[postcasa size=small]http://MyRSSurl[/postcasa]

[postcasa width=100 height=100 align=center]http://MyRSSurl[/postcasa]

[postcasa size=small align=right bgcolor=0fb2c3 showcaptions=yes]http://MyRSSurl[/postcasa]