Category — WordPress

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.

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%';


[Read more →]

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!