I wasn’t very happy with how images were handled on krypted.com. Which is why I added a new plugin, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-jquery-lightbox to provide more of a lightbox feel when you click on my images. Many of my images are pretty large, so I make them a little smaller on the site so they fit well on the page. Now, when you click on images on the site, it greys the rest of the page and zooms in on the image. I’ve tinkered with a lot of lightbox plugins, but this one makes me happy. You just install and activate and viola, you’re done. It doesn’t get a lot easier than this and…
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Get Your WordPress on with Ubuntu 10
Setting up and installing WordPress is pretty straight forward. That’s not to say it’s not going to take a little work to go from 0 to 60 on a base Linux installation. But I’ll lay the work out for you so as not to be that tricky. Everything we’ll be doing will require elevated privileges, so sudo in front of each command or sudo bash before you get going. First up, install Apache, as you’ll need a web server. I think the base apache2 config is pretty straight forward out-of-the-box: apt-get install apache2 During installation you will be asked to type y to continue. Do that and it will finish…
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WordPress and Spam Bots
There are a number of ways that you can protect your WordPress site from spam bots. The first is to only allow authenticated users to post comments. Doing so can still be a bit unwieldy, but this feature is built into WordPress and so pretty straight forward to use. Some, who deal with large amounts of spam bots then choose to completely disable the commenting feature outright (Settings -> Discussion -> Uncheck Allow people to post comments on new articles), but comments can still be made on existing articles and commentary is one of the best features of WordPress for many. To stop comments on older articles, also disable commenting…
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New https://krypted.com/
I just can’t help myself. Every now and then I get a bug up my butt to go messing around with Krypted.com. In this case, I was tired of looking at some broken elements from the page and the front end of the site in general (just felt like something I might have built in college). I also needed to upgrade the site to the latest and greatest WordPress and some of the plug-ins that I was using were broken in 3. And thus, the lightest version of the site that I think has ever gone up. The posts are all still there, so no change to the content, but…
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Resetting a WordPress Password
Sometimes you can bite yourself a little when you experiment around with things. I installed a security plug-in and the next thing you know I couldn’t log into my own website. Ouch. Not a huge deal as it actually led to experimentation with the MySQL tables for WordPress, which oddly enough, I’ve typically just left well enough alone. But this I figured was gonna’ need to be updated eventually (although I relished the opportunity to get caught up on some stuff in the meantime). So first up, SSH into your box. Then fire up mysql: mysql -u root -p Turns out there’s a wp_users table in there. For my user…
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Integrating WordPress Comments with Facebook
In a constant search for achieving comment nirvana for the sites I manage, I was recently looking into integrating WordPress (and a couple of other CMS engines) with Facebook. The sites are setup to only allow authenticated users to comment and it just seemed like with all of the single-sign on technology out there that it just didn’t have to be so annoying. After installing the OpenID integration it seemed like there still had to be a better way to allow even more people to authentication. How about Facebook? Facebook has done a lot of work on making their API one of the best in the social networking world. The…
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Determining WordPress RSS URLs
RSS feeds are pretty darn useful for a lot of things. And WordPress makes them really, really easy. If you want to insert an rss feed somewhere then according to the type of feed you need, you can just use a pretty repeatable pattern to do so. Basically, following the site you would use /wp-rss.php for rss, /wp-rss2.php for rss2 or /wp-atom.php for Atom feeds. For example, to get a feed of this site in rss you could use the following: https://krypted.com//wp-rss.php Or rss2: https://krypted.com//wp-rss2.php Or rdf: https://krypted.com//wp-rdf.php Or Atom: https://krypted.com//wp-atom.php
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More jQuery Goodness
jQuery is also a great solution for interconnecting various graphical elements and making them do things, like go get you coffee. One such aspect of what you can do is tilt graphics, assign perspective to them and have fluid controller motions. For example, the following script will perform somewhat of a vertical version of coverflow using just JavaScript accessible using jQuery. https://krypted.com//labs/coverflow/demo/vertical.html More examples can be found at: http://dev.jqueryui.com/browser/branches/labs
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Leveraging jQuery for Input Validation
jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library in use at this point, finding its way into something around 20% of the largest websites in the world. One of the main reasons for this is that much of jQuery is meant to allow for working between JavaScript and Ajax. As such it often ends up getting used for graphical interfacing. One interesting use for graphics is to only allow someone to actually enter specific characters into fields. It is common to leverage input validation, but typically this includes validating the data that is submitted from a form; however, using jQuery, there is an AlphaNumeric script that only allows the use of…
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URL Shortening in WordPress
I’m now doing my own URL Shortening using the Pretty Link plugin for WordPress. For example, the following link is a bit long: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/christmas-in-the-heart/id331549170 So using Pretty Link, I tell it to add a link and then it gets shortened down to (or aliased to more like it): https://krypted.com//bob