Code
Code
Submitted by johnh on February 23, 2007 - 03:39.
You look after websites, you end up wasting days after days of your life cleaning up baby poop. In this case, we were trying to add Feedburner to a pre-existing Wordpress 2 blog. Obviously that couldn't possibly work. Suggestion was to upgrade to the current codebase of WP2.0. Of course you know what happens next -- I spend yet more hours I will never reclaim picking through code which was never tested on anything (see passim), and which of course completely falls apart as soon as you try running it on -- say -- FastCGI. Which is the only way you'll ever get the bloody thing to serve more than a couple of pages an hour if you get any traffic. Onwards to the meat of today's advice:
Hey, dipshits: plugins [1] go in subdirectories.
On what crack-smoking planet do you release a codebase (2.0.9, since you asked) which allows you to activate a plugin in that subdirectory while simultaneously requiring it to be in its parent directory when I call the options page?
And throw errors about redeclaring classes if I try to fix it, and disable/enable plugins on your whim depending on where they're currently stored?
Here's a present:
You read that, and I'll spend another three cocking hours unbreaking the plugins you just screwed. Which, for the record, was all of them.
[1] Incidentally, how are they plugins when you need to perform major surgery on the core app to make them work in the way you claim they do? That's rather like referring to a kidney transplant as 'jewellery'.
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Code
Submitted by johnh on February 7, 2007 - 15:13.
I'd just like to say that Wordpress 2.1 is a shockingly poor piece of bug-ridden horse crap, whose file upload routine is spectacularly inept, and in whose admin section's option-editing fails with a 403 unless it has a .htaccess file in the right place which they don't even include in the download.
For chewing up an entire day of my life which I will never see again, you will all burn in hell.
And would it kill you to at least differentiate your own fucking website between the four intra-incompatible releases of your product? Ninja-level Google-fu is not an alternative to having a Support link on Wordpress.org which isn't entirely bloody useless.
On a related note if anyone, anywhere, can point me towards something I can bolt onto this POS which can let someone upload an image, create a thumbnail, and then post it in a blog entry, then I can stop wasting my time and money trying to be psychic. Update: The installer failed, for reasons unexplained, to give the ID columns in the posts and posts_meta tables the required 'auto_increment' attribute, which completely banjaxed a bunch of things, requiring quite a lot of manual MySQL surgery to repair.
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Code
Submitted by johnh on January 17, 2007 - 18:47.
Apologies if this site looked a little odd today. The server this site runs on is extremely busy, and I've recently been taking matters in hand. One thing which needed to happen today was bumping the IP address here up by one.
Since you asked, I've started the process of consolidating all the Drupal sites on this server - there are about 18 if memory serves - into one installation and 18 Drupal multisite configuration files. That allows me to use the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) to store compiled copies of every Drupal source file in RAM, which gives me quite the speed bump.
To top that off, I've also set up the first six or seven of the domains here to dodge Apache altogether and run instead off a brutally-fast lightweight HTTP server from Russia called Nginx. And punted PHP over to a small collection of FastCGI processes sharing the aforementioned APC cache. And then installed PHP 5, in order that Drupal can finally take advantage of the mysqli_* functions available to it and get yet more speed out of versions of MySQL 4.1 and higher.
Eventually I'll remove Apache entirely, but for now I've saved so much memory that we can run both web servers and still have space left over from the mere 1Gb available to us, without hitting the swap file.
Right now it's all about getting more raw speed without dropping any more money. There's some description about how to make Drupal play nice with an unfamiliar web server here.
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Code | Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on October 31, 2006 - 17:06.
For those of you who are as frustrated as I am at the relatively slow pace of progress at Vovo, an update of sorts.
Last week I unilaterally decided to postpone the collection of more indices to electoral registers until after the site is launched -- which sounds remarkably counterintuitive since that was supposed to be how I'm resolving addresses to constituencies.
Simon McGarr and I spoke at some length at BarCamp Ireland last month about a different approach: perhaps, we thought, the famed map hack plus the OSI's DigiBoundary would get us very close very quickly?
Sadly not without dropping at least seven thousand euro. Because obviously it's a frickin' state secret which places are in which constituencies. So that idea died about two weeks back.
Anyway. I've since had another idea, and it's working. I spent some of Friday night writing code which will take another couple of weeks to finish doing its thing. So far, this new process has added another half a million people to my home-served private prototype.
If (as herself says), God willing and the creek don't rise, and nothing else goes wrong, there's a good chance I'll have a full national address-to-TD lookup working in four weeks.
That'll be the hard bit done, and we can get to sorting the writing to them part and launch the bugger -- and all in under a year from the first promise. Barely under a year, I grant you, but still.
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Code | CSS
Submitted by johnh on July 16, 2006 - 22:16.
Killes posts on the drupal-dev list, revealing stats of downloads made from Drupal.org in June.
I scrolled down the list to see if the theme I released six weeks ago had made the list, and couldn't find it.
Then I realised I was looking too far down. Fern, apparently, is the 4th most popular Drupal theme, and the 15th most popular contributed download of all.
Rock.. :)
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Code | General | Ireland
Submitted by johnh on January 24, 2006 - 12:10.
I have found a way of geocoding street addresses for Ireland.
There's a quick demo to be had after the jump. You really want to try this. It's the cleverest thing I've done in months :)
Update, 18 months later: This has been rendered somewhat moot by Yahoo! Maps becoming the first outfit to -- very belatedly -- actually cover Ireland properly in its API.
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Code | Ireland
Submitted by johnh on December 11, 2005 - 18:43.
It bugs me that nobody at all will provide us with a decent mapping site which we can script with APIs, though Yahoo Maps is, apparently, likely to include us at last fairly soon.
But in the meantime, I've discovered that Google Maps UK can do a couple of neat tricks. Choose 'Read more' to find out what they are.
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Code
Submitted by johnh on June 14, 2005 - 12:43.
I've just posted an explanation of how I did the navigation block here to this Drupal handbook page.
Enjoy.
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