JBot Mania

After some inexplicable code showed up on the ski club web site that I work on and then the seemingly catastrophic event of having all of the pages on that site being mysteriously turned into posts and basically disappearing, I was alerted that I was the victim of an exploit of WordPress called “Magic Shell”. And with that I say a hearty “Fuck You” to all Russian developers.

After making a few tweaks, I went into full-bore attack mode and upgraded from WordPress 2.2 to 2.5. I don’t know how I missed versions 2.3 and 2.4, but oh well. I’m sure I missed nothing.

I think most people will agree that the newest version is seriously sweet and although it doesn’t fix ever annoyance completely, it makes a valiant effort. Built-in image uploading and inserting (closer to what Blogger offers) and a swank new design, make this upgrade, well, pretty exciting.

One new feature is something called the “Media Library”. I had zero idea what this was all about until I found this great video on a fantastic site called “Wordpress training: Free WordPress training videos and blog tutorials“. So freaking cool. Go check it out… now!

So, I had to do a Find and Replace on about 140 files (139 to be exact). I decided to scheck out Notepad++’s Find & Replace arsenal. Reason #1 - I already have a copy of it. Reason #2 - it’s free.

As suspected, it does offer you the ability to search within multiple files and to drill down through subfolders. Fantastic! So, one might suspect that you could then, oh, I don’t know, go and make replacements in all of those wonderful search results. Well, you “can” (I’m pretty sure the quotes are appropriate here) but you have to OPEN every one of those files to do it. When testing this last night, I figured “Oh, I must be missing something about how to open all of these. I’ll figure it out tomorrow when I am awake.” I was, of course, not missing anything—a nice change of pace for me.

Turns out there is no easy way to open all of those search results except by clicking on each one. Frankly, I have better things to do.

So I went and searched their forum and someone suggested doing the following, which I did and which I will share with you.

• Download AgentRansack (SACK!!)
• Do your search
• Select all of the files in that result set and do a handy little right-click and “Edit with Notepad++” (Notepad++ can actually handle this—at least it did my 139 files)
• Then do your normal Find & Replace within Notepad++ with all of your open files

You can also “Save All” and “Close All” through Notepad++, which is nice in this case.

One caveat to my situation—I was doing multiple Finds and Replaces but they were all within the same files, so I’m not sure what it would be like if I had to do this two-step process every time.

Bottom line—they both run good searches and both tools are free. Thus, you can strap on a not-so-bulky Sack (Ransack, that is) to Notepad++ and make it your search bitch.

Good luck.

Tech sexy #1

ClearContext
An inbox manager that you can use with a GTD method or not. I had the intention of using it with GTD, but find I get by just fine without the Next Action concept, which I find does not always allay my stress in a multi-step process.

ALOT, if not all, of what this program does can be replicated by slapping Outlook around in some not too difficult ways, but I just don’t have the time and I am attracted by shiny colors.

Top features that I enjoy:

• Instantaneously converting an email into a task (which you can also do by dragging an email to the tasks tab - but this program INCLUDES the attachments in those messages while Outlook would not)
• Filing an email with the click of a button
• Highlighting related items for a message such as “Have I scheduled a follow-up for this?”, “Have I made a task for this?”

And one that I have yet to use but would love to:

• Defer - schedule an email to reappear as new in your inbox at a later date. Fuck yeah.

Tech sexy #2

Case statements in SQL

Here are some articles explaining its greatness:

• The Power of SQL CASE Statements - mentions the ROLLUP concept too. Juicy!
• Using CASE Expressions

Oh case, where have you been all my life?

I don’t know if you’ve run into this, but it drives me CRAZY when IE’s Autocomplete stores entries I have made in error and keeps popping them up for forms that I regularly use. Through no fault of the Autocomplete (am I really saying that?), this makes the process longer than just simply entering the information directly.

So, I decided to look up ways to manhandle IE’s Autocomplete and low and behold, I found it!

The clipping below describes exactly what to do and it couldn’t be easier.

Special thanks to the article which led me to this source.

clipped from support.microsoft.com

To clear individual items from the list of form or password suggestions, click the item in the list of suggestions for that field and then press DELETE.

…that I am just now discovering.

The plugin is called Stylish. A description from the download site is:

Stylish allows easy management of user styles. User styles empower your browsing experience by letting you fix ugly sites, customize the look of your browser or mail client, or just have fun.

What does this mean? Well, one example where you might want to use this is with FTP sites. Generally speaking, FTP sites are very basic, and to some, intimidating because of that. There isn’t alot of overt direction about what you do when you get to an FTP site through your web browser, even though it’s actually pretty easy.

Using Stylish, however, you can make this interface alot more appealing and clear. Read the rest of this entry »

From this week’s Web Dev Newsletter, we have some videos of users using assistive technology.

I watched three - “Everything I can’t do in the real world I can do with my Mac”, “One thumb to rule them all”, and “Me and my computer”. They all get you a little choked up or make you smile, and the last one made me all drippy from my nose.

The company that made these videos and that makes these fantastic tools is Assistiveware.

Here’s one video for starters.

In case you are part of that 0.0000001% of web designers who give a damn about the handicapped, here’s an article about some little known techniques for handling complex image display when your user is blind. That’s right, BLIND.

Alternative Text for Complex Graphics

Who’s starting to care? Probably Target.

I say “lite” here because any serious usability expert (those guys with the eye ball tracking devices and data sheets that involve decimals and not various fractions of a stick figure) would take serious issue with idea that their entire curriculum could be summed up in a list of 30 terms. Why do I care? I care because I used to work with these nerds and there’s something to be said for having good hard science to backup the proliferation of generalizations about “the user” and their fantastic voyage called their “experience”.

I was reading through this week’s Web Dev Newsletter some more and I came upon two interesting articles about usability. The first, much closer to actual science than the second (it involves decimals), is called Landing Page Confusion. It discusses the effect on user performance of having multiple objectives on a page. They provide examples of successful changes they made to some unnamed web sites and the effect this had on conversion rates. It provides some convincing evidence for keeping it simple… because we’re stupid.

The second article is a great synopsis of major usability principles, notable theories, and relevant terminology. If you read this, you will definitely be more comfortable at your next usability meeting. It’s also a great jumping off point to go more in depth into any of the 30 concepts. Brought to you by good old Smashing Magazine (the King or Queen of Lists), this article is entitled 30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of. Heck, print it out even and hide it in the back of your desk drawer. I won’t tell anyone.

I was reading my weekly Web Dev Newsletter and I came across the following tool - Designer’s Plaything. I tried it out and it’s slightly addictive.

From the site:

A tool for designers and clients to experiment with different typography and colour combinations on a web page as well as check for colour accessibility level.

It’s available online and as a downloadable standalone app—which brings me to an interesting suggestion they have for using it…

As a standalone web application Designer Plaything can be passed to clients or designers alike so that they can easily explore different layout combinations and express them clearly and precisely back to you.

Give it a shot and have your own plaything for a while. Heck, maybe you could even do something useful and work-related, but only if you feel it’s absolutely necessary.

Well, I finally did it. I began writing a post that became SO LONG that I thought, “Hmmm… I wish I could split this up.” Turns out, WordPress has been capable of handling this from nearly, if not entirely, the beginning. The visual editor doesn’t make it as easy to implement as other features, like splitting up a post with “Read more”, but if you’re at all savy, you can get paginated in just a few minutes.

First, we need to whip out one of WordPress’ old QuickTags. It no longer seems to be shown in the visual or code editor. It was called “Page”. To insert is manually, use

<!--next page-->

Put this throughout your post (in the “code”, non-visual editor) where you’d like to split it into a new “page”.

Your template might not have been built to handle this feature, though, so if you’re using anything other than the standard Kubrick template, you’ll want to check around in your “Single Post” template page. To edit this, go to Presentation > Theme Editor and along the side, you should see a file nicknamed “Single Post”. Select this file to open it in the editor and start looking near the line of code

<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>

What you should see, right after this line, or in this general vicinity, is

<?php wp_link_pages('before=<p><b>Pages</b> &after=</p>&next_or_number= number&pagelink=%'); ?>

or something similar. The call to wp_link_pages() is the important part to find.

If your template does not have this line of code, just add it

<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?> <?php wp_link_pages('before=<p><b>Pages</b> &after=</p>&next_or_number= number&pagelink=%'); ?>

You should then see something similar to “Pages 1 2 3″ at the end of your first post section or “page”.

Pretty swank.