Jul 25 2008

Problems With WordPress 2.6, Google Gears And The Flash File Uploader?

Category: WordPressChrisM @ 7:35 pm

Sorry about the long title post, but I wanted to ensure the relevant factors were all included for clarity.

This post will be of interest to anyone who wishes to use the new Google Gears option within WordPress 2.6, or the flash-based uploader for image files etc., but is not able to.

The first thing to check is if your browser’s Flash plugin is up to date. Visit this page, and towards the top, where it states “You have version x,y,z,a installed”, make sure you have 9,0,124,0 or later listed. You may find earlier versions of the Flash plugin will work OK, but if you have a problem, it is best to discount all potential causes step-by-step.

If you are already up to date, or you have upgraded, and the problems remain, then the next thing to check is that you do not have a Flash applet blocker loaded within your browser. If you see a small ‘F’ symbol on pages where others see flash applets, you need to whitelist (allow) your own website for all flash – it is not enough to temporarily allow the flash applet on a case by case basis.

Problems still remain with Google Gears and/or the Flash File Uploader? In which case I’ll bet you a small bottle of vodka that you used the WordPress Automatic Update plugin to upgrade. You will most likely that find two SWF files are missing from your installation. I had this issue which was stopping Google Gears from working. One of the files involved was the media uploader one.
The easiest way to check if this is your problem is to FTP in to your site and look at /wp-includes/js/swfupload/ – if the file swfupload_f9.swf is missing, and also flv_player.swf from wp-includes\js\tinymce\plugins\media\img
is missing, then we have discovered the root of the problem. The solution? Download WordPress 2.6, from here. Extract the files to a temporary directory on your hard drive and manually upload those SWG files to your site in those locations I mentioned.

So this should sort your problems out for your current installation of WordPress. What to do about next time? If you enable your site within your flash blocker add-in before you next use the WPAU plugin, said files should be upgraded fine 🙂

Information collated from the WordPress support forums – you can see my post here.

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Mar 13 2008

Avoid HD DVD Players?

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 12:39 am

With the near certain demise of the HD DVD format recently, you will probably find that stand alone players will soon be getting quite cheap as shops on websites try to sell off their remaining stock.
Sony appear to have won the format war this time (I’m just about old enough to remember the VHS vs. Betamax ‘war’, when the superior technology of Betamax lost to the better marketing skills of JVC et al when they abandoned Betamax in favour of VHS ). Anyway enough history on video tapes, back to HD-DVD. If you come across a player at a bargain price, that has good reviews, video and audio quality wise, it might make sense to buy one. Why? Well most (all?) of these HD-DVD players can playback DVDs and upscale the picture, so if your display is HD (720 or 1080 lines), the DVD picture will appear to be of a higher quality.
Of course, as a main player, Blu-ray really only makes sense, but if you have a TV in the bed room, or kitchen, and are looking for a disc player, the cost benefit of HD DVD players may make enough (short term) sense. For Playstation 3 owners, Blu-ray discs are already playable through their console, and although the X-Box 360 has a HD-DVD external drive available, it is still not clear whether a Blu-ray version will be released.

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Dec 08 2006

This Week, I Have Been Mainly Using

Category: Personal,WordPressChrisM @ 3:51 pm

OK, as promised a long, long time ago, here are all the Plugins & Widgets used on this site. Some links are not directly to the author’s site, as a few domains have expired, or their servers are too flakey to rely on…

About Me – A wonderfully simple, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin widget.

Adhesive – This plugin’s effect will be familiar to forum readers, as it keeps a particular post ‘sticky’ at the top of the page, rather than naturally slipping down the page as newer posts appear.

Akismet – This is wonderful! It has prevented me from having to manually check almost 100 spamming comments so far. There are alternatives, and other approaches, but it has certainly saved me a lot of grunt work…

All Consuming – This is responsible for showing which books I’ve read recently, and which I’m currently reading. I noticed a bug/feature in an earlier release, and the author kindly gave me credit for noticing how to fix the error. This problem has now been solved properly, but it was good to see my thoughts actually helped someone…

Auto-Hyperlink URLs – If I forget to assign a formal hyperlink to an internet address, this plug-in tries to help.

Commenter Spy – not quite as scary as it sounds, just gives me a shortcut to find the approx. geographical location of a commenter’s IP (or more accurately, their ISP).

GetWeather – The 3 weather reports on the right hand side of each page are generated from this plug in.

IM Online – As in I’m online and IM (instant messenger). Shows whether I am connected to the internet with Windows Live Messenger and Skype.

King RSS Widget – WorkInProgress – will edit my post once I’ve used this plugin properly.

King Text Widget
– VERY, VERY useful widget. It allows you to basically convert any script or normal plugin into a widget. Currently used extensively on this site, at least until ‘proper’ widgets are found for each purpose.

Manage Me – Makes managing multiple posts/comments a lot easier in the admin area for this blog. (Author’s relevant post used to be found at http://www.stilglog.com/wordpress-plugins/manage-me/ , but site is down, as of 10/04/2009 at least)

No Ping Wait – Currently disabled for trouble-shooting purposes, but this plugin allows me to carry on working immediately after Publishing a blog entry, rather than waiting for a response from each service I ‘ping’ to inform them of a new entry here.

Simple Cache – Prevents identical data from being constantly reloaded. As an example, the weather report for Cheltenham, Swansea & Astana aren’t likely to change every 5 minutes, so this plug in checks the last time the data was retrieved from GetWeather’s servers, and if it was recent, will simply serve the cached data.

VideoPop – This allows me to post videos with a simple pop-up player, rather than requiring people to know too much about file types etc.

WhoLinked – Displays which sites link to this one.

Word Stats – This allows you to easily post (& automatically update) the vital statistics of your blog. It can be downloaded from Google.

Zap_NewWindow – This one makes sure that if a reader clicks on a link in one of your posts, the site will open in a new window, so you don’t lose the reader. There is an annoying pop-over ad at his blog right now – close it, then close the new window/tab to see the real text.

Sidebar Widgets – Without this, none of the widgets mentioned above would work!

The theme currently used on this blog is Ainslie Johnson’s Chameleon 1.1.

Oh, and btw, this post’s title refers to a Fast Show quote, in case it makes no sense to some people…

[EDIT]
OK, having compiled this list, I remembered a couple of things I wanted to try out, so you can now add the following two to your list of things to check out if/when you have a WordPress blog…

Inline Ajax Comments – This means you can check the comments on a post without leaving the main page. Took me a while to trouble shoot the insertion of two simples lines of code. I finally realised that the ‘Show Comments’ text would only actually appear under posts that already had a comment! (Used to be found at http://kashou.net/blog/inline-ajax-comments/ , currently the whole site just appears to bring graphic up)

WordPress Mobile Edition – Trying to view this blog on a PDA or SmartPhone just takes too long (GPRS speeds not being that great in Kazakhstan at least) & results in a difficult page to navigate (even with a good browser like NetFront on a PDA), so I decided to give this plugin a try. It seems to work like a charm, picking up both IE & NetFront on the iPAQ…

[EDIT2]
24/2/07 Update

Do Follow – Allow commenters own sites to get the juice they deserve :>
PostPost – A way of automatically adding content (in my case adverts) after your posts. (Also has a lot of other options available)
WordPress Related Links – I’m still not 100% on whether to keep this one or not. It adds links to related sites at the end of my posts. Will have to monitor sometime, and check it isn’t just earning someone else a lot of money from my drivel :>
Google Sitemaps – I’ve had this installed since the first day this blog existed, but never got round to using it for some reason. As I had to re-create all my article web sites, and so re-submit their site maps, I decided to give this plug in a go.
Cloudy – Finally, a plugin & widget that does what I need, without having to remember to edit some PHP next time I wipe a file accidentally. The word cloud you can now see on the right, in the second column, is the result.

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