May 18 2009

Xbox 360 Posts

Category: Personal,WordPress,Xbox 360 Updates — ChrisM @ 1:27 pm

Just a quick explanation for anyone wondering why a games console appears to have hacked into this site 🙂

The short version is that my Xbox 360 posts details of games I have played recently, and any achievements attained. Whenever you see the nickname AntiSceptic, you can swap that for Chris, in your head 🙂 SilentlyScreaming is pretty much the only other alias I tend to use online. That was too long for Xbox live though 🙁 So I had to use my second choice, the one I ‘borrowed’ from Gavin all those years ago.

The slightly long winded version is this… IF my console is connected to the internet (not possible right now, as I have no xBox WiFi adaptor, and there is no network socket in the in-law’s living room), then every time I play a game, the Xbox Live service is informed of any relevant data. From Microsoft’s servers, the people over at 360voice & GamerDNA extract enough data to create blog posts. (See the last link in this post to see the original version). From here, my blog grabs the RSS feed for that page (see here), and posts the information up, under a different user account (it was simpler than trying to form lots of regex expressions to swap AntiSceptic for Chris or ‘I’, and I didn’t like making it look like I was actually talking about myself in the 3rd person), using the WP-o-matic plugin.

As mentioned, the Xbox 360 is currently offline, so the posts so far have all been my console ‘complaining’ that I’m not giving it enough attention. I’m not sure what will happen when I reconnect it when we move back to our flat – whether it’ll ignore games played and achievements…. …. achieved, or amend the older posts, or simply provide a summary of what has been missed.

Anyway, why do all this? Because I wanted to see what was possible. Am I claiming any sort of originality here? No, Narcogen has been doing this for a couple of years, I only just got around to viewing his site’s source to get a clue how he achieved this. Ha, upon checking I had got the right URL for his blog, I now see that each Xbox post actually has a link in it to 360voice. Hey ho.

You can see my official profile over here, and the 360voice/GamerDNA pages here.

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Jan 12 2009

Belated 2009 Greetings

Category: Friends,Personal,Weather,WiFi,Windows Mobile,WordPress — ChrisM @ 3:36 pm

Wow, no posts in almost 12 days. That has to be improved upon, sorry. The (somewhat predictable) reasons for my online muteness were recovering from Christmas, seeing in the New Year, travelling around meeting friends and family, some of whom we hadn’t crossed paths with in a couple of years, friends coming over to sunny Wales to see the house for the first time, oh and also maintaining, repairing and improving four different PCs. Getting used to Vista from a technical support point of view has taken time, but I at least no longer involuntarily shudder when I hear the OS’ name 😉
After flashing my TyTn II (Kaiser) to a custom WM6.1 ROM (it was working boringly reliably, something had to be tweaked/modded 😉 ) and getting TomTom, music and voice commands to work whilst in the car, I installed Ubuntu onto Ira’s laptop (dual-boot obviously, didn’t think the love of my life would appreciate me nuking her Windows install), finally got around to properly securing the wireless network at home in Clydach, got the PCs all happily working as far as UPnP was concerned. This needed to be sorted as the internet radio I recvd. for Xmas could also play files on the LAN, and I was having issues just using normal folder sharing on a couple of the Vista machines.
Ante natal classes have been an interesting and mostly informative process, it is hard to believe we are now probably less than a month away from seeing our daughter’s face for the first time 🙂 We now have a lot of the items new borns need, and even the pushchair/pram/car-seat optimus prime styled transforming thingy has turned up. Ira has done some more photo shoots with John, obviously centred around the theme of pregnancy/new life etc. See previous posts for the last published examples – though hopefully John will get around to adding new posts to his blog, and new photos to the gallery soon. Which reminds me, don’t forget to check out ConJoinery if you are in need of carpentry or joinery skills… when Con came over here for a few days, we got around to setting up a quick blog to promote his work, and showcase previous projects. It obviously still need more content, but the basic framework of WordPress 2.7 and useful plugins are in place.
After all that I finally noticed that this site is once again down to a PageRank of 0 (see many previous posts regarding Google and post links-for-money issues. Anyway, I now know why there is a lot less work around again. From n/a to a 2, then up to 4, spanked by google down to a 0, recovered to 2, then back once more to 0. As the only thing this alters for the worse is the potential income for this domain, I’m not crying into my cereal. The unique visitor numbers per day has been steadily bouncing between 250 and 600 a day, even when no fresh content has been added, so I know the search engine traffic, and regular repeat visitors have carried on regardless. It is a little strange to find out which of your posts are popular, and the search terms people googled to get there. If you’ve not already enabled AWStats on your site, it might be worth popping along to your CPanel interface and turning it on…

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Dec 12 2008

WordPress 2.7 Upgrade

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 2:15 am

Finally, I should hopefully be categorising posts at the same time as creating them. This may seem like a silly aspect of blogging to focus on, when there are quite a few more major changes than an AJAXed movable layout for the boxes in the Add New Post page, but being able to relocate the Categories (and other obviously) box to the top right, where I’ll notice it BEFORE hitting the Publish button means a lot less hassle for me. I tried out the upgrade on my test site first, and having seen no major issues (the FireStats beta (1.60) plugin needed an update from Beta2 to RC3 to prevent an error being displayed on the dashboard) went ahead (following database backups) with this site. If anyone notices anything (NEW!!!) looking weird or out of place, do please drop me a line.

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Oct 25 2008

Area Specific Widgets

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 4:20 am

Long term readers (as in REALLY long term, those who were pressganged encouraged to start reading 18 months ago) will remember the fun and games I’ve been through to get area specific widgets to display on this blog. Originally I used the King Text widget, though WordPress 2.2 (2.3?) broke critical parts of the code, and no updates were to be found. I then moved onto using some PHP code within ExecPHP widgets (probably fixable, but I’m a hacker of other peoples code, not a proper coder), though this then prevented me from using PHP within the actual widget I wanted to display. Now it looks as though there is a decent solution. Slayer’s Custom Widgets is able to ensure that any of your current widgets are only displayed on certain pages/categories/posts etc. This would mean I can once again play around a little more with code, and find new and interesting ways to break this site 🙂 As I don’t have the time or inclination to repair my potential goof ups for now, I’ll leave experimenting with this plugin for now, I just wanted to post a quick heads up for other WordPress users who might be interested.

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Oct 25 2008

WordPress 2.6.3 Released

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 1:53 am

Check here for details. Basically a security fix has been released. The RSS feeds that WordPress site owners see in their dashboard are presented via the Snoopy library, and this is where a vulnerability has been discovered.
I am about to upgrade this blog, so if anything happens to go wrong, and I’m not able to post for a while, you know why 🙂 Alternatively, no posts might be visible at all if it goes horribly wrong, in which case you won’t see this post until I’ve fixed any problems.

[edit]
OK, all went fine, and I’ve just noticed that a slightly annoying bug with the brilliant WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plugin has gone – plugins that were previously disabled are no longer automatically re-enabled during the WP upgrade process.

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Oct 22 2008

Stats Problem Solved?

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 4:23 am

I have decided to give the free FireStats package a try out on this blog. More observant readers may have noticed that I removed the original Unique Visitor count from the first sidebar, as the numbers it produced were not correlating with those provided by the AWStats package I access via my CPanel interface. Having not been able to find an easy method to retrieve and publicly post info from the AWStats records, I had a look around for other alternatives, and so far all seems well. Although I couldn’t use the easy online install program, the only difference compared to a conventional installation seemed to be the time taken to upload many small files from my PC to my server via FTP.
I was able to set the starting point for the counts displayed, though because I am missing last December’s stats (following a change in hosts), I had to estimate both the uniques and pageviews.
The starting counts displayed should be accurate to within +/- 1,000 for the uniques, and +/- 8,000 on pageviews.
Anyway, I hope the code won’t slow down loadtimes too much, and that I should finally be able to keep an eye on uniques/month without having to log into CPanel too often.

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Oct 01 2008

Ooops – Sorry For All The ???

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 3:33 pm

The previous post was supposed to include some Cyrillic characters, however a bunch of question marks are displayed instead. This has reminded me that I really need to convert my SQL tables from latin1_swedish_ci to utf8_unicode_ci . This will mean that older posts that included non-Latin characters should finally display properly again. So instead of typing out Pamctop in latin letters, I can use the true ??????? instead.
I have two options – either run a lot of commands I’m very unfamiliar with, or rely on someone else’s plugin. Strangely enough I’m hoping the UTF-8 Database Converter plugin will do the job, but I’m waiting to hear back from the author first, as it may have ceased working since WordPress 2.5 onwards. So for now, just ignore the question marks…

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Sep 07 2008

Looking Forward To WordPress 2.7

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 9:37 pm

Why?
Because I have just had to go back and edit another handful of posts where I had stupidly forgotten to assign them a category.

So?
Wordpress used to have the category selection box towards to the top of the page, above the fold on the post creation page. It currently resides below the fold. There are plugins to bodge the position, but I don’t like fiddling with key files too much unless really necessary. WordPress 2.7 will apparently allow the various panels to be moved around. This will mean I can see the category box before I hit the publish button, meaning less posts will hopefully find themselves mistakenly in the default ‘Personal‘ category.

Ah, so your laziness/forgetfulness is the key problem?
Yes 🙂

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Jul 25 2008

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

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 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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Jul 16 2008

WordPress 2.6

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 2:49 am

So, just a few months after WordPress 2.5 was released, we now have 2.6! I checked this version on this blog’s little brother (test.chrismerriman.com), making sure there were no repeats of the problems encountered with 2.5 and 2.5.1 last time around. No immediate issues to be found, so I’ve updated 19 sites in very little time (mainly thanks to the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plug in).
One quick thing I’ve noticed so far… the word count feature does not seem to stay perfectly ‘live’. So if you’ve typed out a long post, and the word count is still 0, you probably haven’t started a new paragraph (this seems to trigger an update). Try pressing Enter and then deleting the new para if necessary.
I’ll now not need to worry about installing the Firefox add-on I previously used the next time I do a new install. Also this word count does not take into account the amount of words in the Title box, so that’s an improvement.

Watch the video below for more information on the changes that can be found with WordPress 2.6…

[edit]
I’ve just noticed my comment feed is now working again! I first noticed it wasn’t functioning a couple of months ago, and just assumed it was a configuration issue with feedburner. Since upgrading to WP2.6, all seems well again 🙂

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