Archive for June, 2010
Fix an incorrect blog URL on your WordPress Blog
Recently I ran into a problem I have seen all too many times, someone had entered the wrong URL in the admin panel of a WordPress blog and they could no longer log into the application to fix the issue. Normally this would break wordpress so that you couldn’t use the admin panel and require a manual update to the database however I came up with the idea to use WordPress’ own functions to enable an update of the URL without using the admin panel.
So there was born the idea of WP-Recover. A simple script to do one very simple task, allow you to change the wordpress blog URL when it is not working or you have entered it incorrectly.
I have decided to use the new power of my Open Source Battlefield Wiki to document the script so you can access WP-Recover on the OSBattlefield site.
A brief how-to:
1. Upload recover.php to your root wordpress folder (the same folder that wp-config.php exists in).
2. Open your wp-config.php file however you would like and get the first five charaters of the AUTH_KEY string (excluding the ‘ )
3. In a web browser access http://www.yoursite.com/yourwordpressfolder/recover.php
4. Enter the new URL for your site (ensuring it is in the format ‘http://www.yoursite.com/yourwordpressfolder’ without the ”)
5. Click Submit
6. Once you receive a confirmation message DELETE recover.php from your wordpress folder. Leaving it there is a DRASTIC security risk.
Download
Getting Help
Ideally if you need assistance please pop over and log a bug/support request on the JIRA Bug Tracking Site, although if you have any issues using that you can also use the Open Source Battlefield Contact Page or leave a comment here.
Intel network interface on Dell notebook dropping out
If you are suffering from an issue that causes your network connection to drop out when your computer idles then you have come to the right place.I have been using Dell notebooks for many years, and one little trick that I picked up quite some time back relates to the drivers for network cards on Dell Laptops.
Most commonly I have found this issue with the Intel 82567LM Gigabit Ethernet adapter however it is entirely possible that it affects other models too.
What Causes It:
This behaviour is actually a “feature” of the driver and is designed to drop it from 1 gigabit to 100 megabit mode which in turn saves power (on the assumption that you do not need 1Gbps of throughput while you aren’t physically at the machine). I have only ever experienced this with the Intel Gigabit cards (Intel 82567LM) but it may happen with others as well.
How to stop it from happening:
You will need to get a new driver directly from the manufacturer. As I mentioned I have only ever experienced it with the Intel ethernet interface so if you pop over to the Intel Download Center you can grab the drivers from there (if you are having problems specifically with the Intel 82567LM click here to get the latest drivers).
When you have installed the new driver go into the Device Manager and select the network card. Open up the properties panel and select the Power Management Tab, then uncheck the “Reduce Speed during System Idle” checkbox and you should be sweet.
Why you have to get a new driver:
Dell in their infinite wisdom decided that with all the network interface drivers they put out they will automatically enable the above setting and REMOVE the ability for you to change it. Therefore in order to gain the functionality to change the setting you have to use the manufacturer driver not the Dell OEM version.
I have been using this little workaround for at LEAST the last five odd years and have yet to have an issue with using teh Manufacturer Driver over the Dell Driver.
Hopefully this will help someone else out when they run into this frustration.
Stuart
Atlassian is supporting Open Source Battlefield
I am very happy to say that Atlassian has been kind enough to offer full licenses to me for my development site Open Source Battlefield.
After setting myself up with JIRA, Confluence, Greenhopper and Crowd, I applied to the sales team at Atlassian for a license based on the nature of software that will be released on Open Source Battlefield. The team got back to me in a couple of days and I can now happily say that the new site is up and running with all the bells and whistles.
So thank you very much to Atlassian for the following products and supporting my open source development initiatives. So now I can get on to all the documentation and coding I have backlogged in my brain which I will be doing in due course.
Stuart 
Managing blog advertising with OpenX
As a blogger with numerous sites on the internet I have a wealth of experience on managing content and the like across multiple sites. I therefore wanted to do a short post on how I manage one aspect of this which is managing blog advertising.
The best program I have found thus far for managing blog advertising is the OpenX advertisement management platform.
When I began using OpenX I believe it was only available as a self-hosted version however in more recent times the Free OpenX Community Hosted version has been released. For those of you that are expecting less than 100 million ad impressions per month (which I am expecting to be 99.9999% of the people that will ever see or read this post) the OpenX Community Hosted version will probably suffice. Personally I host OpenX myself as I have a pet hate about being too reliant on other services for my site to operate as well as the fact I have always hosted it myself… but it is entirely up to you.
Essentially OpenX allows you to add numerous websites, advertisers, advertising campaings, and banners (a.k.a ads) into the system and manage the links between all of these. If you have a single blog it is probably somewhat more complex than you might need but when more than one blog comes into play I have found it to be of great assistance. OpenX manages all of these aspects in the background and in turn requires only a single section of code to be inserted for each place you wish an ad to display, the handy thing here is that when the ads change the code on your site does not have to.
OpenX Has Allowed Me To:
- Consolidate all my advertising across three blogs and two galleries into a single location.
- Manage advertising campaigns from various affiliate programs (including the ability to set expiration dates).
- See detailed statistics such as how often banners are displayed, and the effectiveness of each (such as click-through rates).
- Run specific campaigns at certain times. One example being the ability to override all other ads with a campaign that may be holiday related or related to a specific post on the blog (as an example).
- Rotate multiple ads across a single location on a site.
- Change advertisements without having to change the code on my site.
Some things to be aware of:
- In the case of the self hosted version, can take a bit of work to set up.
- It is designed as an enterprise solution so can be pretty much as flexible (complex) as you would like it to be.
- If you are using it across multiple sites (and using the self-hosted version) you may want an additional central domain to run it from. That way the installation is not dependent on any one of your domains so if one site gets shut down in future OpenX is still hosted on a separate domain.
So… that is just a quick and dirty on what I use for advertising management. If you have multiple sites I would highly recommend you at least take a look at OpenX and how it works as it may save you a lot of hassle and time later down the track.
I welcome your thoughts, what are your experiences… or do you have any questions you might like to ask?
Stuart
Trials and Tribulations of Installing New Software
Over the last couple of weeks I have taken on the interesting task of installing the Atlassian Suite for my open source development site Open Source Battlefield. Particularly during the last week I have taken this up a level and powered through this with vigor and have essentially been banging my head against a brick wall.
Before I continue, the task I have set out to do is install the following:
- Crowd – Atlassian’s Centralised User Management Software
- JIRA – Atlassian’s Bug Tracking and Project Management Software
- Greenhopper – Atlassian’s Agile Project Management Plugin for JIRA
- and finally Confluence – Atlassian’s Wiki Software
I began my journey with the Atlassian “Here Be Dragon’s Quest” and I found it was an excellent starter to assist in getting my head around Tomcat and how I could set up Confluence, JIRA, GreenHopper, and Crowd. However due to a memory constraints on the server I wanted to roll the three applications into a single Tomcat instance on my server. For the average Tomcat admin this may seem like a simple task however for me… a person that has never touched Tomcat with a 10 foot pole, it wasn’t as easy as I was hoping.
In steps Scott Herdman a good mate of mine from uni who has been helping me greatly with this little project of mine as he has administered Tomcat and the Atlassian products before. (Oh and for the record he was the one who told me I should document my experiences for others to hopefully learn from (and granted… he is right it IS why I have this blog) so therefore he gets this free plug).
Scott has been answering questions on and off for me and the circle of my learning has gone something along the lines of:
Problem –> Read Error Logs –> Search Google –> Re-Read the Atlassian Guides –> Search Google Some More –> Read the Error Logs Again –> Beg Scott for some assistance –> and back round to the beginning for the next problem.
After many MANY trials of getting the Atlassian Suite up and running in a single Tomcat instance I decided that they have made the recommendation for them to be installed separately for a reason. Unfortunately it appears that due to conflicts in the libraries that are included with each application in order to get them to all run on the one Tomcat server would require a lot of tweaking and careful petting LOL of which I don’t have the time for.
So if you are starting out, and have little experience with Tomcat, I hope that I can save you some time and effort straight up… don’t try to roll your own Tomcat, just use the ones included with each application it will save you a good few weeks.
So this is why I have really not been around much. After my exams are over next week I will be back more and have a few interesting ideas for things I can post about but for the moment I am off to play with my swanky new Atlassian Suite. For reference I got it set up as Open Source Battlefield Home (Confluence) and Open Source Battlefield JIRA. Crowd is installed as well but really has no use of being included here LOL.
If anyone else has experiences with Atlassian I would love to hear your thoughts.
Stuart