Hyperspatial.com

Watch out for gmail

Adam J Nowak — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:28:29 +0000

Watch out for gmails' learning feature. When I delete email notifications from my wordpres sites, gmail decides they are spam periodically.

Have been just clicking 'not spam' in the spam folder - instead of adding a filter for each and every site. Just don't forget to check your spam.

WWW The Debate

Adam J Nowak — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:59:22 +0000

Against WWW

Not neccessary - In 1991 you needed it but not any more, its 2011 and usage of www is an outdated approach
No Advantages - There are no SEO advantages to including the prefix
It's easier to look at - Url's just look better without it, especially long ones
The trend is to go without - See the list of non www sites below

For WWW

People like to bookmark the www version - This is a pro but if your site is non www then it gets bookmarket withot anyway

Non WWW Sites

Apache Trick of the Year

Adam J Nowak — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 03:16:52 +0000

Just noticed I have not written a blog post since 2010. Most of my writing is in code so my blogs are written in PHP on code.hyperspatial.com - Ah Justifications are the root of all accomplishment

The Situation:
I have a WordPress Multisite setup with wildcard dns for subdomains, installed on a virtual host with the ServerAlias set to *.mydomain.com - ServerAlias set in apache2/sites-available

I needed to allow a subdomain of mydomain.com to skirt the *.mydomain.com Apache rule and be served from its own files that are not part of the wordpress install. For the example the subdomain will be outsmart.mydomain.com

Despite all my efforts, when pointing the browser to outsmart.mydomain.com, I would end up at a 404 page on mydomain.com which is the multisite install

The Solution:
After much experimentation with rewrites and virtual host setups it became apparent that apache was following the ServerAlias set in the mydomain.com vhost and not the ServerAlias in outsmart.mydomain.com vhost

~~~ Ding! ~~~

Apache reads the vhosts from the apache2/sites-enabled and conciquently the apache2/sites-available directories in alphabetical order. So just change the first letter in the server name to something that comes before M!

It was not quite that easy, here's the proceedure

Delete the subdomain vhost and create a new one with the server name alphabetically lower than the offending domain. I would make the example ajoutsmart.mydomain.com (You can't just change the server name of an existing vhost because Apache will not re-order existing sites-available upon namechange)
Add the ServerAlias outsmart.mydomain.com to the new vhost using Webmin or by editing the vhost file in the apache2/sites-available directory
Restart Apache

Note: Since Apache does not re-order the sites available you may be able to get away with creating the vhost beginning with an 'A' then change the server name to begin with any letter.

Firefox Caching

Adam J Nowak — Wed, 04 May 2011 12:44:27 +0000

The latest version of Firefox seems to be caching pages differently than it usually does. (Or I am going crazy)

I was working on pointing one of my .org domains to it's .com counterpart and was getting frustrated because it just did not seem to be redirecting. Firefox was caching the old page instead of opening and running the .htaccess file that performed the redirect. I don't think Firefox has always done this.

When conducting dns changes or redirects just keep this in mind. Clearing Firefox history then restarting the browser worked for me. I also noticed that name server changes were not picked up by the Firefox browser until after a total system restart.

Ez Overlay

Adam J Nowak — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 02:03:26 +0000

A simple lightbox plugin designed to enable you to display html content within a popup window using just about any html element as a trigger.

This plugin is an alternative to the jQuery based lightbox systems. It was created using pure Javascript and has no dependencies on any other libraries. I created this simple lightbox after weeks of dealing with jQuery conflicts within Buddypress and WordPress. Many of the existing jQuery type lightboxes do not stop audio playback for flash/.swf playback when closing the lightbox. This plugin completely removes the overlay content from the dom to make absolutely sure your .swf file playback is stopped in all browsers.

Instructions:

Upload the entire 'ez-overlay' folder to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress
Create your overlay's and triggers with html using the examples included in the plugin folder.