The wurster, the better

I experienced not being able to login to 2 of my blogs last week. I could view all the posts and access everything outside of the admin. I then checked another blog in a subdomain and I was able to gain access to the admin area. Strange! I hadn’t changed anything. I did upgrade one site to 2.5.1 but the other site was still on 2.3.3.

Then I decided to look at error logs for clues. I saw errors but they have been there for several months. What could have happened. Was I hacked? No. All the files were intact.

So then I decided to compare the files on the site that was working with the site that was not. I found the culprit. It was an htaccess file in the wp-admin folder. Apparently, something changed on the host server that did not require this any more. Once I deleted it, I was fine.

Over the past week or so, I’ve learned a little about making an image popup on mousing over a word. I found a couple of sites that helped me. One is called Pure CSS Popups. The other is Creating mouseover effects. Both were helpful in helping me understand and coming up with a solution. As usual, IE and FF behave differently. Positioning is a problem, but can be gotten around with some work and perhaps re-design of your web page.

There is an example of what I did on my test web site for now.

Sometimes, a solution just won’t work with your current design. And you will need to change it to get it to do what you want.

I started working on 2 updates to this gallery script. I wanted to be able to add a new image to new galleries that are uploaded. And I wanted to expand my captions mod to include the default image viewing. This is taking me longer than I expected. The js I tried didn’t work in FF but did in IE. I them found a cross platform js script called sarissa which I will try. I still need to add some way of getting the date modified on the gallery folder so that I can determine when to show the NEW image.

The files I’m modifying are:
ajax.functions.js
ajax.init.js
ajax.gateway.php
gallery.css

I’ve been thinking a lot about the web page design class I’m teaching this past week. My students seem to have trouble with html and code to develop a web page. They all seem to not want to know or learn about this but rather use a tool like FrontPage or Dreamweaver to drag and drop a web page. And you really shouldn’t have to if the tools that you use can make your web pages standards-compliant.

I belong to the RefreshDelVal group that promotes the use of standards in the development of web pages. Great idea and it has been around for a long time. Programming standards have also been around for a long time. I am more familiar with them as I am a programmer. The world of web page design and development is relatively knew to me.

The use of standards can only make programs (in our case) better, easier to use, and easier to maintain and manage. I don’t think the common person who wants to build his or her own web site, understands this. But I take this as my challenge in the classes I teach. I want to give my students the information that this is important in web development, no matter what level you build at (personal versus business). A little knowledge can help in many, many ways.

However, knowledge and information is a two-way street ( I am full of cliches as my age shows). I always remember the saying:

You can bring a horse to water, but can’t make him drink.

Unfortunately, we have a choice as we do in so many things in our lives. We can choose to be good or bad. We can choose to drink Coke or Pepsi. Life is full of choices. Someone recently in the Vanilla forum pointed us to a book about “too many choices”. However, I don’t think that is applicable here. In web page design and development, we only have 2 choices: standards-compliant or not. We should always choose the standards-compliant route.

Among the interesting discussions we had at our RefreshDelVal meetup yesterday, I learned a couple of things. One was about a single file CMS system called sNews. This might be useful in helping with some problems I’ve been thinking about. I also learned about a free service (at least at one level) called LogMeIn to possibly help me help my students (and others) easier and remotely. It allows you to log in to their computer to see what problem they are trying to describe to you. A picture is worth a 1000 words!

LogMeIn looks interesting but not for what I would like to use remote access for. I would like to be able to help someone with a computer problem they are having. LogMeIn appears to be too complicated for this. What I just tried and works fine is MSN Messenger. Since I have an MSN Messenger account, anyone who has an account/screen name can allow any other MSN Messenger user to not only see what is happening on their computer but also give them the ability to access their computer. This is really cool and I’m going to suggest this to my students. MSN Messenger is like AIM or Yahoo Messenger for chatting with others. It is free and easy to sign up for.

I wanted to make my forum be W3C compliant and pass the HTML validation. I found 2 problems that I corrected. One was with my Flashclocks extension for Vanilla. I was using the embed tag to show an swf file. This was not valid and I replaced it with the object tag. The code for embedding should be:

[object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="extensions/flashclocks/clock_large.swf" width="165" height="165"]
[param name="movie" value="extensions/flashclocks/clock_large.swf"]
[img src="extensions/flashclocks/clock_large.swf" width="165" height="165" alt="flashclock"/]
[/param]
[/object]

Note: replace [ and ] with < and >.

I also found that the Announcement extension was not valid because the style tag needed to have type=”text/css” added.