Increasing the number of posts per page on category, tag, and archive pages in WordPress
Thu, Aug 18th 2011 12:10a David Killingsworth In WordPress, you can set the number of pages to display per page in the Administration settings. This is set in Admin/Settings/Reading.
The issue with this is that this is a global setting. If you would like to set a different number of posts to display on the front page than on the category page, you can do it by adding this code to functions.php in your theme.
The following code displays 20 posts per page on all pages that are not the front page (index). This includes search results, categori [read] Keywords: admin
administration
domino
archive
88
Zero day vulnerability in many WordPress themes
Wed, Aug 3rd 2011 10:24a David Killingsworth Mark Maunder announced a zero day vulnerability in many WordPress themes yesterday here on his blog.
If you use any third party WordPress themes, you should check your server for the presence of timthumb.php or thumb.php. It is reported that several theme marketplace websites host common legitimate themes that utilize this library.
The fix is to remove any allowed sites from the thumb.php or timthumb.php files as recommended below.
BEFORE:
$allowedSites = array (
'flickr.com',
'picasa.com [read] Keywords: domino
blogger
server
143
WordPress XML Sitemap Plugin Review
Tue, Aug 2nd 2011 6:11p David Killingsworth I have been building quite a few sites with WordPress lately. WordPress has quite a long list of 3rd party plugins developed for various tasks and functions.
One downside to this is that there are several redundant WordPress plugins for common tasks, and their plugin search mechanism which is located at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ is somewhat difficult to use.
I tend to search for the most installed or popular plugins and use the hive mind’s collective research to choose which plu [read] Keywords: domino
bug
community
database
google
skype
xml
146
How to display nicely formatted PHP code in a WordPress post
Thu, Jul 21st 2011 12:11a David Killingsworth I’ve been struggling for a while about how to embed PHP, HTML, or CSS code into WordPress posts so that they look good and are easy to understand.
I found this list of 12 WordPress Plugins to Display and Highlight Code.
I researched a few of them and finally settled on SyntaxHighlighter Evolved, which was simple to install, easy to use with short codes, formats nicely, and seems to have a large existing user base.
In your posts, you can simply use [php] and [/php] shortcodes around your ac [read] Keywords: domino
css
99
Updating Price PHP print statements in Ubercart
Tue, Jul 19th 2011 12:11a David Killingsworth Recently, I updated an Ubercart shopping cart system on Drupal that was very out of date.
After the upgrade, the list price on the product pages had too many zeros. It looked like this.
MSRP $ 49.99000
After a bit of research, I learned that Ubercart has been updated to include more decimal places to accommodate more International currencies.
I took a look at the node-product.tpl.php template and found that the print statement for the list price was using the out of date print statement.
The old [read] Keywords: domino
189
How to dynamically set Facebook Opengraph Meta tags in WordPress headers
Fri, Jul 15th 2011 7:14a David Killingsworth I recently developed a WordPress website where it was important that some pages could be liked and show up on a user’s Facebook status. The front page also had a Facebook fan page like box. This is getting to be pretty much the standard for most websites.
Setting up the placement of the buttons is pretty trivial. This guide shows you how to generate the widget code for the fan page like box, and this guide shows you how to generate the widget code for the like/recommend button.
Embedded th [read] Keywords: admin
domino
css
facebook
profile
widget
79
Theming fields in Drupal 6
Wed, Jul 6th 2011 11:14p David Killingsworth I needed to figure out how to theme a field in Drupal 6. The use case was that I wanted to field to be a URL. This is pretty simple and straightforward by using the CCK Link module, which is a sub-module of CCK.
I was able to input my URL, such as http://www.symetrikdesign.com with no problem, and the CCK display options are pretty good. However, I wanted to strip the “http://” part on the output display, but have the link remain the legitimate link of http://www.symetrikdesign.com
[read] Keywords: admin
domino
google
70
Getting the Delicious bookmarks add-on to work with Firefox 5.0
Wed, Jul 6th 2011 10:14p David Killingsworth I figured out a simple trick to make the Delicious bookmarks Firefox add-on work after upgrading to Firefox 5.0.
This assumes that you previously had the Delicious bookmarks add-on working in Firefox 3.6.x and you have just upgraded to Firefox 5.0 – which disables the add-on and states that it is incompatible with Firefox 5.0
Open Firefox
Goto “Help” in the Menu, then “Troubleshooting Information”
Click on the “Open Containing Folder” or “Show in [read] Keywords: domino
application
firefox
134
How to format line breaks in custom fields in WordPress
Wed, Jul 6th 2011 7:13p David Killingsworth I was working on a WordPress project where I needed to create some custom fields and format them for the user. I wanted to be able to create those fields so that the user only had to put a few bits of text into the fields and be done with it without having the need to know any HTML formatting.
I had this working fine for two fields called price and dimensions. The issues was that the output is a line of text, so all of the items were being displayed on one line and then wrapping to the next line [read] Keywords: domino
Installing Amazon RDS Command Line Toolkit on Ubuntu 10.04
Wed, Apr 27th 2011 6:11p David Killingsworth Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) is their answer to a hosted, maintained database service. They currently offer several versions of MySQL on their instances, and the ability to incrementally backup the databases, and offer full fail-over to another availability zone. Pretty awesome stuff compared to having to manage your own MySQL servers, keep them updated, patched, and manage backing them up.
I am writing these instructions because I didn’t find a Ubuntu package to instal [read] Keywords: domino
application
database
java
mysql
security
server
sql
ubuntu
72
ec2-consistent-snapshot fails during cron
Tue, Apr 26th 2011 9:13a David Killingsworth I was getting the following errors when running ec2-consistent-snapshot to create automatic nightly backups of an EBS volume. You can find Eric Hammond’s ec2-consistent-snapshot script here.
Backing up volume vol-06ca566f
Can't exec "xfs_freeze": No such file or directory at /usr/bin/ec2-consistent-snapshot
line 470.
ec2-consistent-snapshot: ERROR: xfs_freeze -f /vol: failed(-1)
snap-3a387653
Can't exec "xfs_freeze": No such file or directory at /usr/bin/ec2-consistent-snapshot
line [read] Keywords: domino
ubuntu
154
Newer version of Elasticfox now available
Wed, Apr 20th 2011 9:16p David Killingsworth For those who use Elasticfox Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2 to manage their AWS entities, you may want to know that an updated version of Elasticfox is available from the AWS developer website.
It works with Firefox 4 (as did the previous version), and allows you to tag your entities a bit better. The interface has been slightly optimized and improved and there are a few more columns that are available for you in the instances view, such as Name, which is a big help.
It doesn’t allow you [read] Keywords: domino
firefox
interface
47
Tagging AWS entities
Wed, Apr 13th 2011 6:10a David Killingsworth I found this great source of information from Mark Russell on the ec2ubuntu Google group email list jQuery(document).ready(function($) {$('#730058677a094aa1475e6731c746c657').mousedown(function(){$('#730058677a094aa1475e6731c746c657').attr('href', "http://www.123linkit.com/api/new_click?cjkey_id=38196&blog_id=4340&sid=B4340P706045");});$('#730058677a094aa1475e6731c746c657').mouseout(function(){$('#730058677a094aa1475e6731c746c657').attr('href', "http://www.domino.symetrikd [read] Keywords: domino
email
google
javascript
54
Getting the Delicious bookmarks add-on to work with Firefox 4.0
Thu, Mar 24th 2011 3:12p David Killingsworth I figured out a simple trick to make the Delicious bookmarks Firefox add-on work after upgrading to Firefox 4.0.
This assumes that you previously had the Delicious bookmarks add-on working in Firefox 3.6.x and you have just upgraded to Firefox 4.0 – which disables the add-on and states that it is incompatible with Firefox 4.0
Open Firefox
Goto “Help” in the Menu, then “Troubleshooting Information”
Click on the “Open Containing Folder” button (within the [read] Keywords: domino
application
firefox
46
Upgrading Firefox 3.6.x to 4.0 on Ubuntu Desktop 10.04
Thu, Mar 24th 2011 3:12p David Killingsworth The last few days I’ve been using my Ubuntu desktop 10.04 more and more, which I’m running as a VirtualBox appliance on my Macbook Pro inside of Mac OS X.
Learning the ropes, I’ve stumbled a few times. Luckily, I’ve pretty much figured out how to do everything I needed.
I wanted to upgrade from Firefox 3.6.15 which is what was the latest version of Firefox as part of Ubuntu’s Software Center.
I had run Update Manager before starting and the latest packaged version w [read] Keywords: administration
domino
desktop
firefox
mac
macbook
ubuntu
95
Installing Opera 11 on Ubuntu 10.04
Tue, Mar 22nd 2011 12:10p David Killingsworth After setting up my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop through a VirtualBox appliance on my Macbook Pro 15″, I installed a couple of pieces of software through the Ubuntu Software Center which is under the Applications menu item. This consisted of Chromium – Google Chrome browser, VLC player, and Adobe Flash player.
I wanted to test out Opera on Ubuntu, but Opera does not appear in the list of available software.
I found these instructions on the Ubuntu help site, but wanted to clarify them here.
[read] Keywords: administration
domino
applications
archive
community
desktop
google
mac
macbook
security
server
ubuntu
Session Expiration in Drupal
Thu, Mar 10th 2011 5:11a David Killingsworth I’ve spent a significant amount of time researching session expiration in Drupal.
It turns out that by default Drupal sessions a session of 23 days. You can configure the session to expire at a shorter interval and you can configure Drupal to expire the session when the browser closes.
In addition, there is a module called Session_Expire, which pushes the cleanup of the sessions table in the database to the core Drupal cron job instead of relying on PHP garbage collection of your particula [read] Keywords: domino
database
45
Openoffice.org vs. Libreoffice
Wed, Mar 9th 2011 4:10p David Killingsworth I just noticed that there was a new player in town in the desktop office productivity realm with the name Libreoffice.
I was watching a Ubuntu 11 desktop preview video from ZD-Net and noticed that they were referencing the fact that Ubuntu will now come installed with LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.org.
Low and behold after a bit of research, it seems that key developers of OpenOffice.org are not happy with Oracle’s direction for OpenOffice.org and have defected to a new nonprofit organ [read] Keywords: domino
applications
desktop
linux
office
openoffice
oracle
redhat
ubuntu
133
Review of publicly available Drupal stack Amazon AMIs
Mon, Feb 14th 2011 5:24a David Killingsworth Until Pantheon Mercury 1.1 or 1.2 comes out publicly, I wanted to setup a plain vanilla Drupal server for development on Amazon’s EC2 environment.
I wanted the server to have:
Ubuntu 10.04
Apache
MySQL
PHP
Drupal
Drush
Webmin
PhpMyAdmin
There are a ton of AMIs out there, so I wanted to find one that was already available and easy to spin up and configure with my server name and database name/users.
NOTE: The preferred method for me, is still going to be to use Pantheon. I was only [read] Keywords: domino
database
development
linux
mysql
password
server
ubuntu
50
Quick Drupal install on Ubuntu 10.04 server
Sat, Feb 12th 2011 11:13a David Killingsworth Here’s some instructions for doing a really quick Drupal install on Ubuntu server 10.04.
This assumes that you are well versed with Drupal and have already created your database and database user and given the rights to the DB user to access the DB.
Step 1 download, extract, and copy the files into the /var/www root
$ cd /
$ sudo wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.20.tar.gz
$ sudo tar xvzf drupal-6.20.tar.gz
$ sudo mv drupal-6.20/* drupal-6.20/.htaccess /var/www
$ sudo rm [read] Keywords: domino
database
server
ubuntu
35
The perils of running servers at Amazon EC2
Mon, Feb 7th 2011 4:52a David Killingsworth Last week, some of our developers complained that they could not access our server that we have hosted at Amazon Web Services (AWS) / Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) environment intermittently every few minutes, but I was having no problems.
The next day, I was now unable to get to the server.
HTTP, HTTPS, SSH all failed.
Cloudwatch showed all metrics as “flat” for the few minutes after I stopped getting a response.
I would like to note that we have been using this server for approxim [read] Keywords: domino
enterprise
linux
mysql
oracle
server
websphere
46
Problem creating an AMI from a running instance with ec2-bundle-vol
Mon, Feb 7th 2011 4:15a David Killingsworth I’m writing this blog post in the hopes that some wise soul out there happens to read this post and responds with the answer. I am truly stumped.
I’m running an instance store instance at Amazon. I would like to bundle a custom AMI in case something happens to the instance as it did to our instance a few days ago.
Our instance is built from a high availability, high performance AMI built by Pantheon. After we spin up the instance, we still have a bit of customizations. Namely setting [read] Keywords: domino
google
mysql
security
38
Formatting code or commands on your blog with CSS
Sat, Jan 22nd 2011 6:57p David Killingsworth I have spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to make this blog easier to read visually. One thing I came up with is CSS to make the commands or code that I describe easier to pick out and easier to see due to formatting.
Here’s the CSS I used for the tag. This will allow nicely formatted pre sections with your code or commands. I opted to wrap the words for really long lines instead of using the horiztonal scroller.
I’ve tested this on Mac OS X with Opera, Safari, Chrome, and F [read] Keywords: domino
css
firefox
mac
75
How to configure remote shared access to a git repository on Ubuntu using SSH keys
Tue, Jan 18th 2011 10:13a David Killingsworth Requirements: I have a need to share a git repository on a publicly facing server with our development team who are geographically disparate. The team should not have full root SSH access to the server, and the repository should be private (not publicly accessible).
We would like to use SSH keys for authentication so that the developer does not have to type in their password each time they issue a git command that interacts with the server.
These instructions assume Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and Mac O [read] Keywords: domino
development
interface
linux
mac
password
server
ubuntu
38
Prevent your SSH connection from locking up
Tue, Jan 11th 2011 10:17p David Killingsworth Have you ever been working on a Terminal shell SSH session, get busy and then went back to the shell to issue some more commands or look at something only to find that the shell window has locked up.
This requires you to close the Terminal window, open a new one and then login to your remote session again.
In a previous post here, I showed you how to create a ~/.ssh/config file.
Simply add these two lines to your ~/.ssh/config file and any SSH connection that you have to a remove server should n [read] Keywords: domino
server
82
Simplifying SSH command to access Amazon EC2 server
Tue, Jan 11th 2011 10:17p David Killingsworth If you are like me and you have to push the up arrow in your terminal window each time you need to remember exactly what the command is to access your Amazon EC2 server, here is a time saving SSH configuration trick for you.
example:
$ cd ~/.ec2
$ ssh -i davidskey.pem ubuntu@ec2-69-37-131-80.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
You can create a config file in your ~/.ssh directory to include your identity file for individual host names.
If your Amazon server has a public DNS entry which points [read] Keywords: domino
server
ubuntu
60
Customizations for a Trac & Git install
Thu, Jan 6th 2011 11:15p David Killingsworth I spent 2 days setting up my trac server the way I wanted it. Here’s what I did.
These instructions will help you get going faster than I did. There are a few things that need to be tweaked to get it working, and a couple of modules that will make administration easier.
My setup has the following requirements:
No anonymous/public access, SSL traffic, accountmanager plugin to add and configure users through the trac webadmin interface, and gitplugin for use with a Git repository.
These ins [read] Keywords: admin
administration
domino
interface
linux
password
server
smtp
ubuntu
169
Drupal Custom Breadcrumb visibility PHP code
Mon, Nov 8th 2010 7:14a David Killingsworth I needed to show a custom breadcrumb on specific pages by URL.
The nodes in question were of “page” content type.
The URLs of these nodes were like:
/green
/green/page1
/green/page2
/green/page3 and so on.
I only wanted the custom breadcrumb to show up on:
/green/page1
/green/page2
/green/page3
and not on /green
I created a breadcrumb with title “Green” and path “green” and used this PHP code for visibility:
$p= explode(‘/’, $_REQUEST['q [read] Keywords: domino
31
Note to self: print_r statements are your friend
Wed, Oct 27th 2010 7:26a David Killingsworth Debugging a Drupal theme this early morning and remembered that using a print_r statement can provide all of the variables in a debug format for you.
print_r(explode(‘/’, $alias)); [read] Keywords: domino
90
Configuring Spamassassin to show score for HAM on cPanel
Fri, Oct 15th 2010 1:07a David Killingsworth Lately, I’ve been getting a storm of pesky junk mail on an account which is hosted on a dedicated WHM/cPanel server.
The WHM/cPanel server is a Centos 5 server with Exim mail server and Spamassassin anti-spam software installed and configured.
I went through the normal operation of staring at /var/log/maillog and /var/log/exim_rejectlog, as well as sending a test spam message to the server to make sure that the server was filtering spam properly and it seemed to be filtering messages ok.
S [read] Keywords: domino
centos
server
How to create a MySQL Workbench connection to Amazon EC2 server
Wed, Oct 6th 2010 5:26p David Killingsworth I’ve been working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) quite a bit recently.
I’ve also started working with Ubuntu at the same time. The result is the ability to quickly spin up new instances of Ubuntu server to use for various reasons without all the hassle of new hardware, or even alot of configuration headache. Using Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), an administrator can spin up an instance that is already configured, patched, and ready to run.
Using this techn [read] Keywords: domino
mac
mysql
password
server
ubuntu
49
Two brilliant color scheme oriented websites
Wed, Oct 6th 2010 5:26p David Killingsworth If you are doing any development work at all, the theming and UI process is extraordinarily important.
I’ve found two websites, which I’ve been using for various projects.
The first, and probably widely known is kuler.adobe.com. This has color combination schemes, many of which are contributed by the community (your fellow designers/developers).
The second, is called http://www.perbang.dk/color+scheme/ and it allows you to submit an individual color, and it will show you color matche [read] Keywords: domino
community
development
47
Firefox sidebar RSS reader like Lotus Notes 8?
Wed, Oct 6th 2010 5:26p David Killingsworth I’m wondering if anyone out there in the blogsphere knows a firefox plugin that will allow RSS results from various blogs to show up in the Firefox sidebar similar to how you can configure the Lotus Notes 8 client to do so.
I really love this feature about Lotus Notes 8, and when not using the client on a regular basis, miss the feature.
I find it too tedious to continue open a stand alone RSS reader, or view the RSS toolbar at the top of firefox, thus miss alot of good posts out there. If [read] Keywords: domino
lotus
notes
blogSphere
firefox
77
Adding exceptions for Apache mod_sec 2.5
Mon, Sep 27th 2010 4:31p David Killingsworth I have some developers working on a site on a cPanel/WHM CentOS 5 server which has Apache running with the mod_security or mod_sec module running. This is a module that prevents several types of attacks against the server. It is sometimes referred to as an open source intrusion detection and prevention engine for web applications, or web application firewall.
To make a long story short, you can place rules in a configuration file, and if those rules are triggered during an HTTP request, the clie [read] Keywords: domino
application
applications
centos
security
server
42
Using Linux Ubuntu 10.04 Lynx server
Thu, Sep 23rd 2010 5:28p David Killingsworth A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog entry asking the community about your thoughts on Fedora/CentOS versus Debian/Ubuntu.
In the end, I decided that there was so much discussion going on about Ubuntu that I wanted to give it a try. So I’ve been using Linux Ubuntu 10.04 Lynx server. I’ve setup an instance at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2).
Overall, things seem pretty straight forward and there seems to be quite alot more documentation out there about how to use/co [read] Keywords: domino
centos
community
linux
server
ubuntu
41
How to recursively set the file permissions for all .php files on a *nix box
Thu, Sep 23rd 2010 4:25p David Killingsworth I had a need today to change the security of all .php files in a sub-directory, which contained dozens of sub-directories.
I figured out how to do it recursively with the find command. In the example below, I set all *.php files to chmod 755.
All other files with a file extension other than .php and directories were unaffected.
> cd /mydirectory
> find . -type f -name ‘*.php’ -exec chmod 755 {} ; [read] Keywords: domino
security
2012-01-19 17:25:57 Failed to fetch http://domino.symetrikdesign.com/?feed=rss2. (HTTP Response: HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
). 
