Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

4Dec/170

Navigating Coinbase’s customer support

A company with which I am involved recently reconfigured its Coinbase account. This was precipitated by a change in the Stripe API, where Stripe shifted away from Coinpayments.net to another exchange for handling cryptocurrencies.

So, while this company had a prior arm's length arrangement with Coinbase, it never actually had to deal with the entity directly...until recently.

15Jul/140

What not to do with a free WordPress plugin

The Subscribe2 plugin for WordPress, which powers the email notifications of new posts to this blog, was recently turned over from the original developer to a new group. Often, this is a good thing: a devloper runs out of time and energy to maintain his work, and someone else steps up. Sometimes, however, it's not such a good thing.

16Feb/140

Conditional menus for WordPress with the Suffusion theme and mega menus

The Rosenthal & Rosenthal site is undergoing a major revamp, moving from a static, all-Flash (yech) accumulation of static pages and compiled Flash objects to WordPress 3.8.1.

In addition to rebuilding on a stable platform, the redesign plan involves a number of new features, some of which I'll document here on my personal blog to try to contribute to the community 1.

  1. I truly dislike the phrase "give back," as I've not taken anything; I do, however, contribute, as I can.
25Nov/131

Working around the broken RSS feed code in Joomla! 3.2

I'll probaby backfill some more tips & tricks I've picked up this past week, during an upgrade of a client's site from Joomla! 1.5.22 to 3.2, but in the meantime, as this seems to be a nagging bug (well a collection of them; not necessarily a swarm or even a hive, but a colony, nonetheless), I figured I should get something posted about it to hopefully save someone else an hour or two of poking (and testing modules to just replace the built-in feed module, anyway).

25Jun/132

WordPress, WooCommerce, and the elusive WP_MEMORY_LIMIT issue

WooCommerce (and likely some other WordPress plugins - and non-WordPress apps - tend to be rather microcosmic when determining system settings. Case in point: the PHP memory limit.

Prior to PHP 5.2.1, the per-script memory limit available was set at compile time (via the --enable-memory-limit option). With 5.2.1, we got the php.ini directive:

memory_limit <integer>

to set this value at run time 1. In fact, it can even be overridden (if the server admin allows) so that specific apps may set it themselves, thus allowing for greater granularity across all running PHP applications on the server, even under the same instance of the engine.

  1. http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.memory-limit
26May/130

Still more PHP 5.3 fixes for Joomla! 1.5

When you're on a roll, you're on a roll...

Almost done patching this particular old rowboat. This installment deals with quieting this bit of error log noise:

PHP Deprecated:  Function eregi() is deprecated in blahblah\components\com_htmlmap\views\htmlmap\tmpl\default_map.php on line 20

26May/130

Updating the TCPDF library in Joomla! 1.5

TCPDF is an excellent PHP class for creating PDFs from dynamic (or static, for that matter) web content. Unfortunately, the version of TCPDF bundled with Joomla! 1.5 (all 1.5 releases after at least 1.5.8 - someone please correct me if I am wrong - was version 2.6.000_PHP4, dated March 7, 2008. It's also not very PHP 5.3-friendly (there are other parts of Joomla! 1.5 which are not fully compatible with PHP 5.3, but this article will focus on TCPDF). Time to freshen up, methinks.

27Apr/131

Removing the WP Post to PDF icon in WPTouch Pro

This is a follow-up to an earlier post I did, which dealt with removing the WP Post to PDF icon in the free version of WPTouch. I've since registered for the Pro version of WPTouch, and the solution is a bit more elegant (and less obvious).

1Jan/130

Removing the WP Post to PDF icon in WPTouch

I recently added (and slightly enhanced the usability of) the WP Post to PDF plugin for WordPress (more on my tweaks in a later post). The plugin utilizes the TCPDF class for creating PDFs of selected pages and/or posts on a WordPress blog.

What I discovered, however, was that the plugin doesn't seem to want to play nicely with WPTouch (broken pdf links). I was going to address that, but decided that a more practical approach would be to just disable the icon altogether, if only to regain the screen real estate otherwise surrendered to the image.

21Oct/120

Mass editing users in WordPress

Eek!

A thousand apologies to those of you who have received email notifications of my last post, which added two new categories to the blog. Following up on an enhancement request from a long-time friend to provide email notifications of new posts, I installed the Subscribe2 plugin. Not fully understanding the ramifications of setting "Option for Registered Users to auto-subscribe to new categories is checked by default" to "Yes," I set that, which automatically enabled all existing users as subscribers to newly-created categories, even if they were not subscribed to any categories previously (my reading of this option was that only new registrants would be auto-subscribed to new categories, thus saving them click-time during setup).