Feb

23

Arranging Firefox Bookmarks in Alphabetical Order

February 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Sometimes, people spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to arrange their Firefox bookmarks in alphabetical order. Here is a very simple way of doing that:
- Click on Bookmarks in your Firefox browser.The list of all your bookmarks appears.
- Right-click somewhere on that bookmarks list – for example on ‘Organise Bookmarks’ and choose ‘Sort By Name’ from the local context menu,

That’s it. Simple.

Jan

30

How To Enable Theme Editor and Plugin Editor on Wordpress MU

January 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Many Wordpress Mu administrators want to be able to easily customize their themes and plugins directly from the Wordpress Mu dashboard, just as it can be easily done on normal Wordpress dashboards,  but they are frustrated by not being able to access the theme editor and plugin editor.

Simply put, on the WPMU dashboard,  the  “Theme Editor” under Appearance section and “Plugin Editor” under Plugins section are nowhere to be seen.

In order to enable the theme editor and the plugin editor on your WPMU panel, you simply need to edit one file: mu.php situated in the wp-admin/includes folder.

Here is how I enabled the editors on the dashboard of my Wordpress Mu 2.8.6 installation:

- Go to “wp-admin/includes” folder of your Wordpress MU installation and open the mu.php file with your text editor.

- Comment the two lines in mu.php which are actually there to remove the plugin editor and the theme editor from the dashboard. To do that:
Search for the line “unset( $submenu['plugins.php'][15] );”
in mu.php and comment that line.
Search for the line “unset( $submenu['themes.php'][10] );” in mu.php and comment that line.

Here is what you get after commenting the two lines.
/* unset( $submenu['plugins.php'][15] ); */ // always remove the plugin
/* unset( $submenu['themes.php'][10] ); */  // always remove the themes

- Search for the  “function disable_some_pages”, and within the code of that function, locate the  line:

“if ( strpos( $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], $page ) ) {”

and change that line into:

“if ( strpos( $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], $page )&& !is_site_admin() ) {”

- Upload your mu.php file back to the wp-admin/includes folder.

Check now in your Wordpress MU dashboard: the theme editor (under ‘Appearance’ section and plugin editor (under ‘Plugins’ section should work properly in your wordpress MU installation.

Jan

30

Google Sitemaps on Wordpress-MU Platform

January 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Have you tried to get Google Sitemaps running on a Wordpress-Mu platform? There are a few sitemap plugins available, but the problem is that all of the plugins I could find put the sitemap.xml file in the Wordpress mu install directory. The generated sitemap is useful for the primary blog, but not for the subdomain blogs or the subdirectory blogs.

During my research, I came across the famous sitemap generator plugin for wordpress called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It can allow you to easily generate Google XML SiteMap within your blog. But unfortunately the last version I found was not developed for WordPress MU, either.  By default, it could only generate the XML sitemap for the primary blog, not all other blogs in your WordPress MU. That was not enough for me as I had to register all my blogs with the search engines.

I finally came across an interesting article which explains how easy it is to change the code within the Sitemap Generator for Wordpress in order to make it generate sitemaps for various blogs installed on a Wordpress Mu platform.

You first download the Google XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress plugin.

You then edit the sitemap-core.php file in the plugin’s folder, and make the following changes:

In the function “GetXmlUrl”, line 1351, change to:

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1358		 function GetXmlUrl($forceAuto=false) {
if(!$forceAuto && $this->GetOption(“b_location_mode”)==“manual”) {
return $this->GetOption(“b_fileurl_manual”);
} else {
return trailingslashit(get_bloginfo(’siteurl’)) . ‘files/’ .
$this->GetOption(“b_filename”);
}
}

and in the GetXmlPath function, line 1382, change to:

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1389		 function GetXmlPath($forceAuto=false) {
if(!$forceAuto && $this->GetOption(“b_location_mode”)==“manual”) {
return $this->GetOption(“b_filename_manual”);
} else {
wp_mkdir_p(ABSPATH . UPLOADS);
return ABSPATH . UPLOADS . $this->GetOption(“b_filename”);
}
}

This change makes that from now on, the sitemap files will be stored on a per blog basis, inside the blog’s uploads folder.

Upload your modified plugin into the plugins folder, activate it as usual and rebuild your sitemap for each of your blogs.

I am happy to have come across this article. It works and that’s why I had to share it with you.

Jan

22

Registering blogs under Wordpress-mu with Google

January 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Wordpress-mu is a platform with which you can allow people to create their own blog. Most installations are in the subdomain format, i.e. you have the main domain such as www.example.com and the other subdomain blogs such as blog01.example.com, blog02.example.com etc…
If you want to get the stats for all these blogs, you have to register all the blogs individually.
You can not only register the main domain and expect Google to provide you with all statistics relating to the subdomain blogs. You have to go through the verification process in your Google account. Each subdomain is an independant site and you have to prove that the are yours in order to see all statistics and apply on them all the Google tools in your account.
Note that verifying the blog is a step, different from the one of creating a sitemap for your sites.

Thanks

Jan

22

How to keep tabs open when closing firefox?

January 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Sometimes, you might want to keep your Firefox tabs open when you close the browser. There is an easy and convenient way of ensure that Firefox brings them back when it starts next time.

Go to Tools > Options > Main
In the startup section, for When Firefox Starts: choose Show my windows and tabs from last time.

That’s it!

May

3

DELETE Key helps to complete booting process after a “Press ESC to cancel loading sptd.sys” message.

May 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment

A few days ago, I turned on my laptop, and it did not start. It just got up to the windows xp logo, and then just restarted. I tried starting it with the Last Good Known Configuration but it failed and the computer restarted.
I tried to start it in Safe Mode, but as some point, while still loading the drivers, it stopped and displayed the message: “Press Esc to cancel loading SPTD.sys”.
Pressing the Esc key didn’t help. The computer just kept showing quickly a blank screen and restarting.
This problem occurred after I had installed and then uninstalled the same day a PDF edit and I thought that I should try to find a way of restoring my computer to a previous state where it was stable.

This morning, I decided to have a closer look at what was happening and to sort that problem out. As before, I could not boot normally, could not get the Last Known Good Configuration, and in the Safe Mode, I was still getting the message “Press Esc to cancel loading SPTD.sys”.

But before taking any other step, I wanted first to see which message the laptop generated before restarting while starting in normal mode. Normally it shows a blank screen and restarts so fast that I have no way of seeing the error message. So I decided to start the computer in Normal mode, and while the computer was loading the windows XP logo, I kept pressing the DELETE key repeatedly. My ’silly’ idea was that I would hopefully be able to stop the computer at the point of error and be able to read the message it displays before restarting.
I don’t know if it is by chance, but the computer didn’t stop at the blank screen. It continued the booting process and Windows XP started normally. I was so happy.
After logging in, I found the Restore Point before the date I installed the last software and I restored that configuration.
I restarted the computer and everything is now working fine.
I thought that sharing this experience would probably be useful for some people in the future.