Yearly Archives: 2009

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24Dec 2009

More phone foibles

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Yes, I’m still in the market for a new phone. I’m now 2 months away from the end of my contract which means that if I stick with O2 and Carphone Warehouse I can move contracts now. Except, well, they don’t have a half decent Android phone.

At the moment the HTC Hero is the only one that interests me. None-the-less the New Year looks to bring the Sony Ericsson X10 and the Google Nexus One so, right now, my plan is to ride out my final 2 months and then look seriously at what’s available. If it’s still only the Hero in contention then I’ll jump ship and move networks.

Whilst I’m on the subject of Carphone Warehouse, I received a letter after I had 2 months of remaining contract, saying that I would SOON have only 2 months left. But it confirmed the correct date, indicating that it had already passed. Hmmm. After that, though, I heard nothing for a week until I started getting mysterious phone calls in the evening – if I don’t recognise the number then I don’t answer. Anyway, they eventually rang during the day and I decided to see who it was. The voice was distant and foreign enough to make understanding them quite difficult. They identified themselves as being from Carphone Warehouse, but a few seconds later the line went dead (duff signal I suspect). They never rang back.

22Dec 2009

WordPress 2.9 and my pages!

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I updated to WordPress 2.9 yesterday. All appeared fine.

That is, until I went to update a page today and found the Edit button didn’t work any more. Neither was the URL shortening for the page. And then I noticed that all the comments were missing.

It appeared that the URL for the page was not being returned correctly. At first I thought this to be a potential WordPress fault but after installing the default page.php into my theme it worked! So I’m slowly converting my pages using them default theme page as a template. So, bear with me as it will take a while to do this (work, Christmas, etc, all getting in the way!).

It’s strange that I haven’t found any reference to any of this functionality being changed…

Update

I found the fault. It was this line…

if (function_exists('simple_social_bookmarks'))

  ..which I use to detect if the current user has editing rights – if so, the edit option is displayed. I’ve now modified the edit_post_link parameter to do this instead.

No mention of this being changed in this way in any of the documentation and it works fine with posts. Weird.

19Dec 2009

Plugin Support

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The WordPress plugins I produce are, as with most, free. And I’m happy to answer any questions and provide whatever support I can. I don’t think many people wouldn’t expect any more than that.

None-the-less, I regularly receive requests for assistance that are bizarre, time wasting and sometimes just rude.

Two people have asked for help when a plugin hasn’t worked only for me to find, after a lot of time spent on it, that they’d changed my actual code. Sorry, but if you modify my code then I can hardly be expected to support the results. Of course, if you do find the need to modify my code, let me know as it may be functionality that I can add in for later versions.

One person recently contacted me and was, well, down right rude, thinking I was mad to produce a plugin reading RSS feeds that didn’t cache. He didn’t realise that I was already writing code to do this – I just ignored him.

Finally there was the person who attempted to post a comment in which they were very sarcastic about a plugin, simply because they were having problems with it. They complained that my added (also known as “improved”) functionality was just causing problems. Ironically, bearing in mind the previous persons comment, the functionality in question was caching. I believe they hadn’t followed my instructions on ensuring the cache folder was fully writeable. Ignoring their sarcasm I replied – helpfully – but heard nothing back. I edited their comment before allowing it to be published (yes, I do check all comments before allowing them to be seen!).

So, there we go.

If you do want help, I’d suggest that using the comment page is best as this can ensure an easy 2-way dialogue between us – I don’t like having long discussions via blog comments! If you do use the comment, I’ll probably use the email you supply to contact you directly. I’ll then use the comments to give details of the fix.

I hope this makes sense. Keep the rude comments and sarcasm to a minimum and I’ll be sure to help – having said that I’ve usually helped even when that’s not been the case. I’m my own worst enemy ;)

11Dec 2009

Beeb See Me 2

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I missed this at the time – I also got a mention (and more links) on the BBC Internet Blog weekly round-up.

…blogger David Artiss was pleasantly surprised that he had some BBC bods commenting on his Wii post and more so that we’d linked to him from the blog
11Dec 2009

Plugin error “cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode”

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Today I’ve had reported to me that one of my plugins (Simple Twitter Link – but I’m sure this equally occur in others) is generating the error “cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode”. In fact, it generates it about 200 times.

The problem? Well, it’s a bug in version 4 of PHP, so there’s not much I can do about it (sorry!). It’s fixed in PHP 5, though.

One suggested solution is to force your server to use PHP 5 – many have version 5 installed, but just not set as the default. To do this simply put AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php in the first line of your .htaccess file.

I use html_entity_decode for the post title. At the moment I do this whether you ask for the title or not – I’ll make a change for the future to ONLY do this if requested. That way you can omit the title to prevent this error from occurring. This will definitely also affect Simple Social Bookmarks and Simple Facebook Link.

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