Posts Tagged ‘form’
Friday, April 6th, 2012 I'm running WordPress for already 3 years or so now. Since some very long time. The first wordpress install, I can hardly remember but it something like wordpress 2.5 or wordpress 2.4
Since quite a long time my wordpress blog is powered by a number of plugins, which I regularly update, whenever new plugins pops up …
I haven't noticed most of the time problems during major WordPress platform updates or the update of the installed extensions. However, today while I tried to reply back to one of my blog comments, I've been shocked that, I couldn't.
Pointing at the the Comment Reply box and typing inside was impossible and a null message was stayed filled in the form:
To catch what was causing this weird misbehaving with the reply comments functionality, I grepped through my /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins/* for the movecfm(null,0,1,null):
# cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins
# grep -rli 'movecfm(null,0,1,null)' */*.php
wordpress-thread-comment/wp-thread-comment.php
I've taken the string movecfm(null,0,1,null) from the browser page source in in my Firefox by pressing – Ctrl+U).
Once I knew of the problem, I first tried commenting the occurances of the null fields in wp-thread-comment.php, but as there, were other troubles in commenting this and I was lazy to read the whole code, checked online if some other fellows experienced the same shitty null void javascript error and already someone pointed at a solution. In the few minutes search I was unable to find anyone who reported for this bug, but what I found is some user threads on wordpress.org mentioning since WordPress 2.7+ the wordpress-threaded-comments is obsolete and the functionality provided by the plugin is already provided by default in newer WPinstalls.
Hence in order to enable the threaded comments WordPress (embedded) reply functionality from within the wp-admin panel used:
Settings -> Discussions -> Enable Threaded (nested) comments (Tick)
You see there is also an option to define how many nested comments subcomments, can be placed per comment, the default was 5, but I thought 5 is a bit low so increased it to 10 comments reply possible per comment.
Finally, to prevent the default threaded comments to interfere with the WordPress Threaded Comments plugin, disabled the plugin through menus:
Plugins -> Active -> WordPress Thread Comments (Deactivate)
This solved the weird javascript null "bug" caused by wordpress-threaded-comments once and for all.
Hopefully onwards, my blog readers will not have issues with threaded Reply Comments.
Tags: admin panel, Auto, code, Comment, Ctrl, Draft, fellows, few minutes, Firefox, form, grep, long time, misbehaving, movecfm, null fields, null message, number, occurances, option, page, page source, php, phpI, platform, plugin, Plugins, quot, reply comments, rli, someone, something, thread, threads, tick, time, time problems, Wordpress, wordpress blog, wp
Posted in Web and CMS, Wordpress | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 Some long time ago, I've created one user called newuser, on my home FreeBSD router and added him to be a member of wheel group.I've completely forgot about the users existing, just until yesterday when I saw the user still hanging around in my wheel group.For those unfamiliar with the wheel group on FreeBSD, wheel is the same like root group on Linux and some other *nices.
Before proceed with the reason fot this post to show the proper way of adding and removing user to a group on BSD, I will first explain a bit few things concerning BSD password files, where they are and why are they so many 🙂
On the first glimpse, people unfamiliar with BSD will be shocked / (confused) to find out there are 5 files, which has something to do to password authentication.
1. Some short explanation on /etc/passwd /etc/master.passwd, /etc/pwd.db, /etc/spwd.db, /etc/group and login.conf.db BSD auth and login filesFreeBSD and rest of the BSD family has 5 files which deal with username and password authentication, group ids, default shell configs etc.:
The 5 ones are:
- /etc/passwd
- /etc/master.passwd
- /etc/group
- /etc/pwd.db
- /etc/spwd.db
/etc/passwd is readable by all the users on the system whether /etc/master.passwd is only readable by root and toor administrative users. In that numbers members to wheel group have access for reading to all of the five.
Just like on Linux /etc/passwd contains all kind of system existing users … everything except the stored user passwords strings.
/etc/master.passwd is actually the BSD equivalent of Linux's /etc/shadow file. It stores md5 encrypted user passwords (by default) in a form of encrypted hashes. For tightened security one can, however choose to use a blowfish password hash encryption instead.
Since my newuser was a member to group, the user had read access to my /etc/master.passwd and hence this was a potential potential security hole on my system.
To close the whole I decided to remove newuser's membership to wheel group.
Before I say how I actually did it. I will sawy few more words on BSD systems authentication files structure.
The file /etc/master.passwd is actually the BSD equivalent of Linux's /etc/shadow.
Besides /etc/password and /etc/master.passwd, on BSD there are also two other separate binary database files storing authentication user credentials:
freebsd# ls -l /etc/pwd.db /etc/spwd.db
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 90112 Mar 13 23:56 /etc/pwd.db
-rw------- 1 root wheel 90112 Mar 13 23:56 /etc/spwd.db
In case if you're wondering what are this two *pwd.db files for:
/etc/pwd.db contains in database format /etc/passwd content
/etc/spwd.db contains in database format /etc/master.password
, spwd.db stands for (shadow) pwd.db.
Near the end of the man page for pwd_mkdb, pwd.db is described as "insecure password database file and spwd.db as secure password database file.
The exact database type can be displayed with file command which is alawys helpful in (determining a file types).
I use file almost daily to check the (MIME) type of most of the "weird" file type extensions I have on my system. If not yet familiar with file cmd, be sure to try it on few various file extensions and see how it works.
freebsd# file /etc/pwd.db
/etc/pwd.db: Berkeley DB 1.85 (Hash, version 2, native byte-order)
freebsd# file /etc/spwd.db
/etc/spwd.db: Berkeley DB 1.85 (Hash, version 2, native byte-order)
You see, files are stored in format of Berkley DB Hash version 2.
The two files got updated every time with command pwd_mkdb whether a change in /etc/master.passwd occurs through use of lets say pw or vipw.
Btw, one common way to initiate changes to /etc/master.passwd (lets say modify a user shell) is possible through vipw command.
vipw is a wrapper command that launch instance of vi editor over /etc/master.passwd, once changes are saved in the file, pwd_mkdb is run to regenerate the /etc/pwd.db and /etc/spwd.db. With this in mind vipw on BSD is the equivalent of manually editting /etc/shadow with vi /etc/shadow on G / Linux.
Whether talking about user credentials and /etc/pwd.db and /etc/spwd.db, its worthy to mention there is one more db file – /etc/login.conf.db. /etc/login.conf.db is red everytime a user logs in the system. It is is generated from the plain text /etc/login.conf. Just in case if wondering why this .db files are used on FreeBSD at all, the reason is efficiency.
Reading binary database (structured data) as we all know is way faster than plain text file look ups
The performance advantage of the BSD's use of .db stored credentials is not so-"visible" in normal BSD systems with less than lets say 100 users.
Anyways on systems with few thousands of users that login and logout frequently the speed difference will surely be clear.
Manual generation of /etc/pwd.db and /etc/spwd.db or /etc/login.conf.db is possible via pwd_mkdb and cap_mkdb commands.
After explaining shortly the basic auth files, I'll proceed with my specific case and will explain how I removed my newuser from membership in wheel group.
2. "BSD way" to remove or add existing user to member a group
The record for my user newuser in /etc/group, looked like so:
freebsd# grep -i newuser /etc/groupwheel:*:0:root,hipo,newuser
I was curious if /etc/group was possible to manually edit like on Linux with vi or mcedit.I thought this might be a problem since I thought the /etc/group info might be stored somewhere along in /etc/pwd.db or /etc/spwd.db. My hypothesis, however was wrong.
Straight use of vim /etc/group and deletion of the newuser record was enough to remove the user from wheel.
Anyways this is not a standard way and especially if it has to be scripted it is unnecessery hassel, hence below is the 'BSD way' via pw:
freebsd# pw groupmod wheel -d newuser
There is no output returned, therefore the command executed succesfully.
pw can be used for plenty of user management operations. Lets say I want to add back the newuser to be a member of wheel some time in the future, I could use:
freebsd# pw groupmod wheel -m newuser
To later check if newuser is succesfully removed from /etc/group:
freebsd# grep -i wheel /etc/group
wheel:*:0:root,hipo
Generally it is better, to stick to one way to do everything related to user and group management with pw and use it to show group permissions for wheel instead:
freebsd# pw group show wheel
wheel:*:0:root,hipo
Tags: administrative users, authentication, Auto, blowfish, bsd family, default shell, Draft, everything, existing users, family, file, first glimpse, form, fot, group ids, hash, hashes, Linux, login, long time, Mar, newuser, nices, password, password files, passwords, reading, reason, root, root group, router, security hole, shadow, Shell, something, text, time, toor, type, username, wheel, wheel group
Posted in Computer Security, FreeBSD, System Administration | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012 One of the companies, where I'm doing a part time job, as an IT Consultant, System Administrator and Web developer, a e-marketing specialist and business consultant (the list goes on ;)) … planned to integrate a Newsletter support in their WordPress based websites.
As this fits my "job description" ,I took the task and implemented a simple but functional Newsletter support to their 4 WP based sites. In this article I will in short describe, my experience with placing the Newsletter subscription.:
Earlier I've done something similar as, I've added a subscipriotion (form) box to WordPress to use Google Feedburner RSS . What I needed this time, however was a bit different. The company required the newsletter to be a separate one and don't relay on Google Feedburner (RSS) to deal with the subscriptions .
It took me a while until I came with a working version of a Newsletter and I actually tested all in all 4 newsletter wordpress plugins before, I had a well working one. Here in short, In this article I will shortly take a look at the 4 WP newsletter plugins:
1. A wordpress plugin called simply Newsletter
As of time of writting this is the most popular wordpress plugin, when I looked through:
- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
Wordpress Newsletter plugin can be obtained via http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/newsletter/
Its really Advanced, probably the best free newsletter for WP available as of time of writting. The plugin supports email subscriber user confirmation (double opt-in), as well as can be accustomized to work with single opt-in.
For all those who don't know Double Opt-In is the technical term for a once requested user email (single opt-in), for subscription which is later confirmed by following an email box sent link pointing to confirmation URL.
Double Opt-In is almost a standard and "must" as otherwise, many spam bots will fill in randomly email addresses and your subscribers list will be mostly containing spammer email addresses.
1. Install WordPress Newsletter Plugin To install Newsletter plugin;
a) download and put into wp-content/plugins/ and unzip
server:~# cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins
server:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# wget -q http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/newsletter.zip
server:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# unzip newsletter.zip
b) Enable in Plugins:
Plugins -> Newsletter (Activate)
c) Configure Newsletter
A new menu will appear in the left WP control panel, like you see in below screenshot:
Newsletter plugin is very configurable but it takes a bit of longer time until it is confingured to work well. So be patient with it.
d) Make Newsletter field appear on a wordpress home page.
In order to enable just configure Newsletter plugin (text and subscription form) to appear on the wordpress pages, you need to add the plugin as a widget. To do so go to:
Appearance -> Widgets
Drag and drop the Newsletter plugin widget to the widget right pane. Put it on the exact place you would like it to appear.
Once the widget is placed, you will see it appear to the respective location on WP pages, you should have something like:
If while you enable the plugin and put the Newsletter widget doesn't appear on WordPress, this is probably due to some Cache left from some enabled WP caching pugin like W3 Total Cache
In any case if Newsletter form subscription, is not appearing on your pages, delete the cache/ directory:
# rm -rf /var/www/wordpress-site/wp-content/cache/
I've experienced, this caching problems and it was quite a riddle, until I found out that the Newsletter plugin is not appearing on the WP pages because of the old cache. I've checked bacicly everything (error.log , apache php_error.log) etc.. Therein, there was no error or anything, so after a long 1 hour or so poundering I figured out this kind of caching done by W3 Cache.
My guess is, the same newsletter "not working" issue is probably observable also on WP installs with other caching plugins like WP Hyper Cache or WP Db Cache
2. ALO EasyMail Newsletter WordPress plugin
I don't know, why but this plugin didn't work properly on the wordpress install, I've tested it. Its true the wordpress version where I give it a try was not running, the latest stable wordpress so I assume this might be the reason for the empty pages returned when I enabled the plugin.
According to wordpress's plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/alo-easymail/, the plugin is marked as Works, however in my case it didn't.
3. Adding WordPress Newsletter through Email newsletter
This plugin was a real piece of cake, compared to all of the rest, tested this one was the easiest one to install and configure on WordPress.
Just like with Newsletter and ALO EasyMail Newsletter once the user is subscribed, from the admin there is possibility to sent crafted messages to all subscribers.
The plugin is a great, choice for anyone who is looking for quick install of Newsletter on WordPress without extra "config" complications.
Below is a quote describing email newsletter, taken from the plugin author webpage;
Advantage of this plugin
- Simple no coding required.
- Easy installation .
- Using this plug-in we can send email to all registered folks.
- Using this plug-in we can send email to all comment posted folks.
- Email subscribe box for front end
- Check box option available to select/unselect emails from the send mail list.
- Integrated the email newsletter plugin & simple contact form plugin
– Enabling the plugin is done via admin menus:
Plugins -> Inactive -> Email Newsletter (enable)
Afterwards, the plugin requires a quick configuration from wp-admin:
Email Newsletter -> Subscriber form setting
You see in the screenshot, the config where to place the plugin is trivial.
To make Email Newsletter appear on the pages, you will have to add the Email Newsletter widget from:
Appearance -> Widgets
The widget looks like the one in below screenshot:
Drag and drop the widget to the widgets pane. Onwards on the wordpress pages, should appear an email subsciption box:
Though Email Newsletter is great, it has one serious drawback, as it doesn't support Double Opt-In. Therefore people subscribing through it are not mailed with a request to confirm their email subscription request.
As a result, its very likely many spam-bots submit fake emails in the newsletter subscribe form and in 1 year time your newsletter email list might get full with tens of thousands unexistent emails. If you end up with this bad scenario, once newsletter emails are sent to (regular) exitent subscribers, many of the bulk emails in the list will never reach their senders, but will just fill-up the mail server queue and take up server resources for nothing for one week or so (depending on the email configuration keep undelivered mail setting).
Anyways, since the basis of this plugin works fine, I'm sure if the author modifies it to include a simple Captcha instead of double-opt functionality, the plugin can become top plugin.
Tags: administrator, ALO, Auto, bit, blog, business consultant, Cache, confirmation, confirmation url, description, download, Draft, e mail, email addresses, Feedburner, form, free newsletter, google, Install, job, job description, mail newsletter, marketing, newsletter, newsletter subscription, newsletter support, NewsletterAs, Opt, part time job, plugin, Plugins, quot, relay, something, spammer, specialist, subscriber, subscribers, subscriptions, support, system administrator, time, web developer, Wordpress, wp newsletter, writting
Posted in System Administration, Web and CMS, Wordpress | 3 Comments »
Sunday, June 15th, 2008 At Saturday I had my first driving license. The instructor let me drive on the road for Balchik. Happily the driving went smoothly of course I made a lot of mistakes which is pretty normal for a first time driving. In the afternoon we went out for a walk with Niki. We just went out when Vlado (Hellpain) called, he came back to Dobrich for a day, we met for a coffee after which we stayed for 2 hours in the central park. Today as usual I attended the liturgy at the orthodox Church. Today it’s a big Christian Orthodox holiday, it’s the day in which the Our Lord Jesus Christ send the Holy Spirit to the early Church fathers (the apostles). The apostles heard a great noise and they see the Holy Spirit descending from heaven in a form of burning tongues, each tongue coming above the head of each of the apostles and the rest of the first believers in our Lord and Saviour Jesus. I’m still in doubt should I decide to go or not to the Netherlands. I applied for a room there through http://vivare.nl yesterday. But still haven’t received a confirmation for approval and I haven’t send a deposit for a room. I made research about the Arnhem Business School (ABS) and talked and I’m talking with a friend who went to study in Holland the last year. In the afternoon I watched an old russian movie which is marked as a SCI-FI genre (Kin Dza Dza), I got the title from the top 20 in IMDB. Yeah I can say that the movie was pretty freaky :). Vladi did call me again and said one of the servers in the office had crashed I spoke with of my colleagues with a request to go to the office and restart the box but it seems the box isn’t booting. Tomorrow I’ll catch an early bus for Varna and went to the office to see what’s wrong with the machine (hope it’s not a serious hardware problem). That’s most of it. To be honest although God grants me a lot of his divine grace I still feel a bit of lost and pathless and struggle to fight my lack of faith, and bad habits. I’m praying everyday for a physical healing but I still haven’t completely recovered from my sickness. I have sinned badly in my past and I deserve to have that sickness but still I honestly I’m repenting day after day for my bad life in the past and the near present … Another think I should say is that a friend of mine has died I saw his obituary hanging on a tree 🙁 , His name was Alexander (Sashe) known among us by the nickname (Saketo), he was a drug addict and that killed him I hope he is with God know peace be upon him. END—–
Tags: Apostles, arnhem business school, balchik, Business, central park, colleagues, confirmation, course, deposit, divine grace, driving, Dza, form, freaky, genre, hardware problem, HEAD, Hellpain, holland, holy spirit, IMDB, instructor, Kin, liturgy, lord jesus christ, niki, orthodox church, request, saviour jesus, School, sci fi, time, tomorrow, tongue, tongues, varna, vivare, year
Posted in Everyday Life | No Comments »
Friday, December 3rd, 2010 ‘ve used the RSForms to build some custom Joomla Contact forms.
The RSForms was recommended to me by a friend and actually it’s a pretty cool and quick way to create forms.
I’ve installed it and played a bit with it to create a custom forms for one of the website I had to bring up just recently.
After the contact form was ready however there was a problem with sending emails. It took me quite a while to find out how to solve the problemwith contact not able to mail whatever is filled in.
First time I tried the RSForms after filling in the details and pressing the submit button,I got the error message;
Could not instantiate mail function.
I should say that, I’m running a QMAIL email server on the server where I have the Joomla & RSForms installed and configured.
I’ve came up with a solution to this issue after some research in Google
In order to solve that you will have to login to your Joomla administrator and
Navigate to:
Site -> Global Configuration -> Server
Whenever it opens up you should be seing the Mail Settings on the bottom right corner;
From there you will have to change the Mailer from PHP Mail Function to SMTP Server
To give you a better idea check out the screenshot of the Mail Settings below:
Changing this simple setting resolved the Could not instantiate mail function for me.
Right after I tested the RSForms to send my filled in form content but this time the PHPMAILER_RECIPIENTS_FAILED message was there;
This error was caused actually by a mistake I made in the configuration of the Custom RSForm I have prepared;
In Components -> RSForm!Pro -> Manage forms whenever I was preparing my form I’ve made a mistake in the User Emails customized field in my custom prepared form in the To: field I had a wrong variable set (a different value was set from the E-mail caption I’ve set on).
Solving this solved the issue. Even though the PHPMAILER_RECIPIENTS_FAILED was gone now, next I was unpleasently surprised by another error message which prevented the Contact form to properly send the input data:
Now I had to fight with the error;
PHPMAILER_FROM_FAILED
It took me a while and a lot of forums reading before I figure it out again my custom prepared RSForm had an issue;
The problem was in the Admin Emails customization of the form in the From: fill in box I had mistakenly typed in proper email, setting a proper email there solved the issue;
I’ve red online many suggested solutions to the issue which dealt with changes in the the file joomla/components/com_contact/controller.php around line 112, 162 etc.
I should say that before I found and solved the actual problem I’ve tried modifing this file also but with zero success.
Sometimes Linux is so complicated, it really pisses me of, why is not life easier? 😐
Tags: amp, bottom right corner, Button, Components, contact forms, content, cool, custom, email server, Emails, error message, file, form, function, Global, global configuration, google, How to fix "Could not instantiate mail function", login, mail function, mail settings, Manage, mistake, php, phpmailer, PHPMAILER_RECIPIENTS_FAILED and PHPMAILER_FROM_FAILED on Joomla and RSforms, problemwith, RECIPIENTS, screenshot, site, time, User, value
Posted in Joomla, Programming, System Administration, Various | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010 Two months ago, I’ve developed a contact reservation form in PHP. The form is really easily customizable and is straight forward to integrate.
I’ve developed the form for a small restaurant which was missing the feature on it’s joomla based website in order to be able for restaurant clients to reserve tables.
Here is how my restaurant reservation form looks like:
Later on I found there are plenty of possibilities to easily make a reservation form in Joomla but at that time I had no idea that custom contact forms can be prepared with Joomla, so I developed my own one from scratch in plain PHP and MySQL.
The form’s fields are in Dutch, because the form I’ve developed for a Dutch restaurant.
However changing the form text is really easy,to do so open the php file and modify it, according to your needs.
I decided to share here the reservation form in hope that it might be helpful to somebody out there.
The Reservation form is licensed under GPLv2 so you’re very welcome to distribute and modify it freely.
The form installation is described in the README file you will find bundled with the reservation form archive.
You can d Download my PHP restaurant reservation form here
Feedback on the form is very welcome!
Tags: archive, contact, contact forms, feature, feedback, file, form, idea, installation, Joomla, My PHP/MySQL Restaurant Reservation Form, Mysql, order, php, php mysql, possibilities, README, readme file, Reservation, Restaurant, restaurant reservation, scratch, somebody, text, time, website
Posted in Joomla, Linux, Programming, Various | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011 One of the contact forms running on a FreeBSD server configured to work on top of Apache+MySQL suddenly stopped working.
The errors that appeared on the webpage during a page request to the form url was:
Fatal error: Class 'SimpleXMLElement' not found in /var/www/joomla/plugins/system/plugin_googlemap2_helper.php on line 2176 Fatal error: Class 'JLoader' not found in /var/www/joomla/plugins/libraries/loader.php on line 161
As you see in the output the website which was causing the issues was running a Joomla version 1.5.23 Stable configured with RSForm!ver 1.5.x (as a contact form solution) and Google Maps version 2.13b plugins.
The Google Map from Google Maps plugin and the RSform were configured to appear on one physical configured article in Joomla and seemed to work just until now. However yesterday suddenly the error messages:
Fatal error: Class ‘SimpleXMLElement’ not found
Fatal error: Class ‘JLoader’ not found
came out of nothing, it’s really strange as I don’t remember doing any changes to either Joomla or the PHP installation on this server.
There is one more guy who has access to the Joomla installation which I suspect might have changed something in the Joomla, but this scenario is not very likely.
Anyways as the problem was there I had to fix it up. Obviously as the error message Fatal error: Class ‘SimpleXMLElement’ not found reported the server php simplexml was missing!
Just to assure myself the php simplexml extension is not present on the server I used the classical method of setting up a php file with phpinfo(); in it to check all the installed php extensions on the server.
Finally to solve the issue I had to install the module from ports php5-simplexml , e.g.:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/textproc/php5-simplexml
freebsd# make install clean
Afterwards to make the new settings take place I did restart of my Apache server:
freebsd# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache2 restart
Syntax OK
Stopping apache2.
Waiting for PIDS: 63883.
Performing sanity check on apache2 configuration:
Syntax OK
Starting apache2.
Now my Joomla contact form is back to normal 😉
If someone has any idea why this error occured without any php or server modifications, and how comes that all worked fine beforehand even though I did not have the simplexml module instlaled on the server o_O, I would be enormously greatful.
Tags: apache mysql, apache server, Auto, classical method, contact forms, Draft, error message, error messages, fatal error, file, form, form solution, freebsd server, google, google map, google maps, installation, JLoader, loader, Map, Maps, page, page request, php, php extensions, php file, php installation, php simplexml, phpinfo, place, plugin, ports, request, server php, simplexml, something, Stable, Stopping, system, url, Waiting, yesterday
Posted in FreeBSD, Joomla, System Administration, Web and CMS | No Comments »
Saturday, April 9th, 2011 I have noticed that many blogs nowdays offer an email subscription box to simplify the subscription procedure for the blog readers.
My blog was lacking this feature so I took the time to find out how can I add an e-mail subscription box field on my blog.
My research has shown me that the easiest way to add the subscription box is by using Google’s Feedburner RSS service .
I’ve been using Google FeedBurner for quite some time and I’ve already 27 subscriptions with it.
Earlier when I added a FeedBurner subsciption to my blog I’ve blogged about it, so if you’re not acquainted on how to add FeedBurner service to your blog, you might want to read my previous article Adding RSS Feed to WordPress in conjunction with FeedBurner / WordPress add-to-any-subscribe plugin
In this article I will explain in short step by step, how to add the subscrpition email box to your wordpress I assume, that the reader has already enabled and configured registration with Feedburner, if you still haven’t just skip few lines above and check my previous article.
I would hereby skip the explanation of why feedburner as an RSS is so advantageous for every blog owner and readers and skip further to the email subscription procedure step by step instructions:
Step 1: Login to your FeedBurner Account
In my case my feedburner account url is accessed via the URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/WalkingInLightWithChrist-FaithComputingDiary
I have been properly logged in to my feedburner, so to view statistics of my current feeds subscription and to configure various variables of feedburner I had to access the URL address: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds, a very quick shortcut to my feedburner account settings is also avaialable by simply accessing the URL: http://feedburner.com
Step 2: Click on the link that says My Feeds
If you have configured feeds for your feedburner you will get the list of feedburner feeds, (one could have multiple feeds, let’s say if you have a couple of blogs or sites and you use one feedburner account to podcast your feeds for each of the separated blogs or sites.
Step 3: Click over the feed you want to have the feedburner email subscription box
Below you see the screenshot of my configured feedburner feed:
Right after clicking on your configured feed in my case Walking in Light With Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary you will see the screen:
Step 4: Click on Publicize menu
You will see the following two screens while scrolling with your browser:
You see in the second screenshot above there is a textbox with a html form code, to set the feedburner subscription to appear on your blog you need to copy/paste this code and put it on your blog.
After copy/pasting the code, don’t forget to scroll down in your browser and save the email subscription generated form settings, (NB! if you don’t save it it want be working even if you install it on your blog).
Here is the Save button screenshot:
Step 5: Setting up feedburner email textbox to wordpress
In order to set up the just copied html and css form code you need to login to your wordpress blog admin and go to:
Appearance -> Widgets
Scroll over the Available Widgets list, find the Text Widget and press the Add button to include the Text Widget to your blog sidebar.
Further on the same Widgets page, go to the Sidebar menu find the just added Text Widget and click over the Edit link:
Here is my screenshot of the edit screen of the Text Widget:
Step 6. Add the feedburner email subscription box to single posts blog views
This step is not a requirement, but I found it for myself to be vital, as it might rise some more subscribers to my blog, if my blog readers finds individual indexed pages in Google.
This step is also highly dependant on the wordpress theme you use, I use the old wordpress default theme and it’s default behaviour is not to show up the wordpress sidebar, whether an individual wordpress post is clicked over, therefore to enable my feedburner subscription box for individual posts I also need to place the form code obtained from Feedburner.com’s to my templates single.php
If you’re using some kind of theme that doesn’t have the non-sidebar single post behaviour you might skip forward this step, otherwise just continue on reading.
To include the feedburner email form subscription to my single posts I edited blog/wp-content/themes/default/single.php
In the single.php file find the code:
<?php comments_template(); ?>
Immediately after the above code place your feedburner form code, like you see in below screenshot:
Step 7: Modify your form code css and javascript to make your feedburner more accustomed for your needs
Again this step is voluntary and is not necessery I’ve disliked the default way the form is formatted so I played a bit with few of it’s values to customize it to my likings, the things which I have changed a bit in the provided feedburner form code was:
- Remove the Delivered by Feedburner text from the form
-
>To do so in the issued feedburner form code below when you copy the code paste it to some text editor and remove from the code the text:<p>Delivered by <a href=”http://feedburner.google.com” target=”_blank”>FeedBurner</a></p>
- – Change the subsciption box width and height:
-
style=”width:140px”Changed that to:style=”width:120px”also I’ve changed:’scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520’to:’scrollbars=yes,width=450,height=420’Another point of interest for adjustmnets in the feedburner for are in the form code:
- Remove feedburner subscription form default bordering
-
form style=”border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;”I’ve changed that to:form style=”border:0px solid #ccc;padding:2px;text-align:center;”By changing the css values border:1px to border:0px I have instructed the subscription box to show up without borders.
That’s all now refresh in your browser and check if the feedburner email subscription form is showing up properly to your wordpress.
To completely ensure yourself it works correctly try to subscribe yourself to the form and during your next blog post you should receive an email notifying you about the newly written article.
You can see, my blog feedburner subscription form on the blog right sidebar or on the below picture:
Hope that article will help somebody out there.
Tags: account settings, blogs, Button, Click, code, configure, conjunction, e mail, explanation, feature, Feed, Feedburner, form, google, mail subscription, menu, php, plugin, podcast, quite some time, screen, screenshot, scroll, sidebar, statistics, step 1, step 2, subsciption, subscription procedure, subscriptions, subscrpition, time, url, url address, variables, Wordpress
Posted in Various, Web and CMS, Wordpress | 7 Comments »
Saturday, January 28th, 2012 I've earlier blogged on playing Apogee's Raptor Shadows of Death arcade on GNU / Linux with dosbox
All the old school raptor addicts will be interested to hear Kazzmir (Jon Rafkind) a free software devotee developer has created a small game resembling many aspects of the original Raptor arcade game.
The game is called Rafkill and is aimed to be a sort of Raptor like fork/clone.
Originally the game was also named Raptor like the DOS game, however in year 2006 it was changed to current Rafkill in order to avoid legal issues with Apogee's Raptor.
The game is not anymore in active development, the latest Rafkill release is from January 2007, anyhow even for the 2012 it is pretty entertaining. The sound and music are on a good level for a Linux / BSD shoot'em'up free software game . The graphics are not of a top quality and are too childish, but this is normal, since the game is just one man masterpiece.
Rafkill is developed in C/C++ programming language, the game music engine it uses is called DUMB (Dynamic Universal Bibliotheque). By the way DUMB library is used for music engine in many Linux arcade games. DUMB allows the Linux game developer to develop his game and play a music files within different game levels in "tracked" formats like mod, s3m, xm etc.
The game is available in compiled form for almost all existent GNU/Linux distributions, as well as one can easily port it as it is open source.
To install Rafkill on Debian, Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Linux Mint en other Debian based distros
root@debian:~# apt-get install rafkill
Installing on Fedora and other rpm based is with yum
debian:~# apt-get install rafkill
...
Once rafkill is installed, in order to start it on Debian the only way is using the rafkill (/usr/bin/rafkill) command. It appears the deb package maintainer did not wrote a gnome launcher file like for example /usr/share/applications/rafkill.desktop
Just to explain for all the GNOME noobs, the .desktop files are a description file GNOME reads in order to understand where exactly to place certain application in the (Gnome Applications, Places, System …) menu panel.
Even though it miss the .desktop, it is launchable via Applications menu under the Debian section e.g. to open it from the GNOME menus you will have to navigate to:
Applications -> Debian -> Games -> Action -> Rafkill
This "shortcut" to launch the game is quite long and hard to remember thus it is handy to directly launch it via xterm:
hipo@debian:~$ rafkill
or by pressing ALT+F2 and typing rafkill :
Starting the game I got some really ugly choppy music / sound issues.
My guess was the fizzling sounds were caused by some bug with the sound portions streamed through pulseaudio sound system.
To test if my presume is correct, stopped pulseaudio and launched rafkill once again:
hipo@debian:~$ pulseaudio -k
hipo@debian:~$ rafkill
This way the game was counting on ALSA to process sound en the sound was playing perfectly fine.
I solved this problem through small wrapper shell script. The script did kill pulseaudio before launching rafkill and that way solve gchoppy sound issues, once the game execution is over the script starts pulseaudio again in order to prevent all other applications working with pulseaudio.
Finally, I've placed the executable script in /usr/bin/rafkill :
Here is the script:
#!/bin/bash
pulseaudio --kill
/usr/games/rafkill
pulseaudio --start
You can download rafkill.wrapper.sh here
Or write in root terminal:
debian:~# cd /usr/bin
debian:/usr/bin:# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/bshscr/rafkill.wrapper.sh
debian:/usr/bin:# mv https://www.pc-freak.net/bshscr/rafkill.wrapper.sh rafkill
debian:/usr/bin:# chmod +x rafkill
Interesting in Ubuntu Linux, rafkill music is okay and I suppose the bug is also solved in newer Linux distributions based on Ubuntu. Probably the Debian Squeeze pulseaudio (0.9.21-4) package version has a bug or smth..
After the change the game music will be playing fine and the game experience is cooler. The game is hard to play. Its really nice the game has game Saves, so once you die you don't have to start from level 1.
I've seen rafkill rolling around on freebsd.org ftps under the ubuntu packages pool, which means rafkill could probably be played easily on FreeBSD and other BSDs.
Enjoy the cool game 😉
Tags: active development, arcade game, arcade games, Auto, BSD, c c programming language, c programming language, clone, deb package, Desktop, desktop files, different game, dos game, Draft, Engine, file, form, Free, game developer, game levels, game music, Gnome, hipo, level, Linux, linux distributions, linux game, menu, mod, music engine, Open, open source clone, package, package maintainer, pulseaudio, quot, script, shadows of death, share applications, small game, software, software game, software open source, Ubuntu, Universal, wrapper, year
Posted in Games Linux, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | 1 Comment »
Saturday, January 7th, 2012 On 6th of January in our Bulgarian Orthodox Church just like in the most Christian realm, we celebrate the great feast of Theophany / Epiphany (Baptizm of our Saviour Jesus Christ in Jordan).
What exactly we celebrate is the Baptizm of our Saviour Jesus Christ in Jordan by st. John the Baptist (John the Forerunner as we call him in the church). This day is very important for us as Christians and this is why the holy fathers in the church has ordered this feast to be among the 12 most important feasts in our Church, the so called (Lords feasts).
On Theophany's day it is a rule in orthodox Church that the Great Blessing of Water is performed. The Blessing of the water and the preceding holy water from the priests blessing is taken by Church layman and we bring a little of this water to our homes to bless through that our homes.
In our Church belief the Holy Water from the Theophany feast is considered the most powerful in spiritual sense holy water as this water is the same water with which our sinless Saviour and lamb (Son) of God Jesus Christ was baptized in Jordan.
The reason why we call the feast Theophany is because God in his essence of Holy Trinity appeared clearly to mankind for a first time in Human history. Our Holy Trinity (3 essence God in one indistructable and insaparatable God – one God as God said for himself in the beginning of writtings) has revealed himself in front of all the people gathered along John the Baptist in Jordan waiting to be baptized in his three essences:
1. God the Father spoke from heaven manifesting and testifying about Jesus Christ being his beloved and only son and saviour of mankdin
,br />2. God the Son (Jesus Christ), has physically appeared to receive the baptizm to fulfill all righteousness and (the old testemential prophecies) and to begin his 3 years mission on earth.
3. God Holy Spirit) has descended from heaven on Jesus Christ in a publicly observable form of a dove
Theophany's feast is called by some english speaking orthodox christians Epiphany, but this is a term less used in orthodox christendom and much more spread in Roman Catholic one.
The Gospel readings in the church tell of the Lord's baptism by John in the Jordan River. The epistle reading of the Divine Liturgy tells of the consequences of the Lord's appearing which is the divine epiphany.
After the end of the st. Basil the Great Holy Liturgy served, the Great Blessing of Water is performed by one or more priests (depending on the number of present priests). The meaning of the blessing of the waters meaning is to show that mankind and all of God's creation, were created to be blessed and filled with the sanctifying of God's presence.
A very local unique bulgarian tradition on this number is that if the great blessings of water is performed by a priest near a river or a sea shore the cross be thrown in the water in order to bless the waters.
Then a number of brave man jump in and do a race swimming aiming to pull out the crucifixion of the water. It is believed that the one who could pull out the cross will get God's great blessings through the upcoming church year.
Let us pray trust and hope on God to also appear to us who seek him, and show us his Holy Trinity wholeness mercies just like he did himself to the people waiting for Baptizm from John the Baptist by the holy prayes of the Theotokos and his holy saints and all heavinly hosts. Amen
Tags: Auto, baptizm, belief, br 2, bulgarian orthodox church, Catholic, divine, doveTheophany, Draft, epistle, essence, Father, feast, form, god jesus christ, god the father, great feast, Holy, holy spirit, holy trinity, holy water, indistructable, john the baptist, john the forerunner, layman, mankind, number, one god, reading, realm, reason, Roman, saviour jesus christ, son jesus christ, son of god, Spirit, spiritual, spiritual sense, st john the baptist, theophany, time, Trinity, writtings
Posted in Christianity | No Comments »
Fix Null error in WordPress comment reply with wordpress-threaded-comments plugin enabled
Friday, April 6th, 2012I'm running WordPress for already 3 years or so now. Since some very long time. The first wordpress install, I can hardly remember but it something like wordpress 2.5 or wordpress 2.4
Since quite a long time my wordpress blog is powered by a number of plugins, which I regularly update, whenever new plugins pops up …
I haven't noticed most of the time problems during major WordPress platform updates or the update of the installed extensions. However, today while I tried to reply back to one of my blog comments, I've been shocked that, I couldn't.
Pointing at the the Comment Reply box and typing inside was impossible and a null message was stayed filled in the form:
To catch what was causing this weird misbehaving with the reply comments functionality, I grepped through my /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins/* for the movecfm(null,0,1,null):
# cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins
# grep -rli 'movecfm(null,0,1,null)' */*.php
wordpress-thread-comment/wp-thread-comment.php
I've taken the string movecfm(null,0,1,null) from the browser page source in in my Firefox by pressing – Ctrl+U).
Once I knew of the problem, I first tried commenting the occurances of the null fields in wp-thread-comment.php, but as there, were other troubles in commenting this and I was lazy to read the whole code, checked online if some other fellows experienced the same shitty null void javascript error and already someone pointed at a solution. In the few minutes search I was unable to find anyone who reported for this bug, but what I found is some user threads on wordpress.org mentioning since WordPress 2.7+ the wordpress-threaded-comments is obsolete and the functionality provided by the plugin is already provided by default in newer WPinstalls.
Hence in order to enable the threaded comments WordPress (embedded) reply functionality from within the wp-admin panel used:
Settings -> Discussions -> Enable Threaded (nested) comments (Tick)
You see there is also an option to define how many nested comments subcomments, can be placed per comment, the default was 5, but I thought 5 is a bit low so increased it to 10 comments reply possible per comment.
Finally, to prevent the default threaded comments to interfere with the WordPress Threaded Comments plugin, disabled the plugin through menus:
Plugins -> Active -> WordPress Thread Comments (Deactivate)
This solved the weird javascript null "bug" caused by wordpress-threaded-comments once and for all.
Hopefully onwards, my blog readers will not have issues with threaded Reply Comments.
Tags: admin panel, Auto, code, Comment, Ctrl, Draft, fellows, few minutes, Firefox, form, grep, long time, misbehaving, movecfm, null fields, null message, number, occurances, option, page, page source, php, phpI, platform, plugin, Plugins, quot, reply comments, rli, someone, something, thread, threads, tick, time, time problems, Wordpress, wordpress blog, wp
Posted in Web and CMS, Wordpress | 1 Comment »