Posts Tagged ‘quot’
Friday, April 27th, 2012 The last days, I'm starting to think the GUI use is making me brainless so I'm getting back to my old habits of using console.
I still remember with a grain of nostalgy how much more efficient I used to be when the way to interact with my computer was primary in text mode console.
Actually, I'm starting to get this idea the more new a software is the more inefficient it makes your use of computer, not to mention the hardware resources required by newer software is constantly increasing.
With this said, I started occasionally browsing again like in the old days by using links text browser.
In the old days I mostly used lynx and its more advanced "brother" text browser links.
The main difference between lynx and links is that lynx does not have any support for the terrible "javascript", whether links supports most of the Javascript ver 2.
Also links and has a midnight commander like pull down menus on the screen top, – handy for people who prefer some more interactivity.
In the past I remember I used also to browse graphically in normal consoles (ttys) with a hacked version of links calledTThere is also a variation of links – xlinks suitable for people who would like to have graphical browser in console (ttys).
I used xlinks quite heavily in the past, when I have slower computer P166Mhz with 64MB of memory 2.5 GB HDD (What a times boy what a times) .
Maybe when I have time I will install it on my PC and start using it again like in the old days to boost my computer use efficiency…
I remember the only major xlinks downside was it doesn't included support for Adobe flash (though this is due to the bad non-free software nature of Adobe lack of proper support for free software and not a failure of xlinks developers. Anyways for me this wasn't a big trouble since, ex Macromedia (Adobe) Flash support is not something essential for most of my work…
links2 is actually the naming of links version 2. elinks emerged later (if I remember correctly, as fork project of links).
elinks difference with links constitutes in this it supports tabbed browsing as well as colors (links browser displays results monochrome).
Having a tabbed browsing support in tty console is a great thing…
I personally belive text browsing if properly used can in many ways outbeat, graphic browsing in terms of performance and time spend to obtain data. I'm convinced text browsing is superior for two reasons:
1. with text there is way less elements to obstruct your attention.
– No graphical annoying flash banners, no annoying taking the attention pictures
2. Navigating in web pages using the keyboard is more efficient than mouse
– Using keyboard shorcuts is always quicker than mouse, generally keboard has always been a quicker way to access computer commands.
Another reason to use text browsing is, it is mostly the text part of a page that matters, most of the pages that provide images to better explain a topic are bloated (this is my personal view though, i'm sure designer guys will argue me :D).
Here is a screenshot of a my links text browser in action, I'm sorry the image is a bit unreadable, but after taking a screenshot of the console and resizing it with GIMP this is what I got …
For all those new to Linux who didn't tried text browsing yet and for those interested in computer history, I suggest you install and give a try to following text browsers:
- lynx
(Supports colorful text console text browsing)
- links
- elinks
(Supports colors filled text browsing and tabs)
- w3m
By the way having the 4 text browsers is very useful for debugging purposes for system administrators too, so in any case I think this 4 web browsers are absoutely required software for newly installed GNU / Linux or BSD* based servers.
For Debian and the derivatives Linux distributions, the 4 browsers are available as deb packages, so install them with following apt 1 liner:
debian:~# apt-get –yes install w3m elinks links lynx
….
FreeBSD users can install the browsers using, cmd:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/www/w3mfreebsd# make install clean
….
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/www/elinksfreebsd# make install clean
….
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/www/linksfreebsd# make install clean
….
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/www/lynxfreebsd# make install clean
….
In links using the tabs functionality appeared, somewhere near the 2001 or 2000 (at least that was the first time I saw links with tabbed browsing enabled). My first time to saw links support opening multiple pages within the same screen under tabs was on Redhat Linux 9
Opening multiple pages in tabs in the text browser is done by pressing the t key and typing in the desired URL to open isnide.
For more than 2 tabs, again t has to be pressed and same procedure goes on and on.
It was pretty hard for me to figure out how I can do a text browsing with tabs, though I found a way to open new tabs it took me some 10 minutes in pondering how to switch between the new opened links browser tabs.
Hence, I thought it would be helpful to mention here how tabs can be switched in links text browser. Actually it turned it is pretty easy to Switch tabs tabs back and foward.
1 tab to move backwards is done with < (key), wheter switching one tab forward is done with the > key.
On UK and US qwerty keyboards alignment the movement a tab backward and forward is done with holding shift and pressing < onwards holding both keys simultaneously and analogously with pressing shift + >
Tags: Auto, big trouble, calledTThere, computer use, doesn, downside, Draft, elinks, flash support, freebsd servers, gb hdd, graphical browser, hardware resources, hdd, HTTP, interactivity, Javascript, Lack, last days, Lynx, Midnight, midnight commander, nature, nbsp, nostalgy, old habits, pull, pull down menus, quot, screen, screenshot, slower computer, software, software nature, support, Supports, text browser, text browsers, text mode, time, variation, xlinks
Posted in FreeBSD, Linux, System Administration, Web and CMS | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 Debian has a package language-env. I haven't used my Linux console for a long time. So I couldn't exactly remember how I used to be making the Linux console to support cyrillic language (CP1251, bg_BG.UTF-8) etc.
I've figured out for the language-env existence in Debian Book on hosted on OpenFMI – Bulgarian Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics website.
The package info with apt-cache show displays like that:
hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ apt-cache show language-env|grep -i -A 3 description
Description: simple configuration tool for native language environment
This tool adds basic settings for natural language environment such as
LANG variable, font specifications, input methods, and so on into
user's several dot-files such as .bashrc and .emacs.
What is really strange, is the package maintainer is not Bulgarian, Russian or Ukrainian but Japanese.
As you see the developer is weirdly not Bulgarian but Japanese Kenshi Muto. What is even more interesting is that it is another japanese that has actually written the script set-language-env contained within the package. Checking the script in the header one can see him, Tomohiro KUBOTA
Before I've found about the language-env existence, I knew I needed to have the respective locales installed on the system with:
# dpkg-reconfigure locales
So I run dpkg-reconfigure to check I have existing the locales for adding the Bulgarian language support.
Checking if the bulgarian locale is installed is also possible with /bin/ls:
# ls -al /usr/share/i18n/locales/*|grep -i bg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8614 Feb 12 21:10 /usr/share/i18n/locales/bg_BG
The language-env contains a perl script called set-language-env which is doing the actual Debian Bulgarization / cyrillization. The set-language-env author is another Japanese and again not Slavonic person.
Actually set-language-env script is not doing the Bulgariazation but is a wrapper script that uses a number of "hacks" to make the console support cyrillic.
Further on to make the console support cyrillic, execute:
hipo@noah:~$ set-language-env
Setting up users' native language environment
by modifying their dot-files.
Type "set-language-env -h" for help.
1 : be (Bielaruskaja,Belarusian)
2 : bg (Bulgarian)
3 : ca (Catala,Catalan)
4 : da (Dansk,Danish)
5 : de (Deutsch,German)
6 : es (Espanol,Spanish)
7 : fr (Francais,French)
8 : ja (Nihongo,Japanese)
9 : ko (Hangul,Korean)
10 : lt (Lietuviu,Lithuanian)
11 : mk (Makedonski,Macedonian)
12 : pl (Polski,Polish)
13 : ru (Russkii,Russian)
14 : sr (Srpski,Serbian)
15 : th (Thai)
16 : tr (Turkce,Turkish)
17 : uk (Ukrajins'ka,Ukrainian)
Input number > 2
There are many questions in cyrillic list necessery to be answered to exactly define if you need cyrillic language support for GNOME, pine, mutt, console etcetera.
The script will create or append commands to a number of files on the system like ~/.bash_profile
The script uses the cyr command part of the Debian console-cyrillic package for the actual Bulgarian Linux localization.
As said it was supposed to also do a localization in the past of many Graphical environment programs, as well as include Bulgarian support for GNOME desktop environment. Since GNOME nowdays is already almost completely translated through its native language files, its preferrable that localization to be done on Linux install time by selecting a country language instead of later doing it with set-language-env. If you failed to set the GNOME language during Linux install, then using set-language-env will still work. I've tested it and even though a lot of time passed since set-language-env was heavily used for bulgarization still the GUI env bulgarization works.
If set-language-env is run in gnome-terminal the result, the whole set of question dialogs will pop-up in new xterm and due to a bug, questions imposed will be unreadable as you can see in below screenshot:
If you want to remove the bulgarization, later at certain point, lets you don't want to have the cyrillic console or programs support use:
# set-language-env -r
Setting up users native language environment'
For anyone who wish to know more in depth, how set-language-env works check the README files in /usr/share/doc/language-env/ one readme written by the author of the Bulgarian localization part of the package Anton Zinoviev is /usr/share/doc/language-env/README.be-bg-mk-sr-uk
Tags: Auto, bashrc, bulgarian language, configuration tool, consol, debian gnu, description, description description, Desktop, dot files, Draft, existence, Faculty, font, font specifications, Gnome, hipo, info, Informatics, input methods, language support, localization, muto, native language, natural language environment, noah, OpenFMI, package, package maintainer, perl script, quot, root, root root, Russian, russian language, set language, show, show displays, support, time, Tomohiro, tool, UTF, utf 8, wrapper script
Posted in System Administration | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 
I've decided to delete my linkedin account as I don't see any good in constact connectiodness and being part of many "social" networks which if one thinks in deeply are not social but anti-social.
You just stay at home staring at a screen and it will be like this until the end of your days and even worser for the generations to come. Computer revolution or digital revolution is in reality huge devolutin (devil-lution)
To delete the linkedin account I used a short tutorial provided by This post
TO reach to your Profile settings, use upper right corner of your browser and follow the menus:
Settings -> Account -> Close your account
Once, trying to delete your account, linkedin will try to manipulate you to stay in Linkedin by pushing some of your contacts, pointing how you will get disconnected from him.
I'm amazed how impudent this guys can be, actually, its not just them. If you have tried or deleted your facebook account before time you will have faced, exactly the same thing. A profile (person picture) which was recently browsed by you will be shown to you and be said you will be unable to connect with him any more. Well who cares if it is God's will we will connect again 🙂
The problem with us modern people is we're so deluded that we have started relying more on technology and human knowledge than to God. For most people who are atheists relying more on technology than on God for their lives seems reasanable However for us Christians putting more trust in technology than in Gods providence for us is sinful and deadly.
I'm starting to get the conclusion, non-technological societies are more happier than technological ones. In that sense, we the Bulgarians are blessed, because technology is not so widely spread.
Tags: accountOnce, atheists, Auto, browser, bulgarians, christians, close, computer revolution, conclusion, constact, corner, devil, devolutin, digital revolution, Draft, end, facebook, generations, god, good, home, human knowledge, ini, knowledge, LinkedIn, menus, person, post, profile person, profile settings, providence, quot, revolution, screen, Settings, social networks, technological societies, technology, time, upper right corner, use, worser
Posted in Everyday Life, Various, Web and CMS | No Comments »
Friday, April 13th, 2012 1. Dump all installed server packages from Debian Linux server1
First it is necessery to dump a list of all installed packages on the server from which the intalled deb packages 'selection' will be replicated.
debian-server1:~# dpkg --get-selections \* > packages.txt
The format of the produced packages.txt file will have only two columns, in column1 there will be the package (name) installed and in column 2, the status of the package e.g.: install or deinstall
Note that you can only use the –get-selections as root superuser, trying to run it with non-privileged user I got:
hipo@server1:~$ dpkg --set-selections > packages.txt
dpkg: operation requires read/write access to dpkg status area
2. Copy packages.txt file containing the installed deb packages from server1 to server2
There is many way to copy the packages.txt package description file, one can use ftp, sftp, scp, rsync … lftp or even copy it via wget if placed in some Apache directory on server1.
A quick and convenient way to copy the file from Debian server1 to server2 is with scp as it can also be used easily for an automated script to do the packages.txt file copying (if for instance you have to implement package cloning on multiple Debian Linux servers).
root@debian-server1:~# scp ./packages.txt hipo@server-hostname2:~/packages.txt
The authenticity of host '83.170.97.153 (83.170.97.153)' can't be established. RSA key fingerprint is 38:da:2a:79:ad:38:5b:64:9e:8b:b4:81:09:cd:94:d4. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes Warning: Permanently added '83.170.97.153' (RSA) to the list of known hosts. hipo@83.170.97.153's password:
packages.txt
As this is the first time I make connection to server2 from server1, I'm prompted to accept the host RSA unique fingerprint.
3. Install the copied selection from server1 on server2 with apt-get or dselect
debian-server2:/home/hipo# apt-get update
...
debian-server2:/home/hipo# apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
debian-server2:/home/hipo# dpkg --set-selections < packages.txt
debian-server2:/home/hipo# apt-get -u dselect-upgrade --yes
The first apt-get update command assures the server will have the latest version of the packages currently installed, this will save you from running an outdated versions of the installed packages on debian-server2
Bear in mind that using apt-get sometimes, might create dependency issues. This is depending on the exact package names, being replicated in between the servers
Therefore it is better to use another approach with bash for loop to "replicate" installed packages between two servers, like so:
debian-server2:/home/hipo# for i in $(cat packages.txt |awk '{ print $1 }'); do aptitude install $i; done
If you want to automate the questioning about aptitude operations pass on the -y
debian-server2:/home/hipo# for i in $(cat packages.txt |awk '{ print $1 }'); do aptitude -y install $i; done
Be cautious if the -y is passed as sometimes some packages might be removed from the server to resolve dependency issues, if you need this packages you will have to again install them manually.
4. Mirroring package selection from server1 to server2 using one liner
A quick one liner, that does replicate a set of preselected packages from server1 to server2 is also possible with either a combination of apt, ssh, awk and dpkg or with ssh + dpkg + dselect :
a) One-liner code with apt-get unifying the installed packages between 2 or more servers
debian-server2:~# apt-get --yes install `ssh root@debian-server1 "dpkg -l | grep -E ^ii" | awk '{print $2}'`
...
If it is necessery to install on more than just debian-server2, copy paste the above code to all servers you want to have identical installed packages as with debian-server1 or use a shor for loop to run the commands for each and every host of multiple servers group.
In some cases it might be better to use dselect instead as in some situations using apt-get might not correctly solve the package dependencies, if encountering problems with dependencies better run:
debian-server2:/home/hipo# ssh root@debian-server1 'dpkg --get-selections' | dpkg --set-selections && dselect install
As you can see using this second dselect installed "package" mirroring is also way easier to read and understand than the prior "cryptic" method with apt-get, hence I personally think using dselect method is a better.
Well that's basically it. If you need to synchronize also configurations, either an rsync/scp shell script, should be used with all defined server1 config files or in case if a cloning of packages between identical server machines is necessery dd or some other tool like Norton Ghost could be used.
Hope this helps, someone.
Tags: apache, aptitude, authenticity, b4, clone, cloning, copying, deb packages, debian linux, deinstall, dependency, description, dpkg, dump, file, fingerprint, hosts, instance, lftp, Linux, linux servers, Mirroring, necessery, operation, package, package description, Permanently, privileged user, quot, root, rsync, scp, server packages, server1, server2, sftp, ssh, wget
Posted in Linux, System Administration | No Comments »
Saturday, April 7th, 2012 I've recently wanted to use PHP's embedded system(""); – external command execute function in order to use ls + wc to calculate the number of files stored in a directory. I know many would argue, this is not a good practice and from a performance view point it is absolutely bad idea. However as I was lazy to code ti in PHP, I used the below line of code to do the task:
<?
echo "Hello, ";
$line_count = system("ls -1 /dir/|wc -l");
echo "File count in /dir is $line_count \n";
?>
This example worked fine for me to calculate the number of files in my /dir, but unfortunately the execution output was also visialized in the browser. It seems this is some kind of default behaviour in both libphp and php cli. I didn't liked the behaviour so I checked online for a solution to prevent the system(); from printing its output.
What I found as a recommendations on many pages is instead of system(); to prevent command execution output one should use exec();.
Therefore I used instead of my above code:
<?
echo "Hello, ";
$line_count = exec("ls -1 /dir/|wc -l");
echo "File count in /dir is $line_count \n";
?>
By the way insetad of using exec();, it is also possible to just use ` (backtick) – in same way like in bash scripting's “.
Hence the above code can be also written for short like this:
<?
echo "Hello, ";
$line_count = `ls -1 /dir/|wc -l`;
echo "File count in /dir is $line_count \n";
?>
🙂
Tags: Auto, backtick, bad idea, behaviour, browser, code lt, command, command execution, count, default behaviour, dir, Draft, exec, execution, file, fine, function, idea, kind, libphp, line, online, order, performance, performance view, quot, solution, task, way
Posted in Programming, Web and CMS | 2 Comments »
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 »
Thursday, April 5th, 2012 
I've been planning to run my own domain WHOIS service, for quite sime time and I always postpone or forgot to do it.
If you wonder, why would I need a (personal) web whois service, well it is way easier to use and remember for future use reference if you run it on your own URL, than wasting time in search for a whois service in google and then using some other's service to get just a simple DOMAIN WHOIS info.
So back to my post topic, I postpopned and postponed to run my own web whois, just until yesterday, whether I have remembered about my idea to have my own whois up and running and proceeded wtih it.
To achieve my goal I checked if there is free software or (open source) software that easily does this.
I know I can write one for me from scratch, but since it would have cost me some at least a week of programming and testing and I didn't wanted to go this way.
To check if someone had already made an easy to install web whois service, I looked through in the "ultimate source for free software" sourceforge.net
Looking for the "whois web service" keywords, displayed few projects on top. But unfortunately many of the projects sources was not available anymore from http://sf.net and the project developers pages..
Thanksfully in a while, I found a project called SpeedyWhois, which PHP source was available for download.
With all prior said about project missing sources, Just in case if SpeedyWhois source disappears in the future (like it probably) happened with, some of the other WHOIS web service projects, I've made SpeedyWhois mirror for download here
Contrary to my idea that installing the web whois service might be a "pain in the ass", (like is the case with so many free software php scripts and apps) – the installation went quite smoothly.
To install it I took the following 4 steps:
1. Download the source (zip archive) with wget
# cd /var/www/whois-service;
/var/www/whois-service# wget -q https://www.pc-freak.net/files/speedywhois-0.1.4.zip
2. Unarchive it with unzip command
/var/www/whois-service# unzip speedywhois-0.1.4.zip
…
3. Set the proper DNS records My NS are using Godaddy, so I set my desired subdomain record from their domain name manager.
4. Edit Apache httpd.conf to create VirtualHost
This step is not mandatory, but I thought it is nice if I put the whois service under a subdomain, so add a VirtualHost to my httpd.conf
The Virtualhost Apache directives, I used are:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin hipo_aT_www.pc-freak.net
DocumentRoot /var/www/whois-service
ServerName whois.www.pc-freak.net
<Directory /var/www/whois-service
AllowOverride All
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from All
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Onwards to take effect of new Webserver configs, I did Apache restart
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache2 restart
Whenever I have some free time, maybe I will work on the code, to try to add support for logging of previous whois requests and posting links pointing to the previous whois done via the web WHOIS service on the main whois page.
One thing that I disliked about how SpeedyWHOIS is written is, if there is no WHOIS information returned for a domain request (e.g.) a:
# whois domainname.com
returns an empty information, the script doesn't warn with a message there is no WHOIS data available for this domain or something.
This is not so important as this kind of behaviour of 'error' handling can easily be changed with minimum changes in the php code.
If you wonder, why do I need the web whois service, the answer is it is way easier to use.
I don't have more time to research a bit further on the alternative open source web whois services, so I would be glad to hear from anyone who tested other web whois service that is free comes under a FOSS license.
In the mean time, I'm sure people with a small internet websites like mine who are looking to run their OWN (personal) whois service SpeedyWHOIS does a great job.
Tags: Auto, code, contrary, domain, domain web, domain whois, download, Draft, free software, goal, google, idea, info, information, installation, minute, mirror, nbsp, open source software, pain in the ass, personal domain, personal web, programming, project, project developers, quot, scratch, scripts, Search, service projects, sime, software, software php, someone, SpeedyWHOIS, Thanksfully, time, top, topic, Virtualhost, wasting, wasting time, way, web service, web whois, wget, while, whois, whois web, yesterday
Posted in Everyday Life, System Administration, Web and CMS | 5 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 »
Monday, April 2nd, 2012 I've hit an interesting article explaining how to check unread gmail email messages in Linux terminal. The original article is here
Being able to read your latest gmail emails in terminal/console is great thing, especially for console geeks like me.
Here is the one liner script:
curl -u GMAIL-USERNAME@gmail.com:SECRET-PASSWORD \
--silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' \
| awk -F '' '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) {print $i}}' \
| sed -n "s/
Linux Users Group M. – [7] discussions, [10] comments and [2] jobs on LinkedIn
Twitter – Lynn Serafinn (@LynnSerafinn) has sent you a direct message on Twitter!
Facebook – Sys, you have notifications pending
Twitter – Email Marketing (@optinlists) is now following you on Twitter!
Twitter – Lynn Serafinn (@LynnSerafinn) is now following you on Twitter!
NutshellMail – 32 New Messages for Sat 3/31 12:00 PM
Linux Users Group M. – [10] discussions, [5] comments and [8] jobs on LinkedIn
eBay – Deals up to 60% OFF + A Sweepstakes!
LinkedIn Today – Top news today: The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time
NutshellMail – 29 New Messages for Fri 3/30 12:00 PM
Linux Users Group M. – [16] discussions, [8] comments and [8] jobs on LinkedIn
Ervan Faizal Rizki . – Join my network on LinkedIn
Twitter – LEXO (@LEXOmx) retweeted one of your Tweets!
NutshellMail – 24 New Messages for Thu 3/29 12:00 PM
Facebook – Your Weekly Facebook Page Update
Linux Users Group M. – [11] discussions, [9] comments and [16] jobs on LinkedIn
As you see this one liner uses curl to fetch the information from mail.google.com's atom feed and then uses awk and sed to parse the returned content and make it suitable for display.
If you want to use the script every now and then on a Linux server or your Linux desktop you can download the above code in a script file -quick_gmail_new_mail_check.sh here
Here is a screenshot of script's returned output:
A good use of a modified version of the script is in conjunction with a 15 minutes cron job to launch for new gmail mails and launch your favourite desktop mail client.
This method is useful if you don't want a constant hanging Thunderbird or Evolution, pop3 / imap client on your system to just take up memory or dangle down the window list.
I've done a little modification to the script to simply, launch a predefined email reader program, if gmail atom feed returns new unread mails are available, check or download my check_gmail_unread_mail.sh here
Bear in mind, on occasions of errors with incorrect username or password, the script will not return any errors. The script is missing a properer error handling.Therefore, before you use the script make sure:
gmail_username='YOUR-USERNAME';
gmail_password='YOUR-PASSWORD';
are 100% correct.
To launch the script on 15 minutes cronjob, put it somewhere and place a cron in (non-root) user:
# crontab -u root -e
...
*/15 * * * * /path/to/check_gmail_unread_mail.sh
Once you read your new emails in lets say Thunderbird, close it and on the next delivered unread gmail mails, your mail client will pop up by itself again. Once the mail client is closed the script execution will be terminated.
Consised that if you get too frequently gmail emails, using the script might be annoying as every 15 minutes your mail client will be re-opened.
If you use any of the shell scripts, make sure there are well secured (make it owned only by you). The gmail username and pass are in plain text, so someone can steal your password, very easily. For a one user Linux desktops systems as my case, security is not such a big concern, putting my user only readable script permissions (e.g. chmod 0700)is enough.
Tags: article, atom, Auto, awk, client, com, cron, Desktop, download, Draft, ebay, email, email marketing, email messages, facebook, Fri, geeks, Gmail, GMAIL-USERNAME, GNU, gnu linux, google, Group, https mail, liner, LinkedIn, Linux, linux server, linux users group, mail, marketing, news today, OFF, original article, password, quot, rizki, sat 3, script, SECRET-PASSWORD, terminal, thing, top news, twitter, username, Users, Weekly
Posted in Linux, System Administration, Various | 2 Comments »
Saturday, March 31st, 2012 I'm currently learning some basic graphic design – reading GIMP's documentation etc. While reading http://docs.gimp.org, I saw a reference to Gthumb and GQView picture viewing apps, so I thought of installing them on my Debian LinuxGQView has a lot of santimental value to me as it reminds me of the the old times when I used gqview as a default picture viewing program on a old machine running Debian Woody Linux with Window Maker as desktop environment.
I wanted to see how GQView looks nowdays so installed it:
noah:~# apt-get --yes install gqview
And onwards launch it:
hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ gqview
This is a compatibility alias for Geeqie!
Please use /usr/bin/geeqie instead!
Creating Geeqie dir:/home/hipo/.config/geeqie
Creating Geeqie dir:/home/hipo/.local/share/geeqie/collections
Creating Geeqie dir:/home/hipo/.cache/geeqie/thumbnails
Creating Geeqie dir:/home/hipo/.local/share/geeqie/metadata
What poped up instead of gqview is Geeqie – a picture viewer nowdays available on a default Slackware Linux install.
Fedora, CentOS users will have to build geekie from its source, as of time of writting there is no available rpm package.
It was new to me Gqview is no longer developed, its dev is forked (because its head developer is not reachable any more). Hence QGView continues to live on nowdays under the hood of Geekie
As you can see from the prior screenshot Geeqie has very similar interface to GQView. Going through the interface, I've found it has much more features than GQView. You see one of the many new nice features is the support for drawing Image Histograms.
There are few type of Histograms to display in Geekiq, available by navigating to:
View -> Image Overlay
Even if you're not familiar with Image histograms, probably you have seen them appear on a digital camera while browsing in menus. Its likely you didn't know what you saw a digital camera display is a histogram.
Anyways being not familiar with histograms is perfectly fine as for most of us (regular) users image historograms doesn't make much sense.
BTW Histograms are very useful for pro Photographers. Photographers can use them as an aid to show the distribution of picture "tones" captured, and whether image detail has been lost to blown-out highlights or blacked-out shadows.
Interesting fact concerning "reading" and understanding Histograms is on a Histogram for a very dark image the majority of data points are on the left side and center of the graph, whether histogram for a very bright image with few dark areas and/or shadows will have most of its data points located on the right side and center of the graph.
With this said in mind, you can see, the above Geeqie picture visibile histogram obviously has most of its data concentrated on the right and the center so this means the histogram belongs to a bright pic. Well, Actually you can see this without a histogram too 😉
Though Image Histograms might seem pretty useles they're very much needed in Professional Graphic Manipulation. For instance for correction of image color gamma or manually adjusting the brightness for each picture pixel brightness.
So Enough with histograms, I will switch now to a short review of Gthumb
Since I haven't used/seen Gthumb "for ages", I was also curious how the program looks nowdays. I did not needed to install gthumb, as I had it installed already on my notebook. I assume gthumb package was installed as some package dependency or I did it install some very long time ago and I forgot.
For people who didn't have it install do:
noah:~# apt-get --yes install gthumb
...
This installs a Gthumb version 2.12.2. The current latest stable Gthumb release is way ahead from the existing deb stable package, the latest available version on sourceforge is 2.7.4
Ubuntu gthumb latest packages would probably be newer than my debian installed one, so Ubuntu users can have the joy to use a newer version of gthumb…
gthumb is also installable for Fedora and CentOS users by default from default assigned package repos:
To install on RPM based Linux distro:
[root@centos:~ ]# yum -y install gthumb
...
Once installed, I ran it via a gnome run application shortcut ALT+F2 and typed:
gthumb
If you're more of a gui user than me you can run it also through GNOME menus:
Applications -> Graphics -> Gthumb Image Viewer
You see gthumb appears, quite similar in "look&feel" to Geeqie.
I went through the program options just for the sake to compare with Geeqie. Based on the fact Geeqie seems to have more functionality it is probably superior and better choice for people looking for professional image vieweing / editting.However there are some other aspects I've noticed, where it lacks behind Gthumb.
Gthumb has few great functionality which unfortunately as of time of writting are missing or hardly achievable in Geeqie
1. Bookmarking pictures.
This allows for your favourite pictures to be bookmarked in the same way as bookmarks work in a browser, really neat feature.
2. Share functionality
Share button is located on the rightest upper corner and makes sharing with major web storage places easy.
Through the Share button, you can export (share) your pictures directly in Picasa, Facebook,Flickr and Photobucket.
Through this share button it is also possible to "share your photos on a CD or DVD", – burn them on a CD/DVD directly from gthumb. This is doable via:
One other Gthumb advantagle is its extensibility. It has a powerful plugin system. Many of the features it has are already there thanks to its enabled extensions.
3. Photo Tagging
Nowdays tagging, photos has become so popular with the boom of facebook tagging. Gthumb has a relatively easy to use image tagging integrated.
tagging a picture is done by simply going through the picture and selecting it with the (rightest located mouse button).
There is a list of few already predefined tags, which can be used to tag images.Assigning more tags is done via menu:
Tags -> Other
4. Organizing pictures
Through the Organize button located right below the Share button, one can easily organize his picture collections, based on few criterias.
The organize easy feature is not so important for not people, who are not in depth in photographing but for professional photographers this is an absolute necessity. For people who are image freaks and store tens of thousands of pictures organizing pictures for easy later retrieval is really nice.
To sum it, up Geeqie and Gthumb are richer in functionality if compared to GNOME's default pic viewer (eye of the gnome) – eog.
Geeqie, as the name suggests is more for geek oriented and has a lot of great options which can serve well for advanced computer users. For an ordinary desktop user however it will probably be not easy to "digest". Gthumb on the other hand is ideal for anyone who prefers gui convenience. Gthumb is a good option for anyone looking for some similar to Picasa free software program that is feature rich and easy to use.For people who has to review a dozens of pictures daily, associating one of the two as a default picture viewer will probably be useful.
Tags: alias, alternative, Auto, center, CentOS, config, debian woody, default, design reading, Desktop, desktop environment, digital camera, Draft, fedora, geekie, GIMP, GNU, gnu linux, gqview, graphic design, head developer, hipo, histogram, histograms, image overlay, LinuxGQView, machine, meta package, metadata, noah, package, Photographers, picture, poped, quot, reading, rpm, screenshot, time, Ubuntu, value, window, woody linux, writting
Posted in Gnome, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, News | 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 »