The dashboard in my opinion can give way to much information to base subscribers in a WordPress blog.  I found this works and confirmed with WP 3.0

http://www.im-web-gefunden.de/wordpress-plugins/iwg-hide-dashboard/

You will also need plug-in first:

http://www.im-web-gefunden.de/wordpress-plugins/role-manager/

Home-tech.com, the website portal for employee-owned Home-Tech is intensely focused on being a resource for residents of the SW Florida area who need affordable, convenient and hassle-free repair and replacement services for air conditioning systems and major appliances.  In keeping with this tradition, Home-Tech’s new blog resource will help share with the community about Home-Tech’s community involvement as well as Tips and Tricks in regards to home appliances and air conditioning system.  Visit home-tech.com and click on the News section in About Us or Tech Tips on the front page to check it out.  Two thumbs up, Home-Tech!

Are your outlook clients getting the following error?

The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server. The rejected e-mail address was ‘bp@oilsucks.com’. Subject ‘test’, Account: ‘mail.bpOilSucks.com’, Server: ‘mail.bpOilSucks.com’, Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: ’553 sorry, that domain isn’t in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1)’, Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 553, Error Number: 0x800CCC79

After troubleshooting a server issue with sending mail it appears that clients using Outlook had their “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication” checkbox unchecked automatically after they failed to make a connection.  After a few hours of exhaustive research on the server end, we had the brilliant idea to compare settings at the client.  Obviously one would assume nothing changed, but sure enough the client settings for the whole domain on each individual workstations’ was changed.  I have no answer for this at this point but am passing it along in hopes this will save someone else a few hours of fruitless troubleshooting of Plesk when the issue is at the client.

Here is a screen shot of how it should look:

Good coding practices should always involve having your PHP/MySQL scripts close out the connections when they are done with them.  Unfortunately, this is not always the case especially in
 a shared hosting environment where you as the web host may not have entire control over the source code for each client’s website.  This presents a potential issue even in a small virtual domain hosting environment where potentially thousands of connections can be opened and not close can cause the dreaded “Too many connections”.

What is even more surprising is that the default value set for connection timeouts in a MySQL database is 28800 seconds.  Yep, you heard me right…8 HOURS for sleeping, dead connections!

Setting this simple connection timeout to a more manageable 10 minutes is a very viable solution when you cannot guarantee that each virtual hosting client is practicing best use coding techniques.

Happy Coding!

While sending mail, some users on virtual domains with Plesk installed experienced this error:

553 sorry, that domain isn’t in my list of allowed rcpthosts

This error occurs on a per domain basis within installations of Plesk.  Starting and stopping the SMTP service for the server unfortunately does not work.

WORKAROUND: Go to the individual virtual domain with the issue and then choose the Mail icon under services.  Switch mail off and then back on and it should rewrite the mail.conf file.

Update:  5/11/2010. Since the creation of this article, we successfully located and purchased the “Perfect” sailboat.  The process described here was instrumental in combing the vast data in Craigslist’s Florida boating ads.  I am now maintaining the site as http://www.sailboatsfl.com as a continued resource for others as well as a filter for my now growing list of improvements/gear on the sailboat.

From a developer perspective, I have used this process to provide dynamic, engaging content to our client’s websites on several occasions.  The process of importing the news (make sure you give credit to the source) and then publish of the client feed to Google has in some case doubled or tripled the traffic to the client website.  RSS is dead?  I think not…in fact, its only just coming to the forefront.

—Original Article—

I am looking for a sailboat. Nothing fancy, just a safe, solid, little sailboat I can take the family out on for the weekend and learn the time honored tradition of capturing the wind. Through a few weeks of research, I identified and exact criteria of what I am looking for: Catalina 25′ under $10,000 with a trailer. Naturally my first choice for locating a sailboat brought me to Craigslist. What a nightmare, despite the fact that the site looks like a piece of poo aesthetically, there really is no way to search and locate this specific criteria easily across an entire state. You actually have to navigate to each location and then issue your search criteria…there are tons of locations in Florida…a daunting task to say the least.

Through some testing I was able to tweak the Craigslist query and figured out I can switch the location if I know it and re-use it.

http://daytona.craigslist.org/search/boa?query=sailboat&;catAbbreviation=boa&;minAsk=min&;maxAsk=10000&;hasPic=1&;format=rss

Now this little ditty will locate sailboats under $10,000 with a photo, insert a different city and I am good to go. Since I am not ruling out buying a trailer separately and I am not opposed to purchasing something besides a Catalina this produced the best results for what I was looking for.

The root problem still exists, namely that I have to manually do this EVERY day for EVERY location in Florida if I want to stay on top of what is for sale. These Catalina’s in this price range go fast, super fast so checking Craigslist twice a day would be a good thing (if not a bit obsessive, but hey it’s how I attack a problem).

Being a bit lazy (Lazy = Automation), I figured there had to be a way to automate this search across the entire state and then run a CRON job to check it twice daily (okay, I have it checking it every two hours but our server could care less, I assure you).

About this time, I noticed the little  graphic at the bottom of each successful sailboat search. NICE!!! Since I do a poor job of explaining what things are, this is the definition of RSS according to Wikipedia: “RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works…” works for me. In human speak basically it’s a way to publish your frequently updated content (such as classifieds) so that people can see the most recent additions.

In short, problem solved…seriously. Each location in Florida has its own RSS feed that displays sailboats for sale. Now all I have to do is suck in these feeds to a database (MySQL) and I can pool my results in a format where I can search specifically as well as order the data to show me latest sailboat listings across the entire state of Florida!

My solution is a blog that updates every two hours:

http://www.sailboatsfl.com

Although I still have not located my “perfect” little sailboat, I know I am seeing the entire State’s inventory for sailboats on Craigslist without lifting a finger (err…mouse click).

Since Craigslist is not the only site selling sailboats online, I then went to Sailboat Trader to find their RSS feed and to my dismay they do not offer one. I took the time to email the webmaster asking for its location just in case it’s something tucked away (and not used). They had no clue what I was talking about, but were very interested once I showed them what I was doing with Craiglist. I tried a few other Boats for Sale in Florida websites and all had the same reaction.

In short, I don’t think anyone has realized the convenience and power of RSS when serving their content to the masses.  I predict a trend (if us web folks grab onto this) that sites offering products for sale will treat their content as a dynamic feed and thus open their content to new methods of getting it to the masses.  Take my PT Dev site, this is nothing more than a filter I can point to every location on the net I can find.  Since I point the user (me) back to Craigslist it behooves Craigslist when similar minded people access my site looking for similar items.

I have been experimenting with Blogs for clients for quite sometime and am amazed at how quickly Google treats these feeds and inserts them into their search results (In some cases, a matter of hours).  Recently a manufacturing client placed their technical documents online in a blog style RSS feed and by the end of the day had received a dozen calls for more information from interested parties.  Google is now indexing their content and subsequently they are the top result for their product.  Yummm!  I love RSS at this point for sure!

Sailboat Trader said they will get back to me….I hope they do or it looks like I will be finding this boat on Craigslist.

Happy Sailing!!

Tony Nestor
CEO, Progress Technologies, Inc.
(239) 985-0335 ext. 623
tn@progresstechnologies.com
http://www.progresstechnologies.com
http://twitter.com/progresstech

Tony Nestor is CEO for Fort Myers, Florida based Progress Technologies, Inc.  Progress Technologies, Inc. is a leader in the development of website and database applications for city government, real estate, financial and manufacturing companies nationwide since 1998.  The company has continued to steadily grow  while weathering the tech boom and crash of the late 1990′s and today’s market by providing unmatched customer service and top of the line programming techniques.

One of the most exciting trends over the last two years is the realization by clients and new prospects that they have the ability to add/edit and update their website content in real time on the fly without waiting on their “web” company.  Since automation is our niche, this is good news for us web developers!  Website editing can be accomplished in many ways using either Open Source solutions such as WordPress (awesome) or Drupal (not so much, yuck) or having a web development firm build a custom web management tool that fits within your unique business process where a Open Source solution may not fit the bill.

Open Source CRM is fantastic EXCEPT when the client has concerns in the case of security or support of the CRM product.  Let’s face it, no client wants to hear that you posted to a support board for a WordPress plug-in that is malfunctioning and you “hope” to hear back from somebody soon.  In that case, custom development is the way to go and can still be developed using Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) for thousands of dollars less than the comparable Microsoft .NET platform.  While LAMP itself may be open source, each product offers a paid support route with dedicated professionals and a solid organization behind it (without the $25K entry cost for licensing..ahem, Microsoft).

While creating a custom CRM, it is MOST important to make sure you allow for the client to backup their data prior to making changes to their website live.  This will avoid headaches down the road in the form of trying to restore the web data when someone accidentally hits save. One of the best ways we have found to achieve this is to provide two tables: live and staging with a third table acting as your backup for the live table.  The backup to the live table will allow for the creation of a second button to “restore” the backup to live in that scenario.  Since there is nothing good we could find out on the web, here is a script you can easily insert and call from a form to perform the entire process in a single step.  Even better, slip this functionality into your quote and it will provide you will a terrific selling point often missed by other companies.

Happy Coding!

Tony Nestor
CEO, Progress Technologies, Inc.
(239) 985-0335 ext. 623
tn@progresstechnologies.com
http://www.progresstechnologies.com
http://twitter.com/progresstech

Progress Technologies, Inc. is a leading supplier of custom web based applications to small business.

PHP Backup MySQL database source code:

<?php
mysql_connect(“localhost”,”username”,”password”);
mysql_select_db(“database”);

// Clearing backup table, this deletes contents of the backup table.

$query = “TRUNCATE TABLE web_data_backup”;
$result = mysql_query($query);

if ($result)
echo “<p>Backup Table Reset</p>”;
else
echo “<p>There was a problem resetting the backup!</p>”;

// Copying live table to backup

$query1 = “REPLACE INTO web_data_backup select * from web_data_live”;

$result = mysql_query($query1);

// Display an appropriate message
if ($result)
echo “<p>Existing website backup is created.</p>”;
else
echo “<p>There was a problem backing up the existing website!</p>”;

// Copying Staging table to the Live table, this makes the staging table live on the website.

$query1 = “REPLACE INTO web_data_live select * from web_data_staging”;

$result = mysql_query($query1);

// Display an appropriate message
if ($result)
echo “<p>Existing website backup is created.</p>”;
else
echo “<p>There was a problem backing up the existing website!</p>”;

// Close that connection, Son!
mysql_close();
?>

I am using this Events Calendar on a blog:  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-calendar/

When using the sidebarEventsCalendar(13) instructions in a actual post page instead of a a sidebar, it displays the events but the mouseover breaks.

Work around:

Open the templates page.php and add this where you want it to appear.  Change the ID to the page Id of your events calendar and the events to the number you want displayed (25).  This only displays if its on the Events Calendar page (200 for me).  This fixes the event not displaying on mouseover.

<?php
if (get_the_ID() == 200) {
echo “Please place your mouse over an event to see details:”;
SidebarEventsList(25);
}
?>

Z22FQ5PK5AV5

I was adding a .htaccess file to a domain for the purpose of a 301 redirect for a bunch of a pages.  The 301 redirect is supposed to tell search engines that the file has been moved permanently AND keep the page rank the same.  One of the pages had spaces in the file name and it caused a 500 Server Error when I uploaded the .htaccess file.  Here is a sample of what I did to fix it.  Also note you need to make sure you have only ONE space between the elements or the same error occurs.

WRONG:
301 redirect /file with spaces.php http://www.mydomain.com/file with spaces.php

CORRECT:
301 redirect /file_with_spaces.php http://www.mydomain.com/file_with_spaces.php

Last year we began to quote compatibility for iPhone enabled web applications.  When two quotes came within the same week, it was time to pay attention.  This trend so far in 2010 has not ceased as we have included in our web application quotes specific language for iPhone compatibility on 40% of the quotes in January alone.  If you have not started looking at incorporating iPhone enabled functionality in your quotes I would strongly suggest you get on the ball.

This is the server side PHP code we use to detect an iPhone and I am storing it here for easy reference. Feel free to snag it for yourself if you want. Basically it will detect for iPhone and use conditional CSS based on detection or not. This is especially useful if you have an iPhone application that is primarily used with the iPhone (example: Propane company field technician) but features a browser based administration through a web browser going to the same domain from a PC in an office (example: Scheduling Admin at the Propane company home office). Based on the platform this code will “choose” the correct user experience using a CSS style sheet. Making sure your CSS is compliant will also solve any issues with different browser platforms (LOL…most of the time).

<?php if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘iPhone’) !== false) { ?>
<link media=”all” href=”iphone-device.css” type= “text/css” rel=”stylesheet”>
<?php } else { ?>
<link media=”all” href=”not-iphone-device.css” type= “text/css” rel=”stylesheet”>
<?php } ?>

Want to demo what the web application will look like in an iPhone, but don’t have one? No problem, check out this cool FREE app iPhoney. It’s important to remember this is not an actual simulator, but actually a tool for web developers to develop 320 by 480 (or 480 by 320) websites for use with the iPhone:

http://www.marketcircle.com/iphoney/

What’s next on the horizon?  Can you say Apple Tablet?

Happy Coding!

Tony Nestor
CEO, Progress Technologies, Inc.
(239) 985-0335 ext. 623
tn@progresstechnologies.com
http://www.progresstechnologies.com
http://twitter.com/progresstech

Progress Technologies, Inc. is a leading supplier of custom web based applications to small business.

I kept getting this error when trying to perform and automatic upgrade to WP 2.9.1.  I chmod 777 the upgrade directory with no luck.  I then chmod the /wp-content directory to 777 and it worked!

NOTE:  MAKE SURE YOU CHMOD THESE DIRECTORIES BACK TO 755 OR YOU HAVE A SECURITY ISSUE

Every application we build has a requirement for email notification in some form or the other. Tough economic times call for doing more with less and savvy business folk recognize the value of automation in any shape or form.  Sales applications want automated “tickler” email to their prospects sent over X days, order fulfillment, accounting notices, real estate listing matches, etc. Since this type of automation is our specialty, and one I personally love the heck out of, we try to help guide the client in this direction during project discovery as to what an email notification enabled system can do for the client specifically. With the emergence of broadband and mobile devices to the mainstream I am comfortable with saying this trend will itself become a standard requirement for all custom web applications.

In fact, if you are a developer and are NOT guiding the client in this direction you are doing them a disservice as well as opening the door for your competition to offer your client features that they will value.

As with any feature that functions with outside systems (email server, spam filters, ISP’s, firewalls, etc.) you must heavily test the notification feature extensively. This will save a tremendous amount of time when supporting the application later. Almost always we initially find issues as to how the header is sent or a curmudgeonly inclined blacklist smacking you down. Once fixed, despite best efforts, invariably issues with delivery do arise.

When this happens we immediately go into test mode and send notifications from the web application to a series of test email accounts. These email accounts span the Internet from free Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail accounts to POP accounts on servers on the same network as well as across the grid. Bottom line, after 10 years we have the USA pretty much covered for email testing.

The one problem with this “test system” is that it takes a HUGE amount of time to login/logout of each test email account to see if the mail is received.

THE SOLUTION: POP Popper! This awesome gem of a program allows you to set up each test account a single time and then check all the accounts simultaneously!  Can you say GODSEND?  It covers all the free email accounts as well as any POP accounts.  Even better you can handle customer replies in the same application just like a regular email client to test sending back to your system.  The software is free and features a cNet download link.  You can get to the application here.

Happy Coding!

Tony Nestor
CEO, Progress Technologies, Inc.
(239) 985-0335 ext. 623
tn@progresstechnologies.com
http://www.progresstechnologies.com
http://twitter.com/progresstech

Progress Technologies, Inc. is a leading supplier of custom web based applications to small business.

After an uneventful (this is good) and successful (even better) upgrade from Vista (ewwww, yuck) to Windows 7 (ahhh, much better) I found that  the Show Desktop icon had been moved to the far right hand side of the screen next to the Time.  After about a week of trying to get used to this I just could not adapt to the new location.  Since I have at a minimum of 3 programs open at any given time and have a terrible habit of dropping everything on my desktop, the Show Desktop icon on the Quick Launch taskbar is crucial as I usually “Show Desktop” to regroup or open a file on the desktop frequently.

A quick search on the Internet found that there was no quick fix for this and after following a verbose, long winded (hey, it takes one to know one) 20 step process found on the net to make your own Show Desktop on the Quick Launch that worked fine right up until you rebooted the machine (it IS Windows after all…)  I realized there was nothing easy about adding this feature back in.

This issue from my perspective is that you can ONLY Pin a executable program (.exe) to the Quick Launch task bar (no shortcuts, scripts etc.).  Surprisingly nobody had created a app to do this simple little function.  Here is a small app written in Visual Basic and compiled as an .exe to do the trick.

Download and unzip the .zip I have uploaded.  Save it to someplace on your hard-drive and then right click over the .exe and choose “Pin to taskbar”.  That is it, simple and it works!

Enjoy!

Everything You Need to Know About Eggnog – Food & Drink – FOXNews.com

Posted using ShareThis

I had and issue with WordPress removing my line breaks no matter what I did in a post for a WordPress installation.  I ultimately upgraded the Rich Text Editor that comes with WordPress to the advanced version found here:  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/

This did not fix the issue with pages that are formatted outside the editor, for example custom imports of outside RSS feeds.

NOTE: This page edit WILL get overwritten when you upgrade WordPress, so keep it handy as I suggest you upgrade frequently and you will need to edit this back in after the upgrade.

Fix:

I modified the function called the_content(), that echoes out the posts content. This function can be found in wp-includes/post-template.php on line 165. Then I simple added two lines, that replaces the line-break with a br-tag. So here how my the_content() looks now.

function the_content($more_link_text = '(more...)', $stripteaser = 0, $more_file = '') {
	$content = get_the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser, $more_file);
	$content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
	$content = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $content);
	$content = str_replace("\n", "<br />", $content);
	$content = str_replace("\r", "", $content);
	echo $content;
}

I found myself in a lively discussion as to whether SEO is possible with text found within a Flash movie indexed by the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Its been well over a year since Google announced the development of an algorithm to consume text found within a Google movie on the Google Webmaster Blog.

Randomly consuming this text and having the text show up in a search result is a whole different story.  We know that Google has trouble with complicated Actionscript within the movie as well as JavaScript referenced outside the Flash movie but there is no clear documentation as to what actually is indexed.  For example… is only static text indexed?  Does the indexing extend to buttons, embedded text within movies?  Does the indexing go even further and index text found WITHIN embedded movies WITHIN an embedded movie?  How deep does the indexing go?

The Experiment:

Basically I have a two frame movie with text featured on the first frame, a button with text that links to the second frame, text on the second frame, embedded movie clip with text on the second frame and finally a third embedded movie within that second frame.

This should start to answer if Google indexes these elements and how deep it goes.  Depending on these results I intend to extend the experiment to dynamic data pulled from a database directly as well as a XML file as each will be very interested to see.   Google usually indexes this site weekly, so check back in a week or use Google to search on “progresstechlabs.com %word you find in the movie below%” to test.  If you see some results show up before I post an update, please post a comment here so I can check it out.  Here is the source of the Flash movie as a reference.

Here is the movie embedded into the post:

I had this problem and it killed an hour of time.  Everytime I tried to create a dynamic list menu from a recordset it closed Dreamweaver.  It appears the best solution is to delete the DW cache file.

1) Close DW
2) Go to c:\documents and settings\USERNAME\application Data\adobe\Dreamweaver 9\configuration
3) Delete WinFileCache-ADXXXXXX.dat
4) Reopen DW

I was also having trouble locating this .dat file so I found this article in Adobe Support.  Given that alot of their links disappear without warning, I am posting the whole thing here:

Original Link:  http://forums.adobe.com/thread/494811

I re-installed my data assist extension and upon launching I am getting the following error when I click the database icon in Dreamweaver for a PHP site for the first time. This occurs even before I can past my license key in. “While executing onLoad in WA_AppBuilder.htm, a JavaScript error occurred”.

This is a reply from a WebAssist tech on their forums…going to post it here just in case it happends again, hope it helps someone else:

With Dreamweaver closed, try deleting the WinFilecache-########.dat or MacFileCache-########.dat, depending on your operating system, file from the following location:

WinXP
-DW8
–C:\Documents and Settings\<Your User Name>\Application Data\Macromedia\Dreamweaver 8\Configuration
-DWCS3
–C:\Documents and Settings\<Your User Name>\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
-DWCS4
–C:\Documents and Settings\<Your User Name>\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver CS4\en_US\Configuration

Win Vista
-DW8
–C:\Users\<Your User Name>\AppData\Roaming\Macromedia\Dreamweaver 8\Configuration
-DWCS3
–C:Users\<Your User Name>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
-DWCS4
–C:\Users\<Your User Name>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver CS4\en_US\Configuration

Mac OSX;
-DW8
–Hard disk: Users: <Your User Name>: Library: Application Support: Macromedia: Dreamweaver 8:Configuration
-DWCS3
–Hard disk: Users: <Your User Name>: Library: Application Support: Adobe: Dreamweaver 9: Configuration
-DWCS4
–Hard disk: Users: <Your User Name>: Library: Application Support: Adobe: Dreamweaver CS4: en_US: Configuration

(Please note that <Your User Name> Should be replaced with the User name you use to log into your computer)

Also, please make sure that you have the most recent version of our extensions installed.

NOTE:
On Windows Computers, The AppData or Application Data folders may be set to be hidden.

To View Hidden Folders in Windows Vista:
1) In The Windows Explorer, Click the “Organize” button
2) Select “Folders And Search Options”
3) Select the “View” tab
4) Click the “Show Hidden Folders And Files” radio button.

To View Hidden Folders in Windows XP:
1) On the Tools menu in Windows Explorer, click Folder Options.
2)Click the View tab.
3) Under Hidden files and folders, click Show hidden files and folders.