Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

  • The WebSVN Alternative

    The WebSVN Alternative

    Now that SubVersion is up and running, I decided to make it visible to others via WebSVN. The only reason I’m using WebSVN, which is really cool, don’t get me wrong, is because I can’t get mod_dav_svn and the default apache stuff working with my server.

    Go to http://svn.ipstenu.org and you can see my web-version of SubVersion up for you to snag whatever you want.

    Installing and configuring this was really easy. I followed the directions. Done. The only tweak was that I had to finagle some Open Basedir settings to let my install talk to SubVersion. But it works, and now you can see what I’m working on.

  • Struggling with SubVersion

    After some twittering with Mark Waterous, we decided that I probably had an out of date version of SVN. This is not a surprise. My server is CentOS, and they have this weird ‘core’ plugin repository that basically says ‘whatever version of a package we release your OS with is the version you get’. It took some heavy lifting and a stern conversation with yum that I do too want to use rpmforge as a source, but I finally upgraded everything to version 1.4.6 (previously I was on 1.1.x).

    And what happened when I tried to reactivate mod_dav_svn

    Same damn error!
    API module structure 'dav_svn_module' in file /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_dav_svn.so is garbled - expected signature 41503232 but saw 41503230 - perhaps this is not an Apache module DSO, or was compiled for a different Apache version?

    I took a step back and decided to make sure SubVersion really was working on my server. After a couple hours of wrangling, I determined it was. In fact, it’s working fine. For a while I had svnserve running and you could see it up on a website. But it still wouldn’t let me check in or out files from my PC at work (I had to do it all via command line on the server). That’s not what I want.

    So why won’t dav_svn work? No idea. Mark implied it’s CentOS and I’m inclined to agree. Everything else works. Not that I really have a thing against CentOS, but Red Hat (and it is Red Hat) has been weird ever since they released their IPO a decade back. Lost their street cred, I suppose.

    Mark’s suggestion:

    Pain in the butt, but uninstall current, try mod_dav_svn-1.4.6-0.1.e14.rf.i1386, then 1.3.2, then 1.2.1, see if any work?

    Thankfully, installing older packages in yum is pretty easy. It’s just yum install mod_dav_svn-1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf.i386 and done. Except I got this:

    ---> Package mod_dav_svn.i386 0:1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf set to be updated
    --> Running transaction check
    --> Processing Dependency: subversion = 1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf for package: mod_dav_svn
    --> Finished Dependency Resolution
    Error: Missing Dependency: subversion = 1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf is needed by package mod_dav_svn

    Basically, subversion and mod_dav_svn have to match for this to work. Now, since I have subversion working, I really don’t want to roll that back. I decided that maybe I just had a bad copy from the repository, so I downloaded SubVersion and installed it manually. This is always fun, but I do it often enough at work that I’m only slightly terrified. This is why I have a managed server, by the way. Since I got the same damn error after a manual install, I decided that something was wrong with my server and mod_dav_svn.

    Thankfully there are alternatives!

    svnserve is not as ‘pretty’ but it works. I followed the default installation directions and then used Subversion : svnserve over xinetd to get it running. Once I got it running, I was able to point things at svn+ssh://ipstenu.org/svn/repos/ipstenu (which will do you no good, it’s locked to my user ID/password). Now everything downloads and I say sayonara to Google Code!

    Next up, I’ll put a WebSVN site up for people to browse my code. If they really want to.

  • Switching to WordPress MultiSite Breaks Links

    As of WordPress 3.1 you can NO LONGER remove the blog slug via the method described in this post! – Feb 28 2011

    Warning: WordPress MultiSite is not for the newbie!

    Most people I know who are using MultiSite (formerly WPMU) are people who have always been using that fork of WordPress. With the advent of MultiSite, a built in way for people to move from single ‘blog’ installs of WordPress to a multiple site structure, more and more users want to move to it, which is great. But. There are some weird ‘problems’ with MultiSite that cause a lot of users to think it’s broken. It’s not, it’s just different.

    My friend Andrea wrote a nice tutorial about how to create a network, and generally when I need help, I scan WPMU Tutorials first. Or I tweet at her. One of the things we’ve talked about is the way WordPress MultiSite changes your blog links.

    When I changed https://ipstenu.org from single to multi, my links were changed from https://ipstenu.org/YYYY/MM/PostName to https://ipstenu.org/blog/YYYY/MM/PostName, which I did not want! Thankfully, I knew a lot of people had this problem beforehand and I fixed it quickly, which I will explain here, but first, here’s why it’s done that way.

    Normally, when we use pretty permalinks (that’s the part of your URL that looks ‘pretty’ instead of code-like) on a blog, all we have to worry about is not conflicting with post names and page names. If you have an about page, generally the URL is https://ipstenu.org/about. Since WordPress has to translate https://ipstenu.org/?p=2 into that to be pretty, you can’t also have a blog post with the same URL. How would the software know WHICH page you wanted? Simple enough. For details on that, you can read Otto’s post on Category in Permalinks Considered Harmful.

    When you add in MultiSite, suddenly the code has to check for something more: is this new Site named something that breaks my existing links?

    There are two kinds of MultiSite, and I use them both. You have SubFolders and SubDomains. Subfolders gets you URLs like https://ipstenu.org/code and SubDomains gets you https://halfelf.org/. If you use SubFolders, WordPress takes an extra step to make sure that pages named ‘code’ don’t break when you have a new blog with the same name. To help do that, it kicks your blog URLs from your main blog (i.e. https://ipstenu.org/) up a level to a new URL: https://ipstenu.org/blog/. For those of us who move from Single to Multi, this breaks our old links.

    Thankfully there are a couple fixes which can tide you over until WordPress 3.1 is released. The developers plan on having this ‘fixed’ or at least editable by then, so at the worst, you can go from having a blog slug to ‘news’ or ‘pasta’ or whatever.

    .htaccess

    If you want to keep the blog folder, but you want to redirect your old posts, .htaccess is your friend.

    If I wanted to redirect all YYYY/MM/DD posts to /blog/… I would add this:

     
RewriteRule ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.*)$ https://ipstenu.org/blog/$1/$2/$3/$4 [L,R=301]

    What I actually did on another site was this:

    RewriteRule ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.*)$ http://domain.com/blog/$4 [L,R=301]

    And I changed my permalinks to just post name. This was risky, in a way, but it matches how I use the site better.

    Plugins

    There are a couple plugins that can help you here. Thinking in WordPress made a plugin for WPMU, but I’ve heard it doesn’t quite work yet.

    Andrea (and her husband Ron) have a Remove Blog plugin that can also help you.

    I’m sure there are others, but I mostly recommend Andrea and Ron’s. And not just because I like them.

    Hack

    If you’re dead-set on doing this, and you don’t want to use a plugin, there is a manual way to do this. Remember, by doing this you will BREAK the ability of WordPress to check for conflicts between your main site’s urls and any new site. If you’re using SubDirectory SubDomain MultiSite, this should be fine. Hell, I’m doing it. If you’re using SubFolder, I really don’t recommend this at all.

    You ready?

    • Login to your admin site.
    • Go to: Super Admin > Sites > Edit
    • Scroll down to “Permalink Structure” and remove the “/blog” part
    • Save

    That’s it.

  • bbPress 1.x Functions

    bbPress 1.x Functions

    Since I don’t actively develop for bbPress 1.x at this time, you’re on your own with these ones.

    bbPress is a forum platform by the same people who do WordPress. It’s very much a barebones bulletin board system (which makes layers on layers of bb jokes). bbPress is not for the non-techy at this point. It’s still in alpha mode, with a lot of rough edges, and is comparable to WordPress 1. Maybe. Most of the features are done as plugins, rather than defaults, so you don’t get things like PMing and Quick Tags and inline images. You have to add in plugins for that. While I was using it, I wrote a few of my own plugins and hacks to make things work like I wanted.

    All of these hacks can be directly applied to the functions.php file of your theme.

    Change ‘Sticky’ to an image

    If you make a topic sticky it gets ‘pinned’ to the top of the forum. This great for things like announcements etc. It’s really annoying that it’s hard to change. I wanted a post-it image to show that it was pinned, so I made a function to delete the default function and replace it with my own.

    This goes in your functions.php for your theme, just like it would for WordPress

    <?php
// This sets sticky label as an image
remove_filter('bb_topic_labels', 'bb_sticky_label', 20);
function my_sticky_label( $label ) {
        global $topic;
        if (is_front()) {
                if ( '2' === $topic->topic_sticky ) {
                        return sprintf(__('<img src="/images/sticky.png" alt="&#91;sticky&#93;" /> %s'), $label);
                }
        } else {
                if ( '1' === $topic->topic_sticky || '2' === $topic->topic_sticky ) {
                        return sprintf(__('<img src="/images/sticky.png" alt="&#91;sticky&#93;" /> %s'), $label);
                }
        }
        return $label;
}
add_filter('bb_topic_labels', 'my_sticky_label', 20);
?>

    Change the text of a ‘Closed’ topic

    By default when you close a topic it renames the topic to Closed: Topic Name. I wanted to change that to Read Only: Topic Name, so what I did was delete the old closed filter and replaced it with my own.

    <?php
// This sets closed lable to read as 'read only'
remove_filter('bb_topic_labels', 'bb_closed_label');
function my_closed_label( $label ) {
        global $topic;
        if ( '0' === $topic->topic_open )
                return sprintf(__('[Read Only] %s'), $label);
        return $label;
}
add_filter('bb_topic_labels', 'my_closed_label');
?>

    Woopra

    If you use Woopra to monitor traffic and Gravatar for icons, you may notice that just slapping Woopra’s tracker in the bottom of your site doesn’t show the Gravars. Since bbPress themeing is what it is, I put this in my theme’s footer.php file to make gravatars show up in my Woopra console. The trick was getting it to extract the logged in user’s email. So here it is. Put this in your footer file and Woopra will show gravatars.

    <!-- Woopra Code Start -->
<?php
        global $user_id, $user_email, $user_identity;
        $woopra_name = bb_get_current_user_info( 'login' );
        $woopra_email = bb_get_current_user_info( 'email' );
        if ( $woopra_name == '') {
                echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">";
                echo "\n";
        }
        else {
                echo '<script type="text/javascript">';
                echo "\nvar woopra_visitor = new Array();";
                echo "\nwoopra_visitor['name'] = '$woopra_name';";
                echo "\nwoopra_visitor['email'] =  '$woopra_email';";
                echo "\nwoopra_visitor['avatar'] = 'http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/" . md5(strtolower($woopra_email)) . 
                "&amp;size=60&amp;default=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.woopra.com%2Fimages%2Favatar.png';";
                echo "\n";
        }
?>
var _wh = ((document.location.protocol=='https:') ? "https://sec1.woopra.com" : "http://static.woopra.com");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + _wh + "/js/woopra.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<!-- Woopra Code End -->
  • Woopra Gravatars

    Woopra Gravatars

    At one point, I used Woopra to monitor my traffic. At the time, I also used Gravatar for avatars. Woopra has this awesome ability to show the gravatars of the person visiting, based on their email. Except it wasn’t working with my theme.

    Normally I’d just slap this in my footer.php theme file to make gravatars show up in my Woopra console, but I happen to be using a Theme Parent (ThemeHybrid – which I’m also using here) and I don’t want to have to hack my theme any more than I have. The glorious thing is that Justin, in his wisdom, made a function I could plug into. So I made a new function (my_woopra_footer) which lets me extract the user’s email and ID name, parse it through, and spit back the right data. It’s weird, and I don’t suggest you use it unless you’re using Hybrid’s theme.

    /* Woopra */
function my_woopra_footer() {
        global $user_ID, $user_email, $user_identity;
        echo "\n";
        ?>?
                <?!-- Woopra Code Start -->?
                <?script type="text/javascript">?
                var woopra_visitor = new Array();
        <?php

        if (is_user_logged_in()) {
                echo "\n\t\twoopra_visitor['name'] = '$user_identity';";
                echo "\n\t\twoopra_visitor['email'] =  '$user_email';";
                echo "\n\t\twoopra_visitor['avatar'] = 'http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/" . md5(strtolower($user_email)) . 
                "&size=60&default=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.woopra.com%2Fimages%2Favatar.png';";
        }
        echo "\n";
        ?>
                var _wh = ((document.location.protocol=="https:") ? "https://sec1.woopra.com" : "http://static.woopra.com");
                document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + _wh + "/js/woopra.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
                <?/script>?
                
        <??php
}

add_action( 'wp_footer', 'my_woopra_footer' );

    As a sidebar, I still think Woopra is an amazing tool. It just had all sorts of weird issues on my sites and I backed off, trading it for Google Analytics. Yeah, I know.

  • Ban Whack-a-Mole

    Ban Whack-a-Mole

    If Ban Hammer is too much for you, I understand. But you still want to smack down users from a specific domain? Otto came up with this and it works nicely.

    Copy the code into your theme’s functions.php file (just make one if you don’t have one) and change the call to .ru to whatever it is you need. I’m not 100% sure what would happen if you added in multiple calls, but this is perfect for banning just ONE annoying person.

    function no_russians($login, $email, $errors) {
        if (strpos($email, '.ru') !== FALSE) {
                $errors->add('email_banned', __('ERROR: This email address is not allowed, please choose another one.'));
        }
}
add_action('register_post', 'no_russians', 10, 3);