Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Category: How To

  • WHOIS Tells All

    WHOIS Tells All

    WHOIS?This most often comes up when someone is suffering content theft. Invariably, someone will see their hard written prose on some scammy person’s site, and want it taken down. This is, sadly, harder to do than we’d like. Basically you have to find the site owner, contact them, ask them to take the stuff down, hope they do it, and when they don’t, go up to their webhost. I’m not going to get into the copyright issue, and just assume you know not to attack someone over links to your site (not illegal), rss feeds pulling excerpts from your site (ditto), or quotes (really?). If you don’t know what is and isn’t copyright/content theft, then you’re not ready for this yet.

    Assuming you are, how do we do find out who owns a site?

    First, remember that when you see “Powered by WordPress” in a footer of a site, it is not, in fact, hosted by WordPress. This site says “Powered by WordPress” but it’s hosted by Liquidweb. Now if you see “Blog at WordPress.com”, then yes, it’s hosted by WordPress, and you can easily report the site. The same is true of Blogger, who also has a way to report copyright theft. Many of these ‘hive’ hosts do that.

    LiquidWeb doesn’t, though. So, pretending for a moment that I’m a dirty thief, how do you find out who I am, my email, and get your content removed? And when I don’t answer, where do you go next?

    Start With WHOIS

    Your first tool is called ‘WHOIS’ and does exactly what it sounds like. It tells you ‘who is that.’ Network Solutions has a free whois lookup tool and if you were to search for Halfelf.org you’d get the following:

    Registrant ID:bf39ab1b08df1394
Registrant Name:WhoisGuard Protected
Registrant Organization:WhoisGuard
Registrant Street1:11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200
Registrant City:Los Angeles
Registrant State/Province:CA
Registrant Postal Code:90064
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.6613102107
Registrant FAX:+1.6613102107
Registrant Email:28a9f8aa493149b1a58ff9b4c51e0bcd.protect@whoisguard.com

    It goes on and on, but you may notice none of that is actually … me. That’s because I pay a wee bit extra a year for my host to hide my personal information via whoisguard. I do it becuase I had some idiot track me down to call me about how I wasn’t updating my website enough (a different site), and I now have a restraining order against him.(This is a true story, and yes, he called my house. I no longer have that number for a reason, and frankly if you even think about doing that to someone, get a grip! It’s harassment. For the full story, buy me a drink.) Now that said, the last line I listed is Registrant Email and that email actually works! It’s a real email that will forward messages to me.

    So step one with these things is email that address and hope the person answers. But when a week goes by with no reply, what next? Sadly, some people never check those emails, or they think you are spam, and ignore it. Thankfully, WHOIS will still save you! Scroll down to the name server entries!

    Your nameservers are what translate your domain to the server IP address, and, as a rule, they have to point to where your server really lives. Generally speaking, a nameserver will give away either the registrar (i.e. who you registered your domain with) or the webhost (who you host with).

    Mine are:

    Name Server:NS1.IPSTENU.ORG
Name Server:NS2.IPSTENU.ORG

    Doesn’t really help, does it? I mean, that just says ‘ipstenu hosts ipstenu!’ Here’s what I used to have:

    Name Server:NS1.LIQUIDWEB.COM
Name Server:NS2.LIQUIDWEB.COM

    That would have been much more explanatory. Thankfully you can use Who Is Hosting This? and run a search for any domain (like http://www.whoishostingthis.com/halfelf.org), even if they have their own name server, and you get this:

    Well thank goodness we have some information! Look up LiquidWeb, and you can contact them. “Hey, this evil Half Elf is stealing my stuff!”

    I prefer Who Is Hosting This to ‘Who Hosts’ becuase if you look me up on the latter, you get this:

    Not useful (though accurate). If you keep getting nested domains, you have to keep digging until you find the end of the rabbit hole.

    Really the best thing is always going to be whois, and once you get used to looking at it, it’s really not that scary. At the same time, I strongly suggest people invest in Whois Guard, or some other ‘protection’ to stop annoying people from getting their personal information. You don’t need the hassle of being listed in a phonebook.

  • WordPress Site Description

    WordPress Site Description

    Someone asked me how I got the asterisks in my site description to be a link. It was actually really frustrating for about an hour. And then I remembered my filters.

    This site is using Hybrid Core, so there are some extra hooks:

    
add_filter('option_blogdescription', 'halfelf_site_description');

function halfelf_site_description($desc) {
        $desc .= '<a href="https://halfelf.org/#bitch" title="Brave, Intelligent, Tenacious, Creative and Honest">*</a>';
        return $desc;
}

    If you’re doing it on a non-Hybrid theme, you have to filter bloginfo

    add_filter( 'bloginfo', 'halfelf_bloginfo', 10, 2 );
function halfelf_bloginfo( $text, $show ) {
    if( 'description' == $show ) {
        $text .= '<a href="https://halfelf.org/#bitch" title="Brave, Intelligent, Tenacious, Creative and Honest">*</a>';
    }
    return $text;
}

    Pretty simple.

  • Mailman Newsletter Widget

    Mailman Newsletter Widget

    I read How to Add a Newsletter Signup Box After Your Posts by Brian Gardner and thought to myself “Self,” I said, “I really would love to be able to add a signup widget for my mailman newsletter.”

    And so I did. The following code is plain HTML. Just drop it into a text widget wherever you want it to show up, and magically it will. If you’re using a Genesis theme, this is your replacement for Step 3.

    <div id="newsletter">
    <div class="white-border">
        <div class="newsletter-wrap">
            <h4>Newsletter</h4>
            <p>Get my awesome newsletter!</p>
            <form action="http://example.com/mailman/subscribe/newsletter_example.com" method="post" id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" name="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" class="validate" target="_blank">
            <input type="email" value="" name="email" class="email" id="mce-EMAIL" placeholder="Email Address" required>
			<input name="pw" type="password" class="password" id="mce-PASSWORD" placeholder="Enter Password" required>
			<input name="pw-conf" type="password" class="password" id="mce-PASSWORD" placeholder="Confirm Password" required>
			<input type="hidden" name="digest" value="No">
            <input type="submit" value="Sign Up" name="subscribe" id="mc-embedded-subscribe" class="button">
            </form>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

    One important thing to note here, I wanted everyone to get the emails as they happened, no digest, so I set this: . If you want to make it an option, the down and dirty way is to use this:

    Digest: <select name=digest>
<option value=1>Yes</option>
<option value=0>No</option>
</select>

    The rest is pretty much Brian’s CSS, tweaked a little since my size requirements were different. Don’t change the ‘name’ values, as it makes Mailman cry. And how does it look?

    Looks nice, don’t it?

  • WordPress Multisite 101

    WordPress Multisite 101

    So there’s this thing. I blog a lot, but sometimes the ‘lessons’ I want to teach would take up a few thousand words. I’ve sorted out that any blog post over 1200 words is ‘too long’ and I try to split it up. But then how do I organize it? Let’s face it, books are useful for a reason.

    After compiling and colating all the emails, IMs, forum posts, and blog posts Andrea and I have made over the last couple years, we realized we had a novel. The problem was organizing it so the scope wasn’t maddening and daunting for us to write, nor for the user to read. Finally inspiration struck. If you’re using Multisite, you really need to know WordPress first. You have to walk before you can run, as they say, and with Multisite, you have to already know how to do the basics.

    This book will not teach you how to pick a host, copy files up, create a database, or any of those things. It won’t even tell you if you should or should not use Multisite. What it will do is help you go from WordPress to WordPress Multisite, configure the options, understand what they mean, sort out the standard problems, and help you figure out what you need to know and where you need to be in your own head in order to do this thing.

    And it’s free. Well, no. It’s not. It’s pay what you want.

    That’s the other thing. I could go the traditional route with a book, find someone to publish it, etc etc. Or I could self-publish on the iBook store or eJunkie and take a hit for the overhead and the hassles of all that. Or… Or I could address the real problem about making ‘money’ with books. Obscurity. I have a whole philosophy about paying for ebooks and you can read it if you want. But the tl;dr for you is this.

    Pay me whatever you think the ebook is worth. If you aren’t going to pay, you weren’t anyway, and that’s nothing lost from my end. I’d appreciate a fiver if you find it useful. I totally support you downloading it first, reading it, then paying later. After all, how do you know it’s what you wanted without reading it?

    Grab a copy of WordPress Multisite 101, it’s in ePub and PDF. You know the drill. Right click and save as.

  • Moving WordPress Multisite

    Moving WordPress Multisite

    I answer this a lot.

    Edited to add: If you’re just moving to a new server and keeping your domain name, it’s exactly like moving Single Install WordPress. Just remember to make sure your new server is set up to handle wildcard domains, and your httpd.conf has ‘AllowOverride’ set to ‘All’ and you should be fine. If you’re moving to a new domain name, read on!

    Edit : The Incerconnectit Search/Replace DB script is also perfect to use, though you still need to manually edit a couple places.

    Moving a normal WordPress site is really easy. Copy over your data. Change your URLs, do a search/replace on your wp_posts table (to fix any internal links), go out for a beer. Some of you may need to edit a wp-config file, but mostly that’s it.

    Then there’s Multisite, which sucks. See, unlike single installs of WordPress, you can’t change your site URLs easily. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re a Super Admin, you can easily go into WP Admin -> Network -> Sites and edit the sites. You’d have two places to edit it:

    On the Info Tab

    On the Settings Tab

    But here’s where it starts to suck. If you’re changing tech.ipstenu.org to press.ipstenu.org for example, you do that and then you need to go to your database and look for the site posts table (in this case, it’s wp_2_posts) and search/replace tech.ipstenu with press.ipstenu.

    That’s not terrible, right? It looks a lot like moving a single install of WordPress.

    What if you have your site as subfloders, using ipstenu.org/tech and ipstenu.org/press though? And you want to move everything to lipstenu.org?

    This is where it sucks.

    See some widgets and theme settings store your data and include your URL. This is done with data serialization as well, which means the length of your URL matters. If you changed from ipstenu.org to Lpstenu.org, then you would be perfectly safe doing a total database search/replace of the domain name! But since I’ve proposed changing it to Lipstenu.org, I can’t do that. Any field that counted my domain name would be off by one, and thus invalid, and thus wipe out my settings. Oh and to make it worse? Depending on how you uploaded your media and included it in your site, your postmeta table might also be filled with this.

    It’s important to understand two things here.

    1. This situation exists on a normal single site install.
    2. You don’t have to change it in those places!

    And as a maybe third, I know a lot of people who do a blanket search/replace all the time and never have a single problem. But because I know enough who do have issues, I can’t safely recommend you try it unless you have a rock-solid backup of your database.

    This brings us to the point. How do you move WordPress Multisite to a new domain name?

    Very, very, carefully.

    You’re going to have to do some work in the database, so now’s the time to get some coffee and practice not freaking out. If you have phpMyAdmin, editing your WordPress database is not terrifying, but like a cat, should be approached with caution. Remember to take a full backup of your database before you start. A good backup.

    First, it’s perfectly safe to edit all wp_posts (and wp_x_posts) tables with a search/replace of your domain name. I strongly suggest using as much of the domain as you can: i.e. http://newdomain.com instead of just newdomain. This will make sure you don’t confidently change the content of your posts. The Incerconnectit Search/Replace DB script is also perfect to use here, but it won’t fix everything, which is why we have another step:

    Next you need to manually go through these tables:

    • wp_site
    • wp_blogs

    Those two tables are really straight forward, by the way. You’ll see what to edit right away.

    Then you have to manually (again) review all the wp_x_options tables and look for THREE fields:

    • home
    • siteurl
    • fileupload_url

    Only edit those. And yes, you have to do it manually in each of the options table unless you used the Incerconnectit Search/Replace DB script earlier.

    Once you’ve done that, go into your wp-config.php and see if you have to change define( 'DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'ipstenu.org' ); (depending on your change, you may not).

    And … that should be it.

    It’s a pain, but it’s not insurmountable.

    Right away, though, you can see the complications if you’re moving a site from ipstenu.org/wordpress to ipstenu.org, and while most of the changes remain similar, you need to remain vigilant and attentive with every change you make. The wp_blogs table is where it gets stickiest, as you have to add in the new subfolder (or remove it) by editing a separate field in the row.

    Just pay attention, read carefully, and remember to breathe.

  • SOPA Blackout

    SOPA Blackout

    I’m lazy and I don’t want to write a plugin, so I asked on Twitter if someone had one to black out a site for SOPA on the 18th of January. If you don’t get why this is a thing, please read WordPress.org’s post on SOPA. A lot of sites are going black from 8am to 8pm. I am, and I to didn’t want to use a plugin.

    My solution for this involves two files and is all thanks to Pete!

    To do this is really simple. Go in and make a file called .maintenance in the top level of your WP install. For most people, it’s the same folder as your .htaccess and wp-config.php files.

    Now edit that file and put in the following content:

    <?php
 
// Let's make sure you're not an admin/logged in!
 
function is_user_logged_in() {
    $loggedin = false;
    foreach ( (array) $_COOKIE as $cookie => $value ) {
        if ( stristr($cookie, 'wordpress_logged_in_') )
            $loggedin = true;
    }
    return $loggedin;
}
 
if ( ! stristr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/wp-admin') &amp;&amp; ! stristr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/wp-login.php') &amp;&amp; ! is_user_logged_in() )
 
// If it's after 8:00:00 on the 18th, we're going to show the blackout page
 
if ( time() >= mktime(8,0,0,1,18,2012) ) {
	// When we hit 8pm (20), we're back.
	$upgrading = mktime(20,0,0,1,18,2012);
}
?>

    What does this do? It’s pretty simple. First it checks to see if you’re logged in and, if so, lets you get where you need to go. If you’re not logged in, though, it checks the date and if it’s after 8am on the 18th, you get a maintenance page. After 8pm on the 18th, it swings back. (All this code, except for the date stuff which I wrote, is from Matt (Sivel):
    WordPress Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin and WordPress Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin Part 3/ ) Pretty cool right? And the 8am to 8pm is based on your server’s time, so it’s all local. It’s also pretty easy to see how you change that for your own time. I would say pick your busiest time to go black.

    But if you want it to look pretty, you need to do a little extra. (Code from WordPress Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin Part 2 and text from Blaccupy) Make a file called maintenance.php and put it in your wp-content folder. Here’s an example:

    <?php
/* Tell search engines that the site is temporarily unavilable */
$protocol = $_SERVER&#91;"SERVER_PROTOCOL"&#93;;
if ( 'HTTP/1.1' != $protocol &amp;&amp; 'HTTP/1.0' != $protocol ) $protocol = 'HTTP/1.0';
header( "$protocol 503 Service Unavailable", true, 503 );
header( 'Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8' );
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
        <title>BLACKED OUT</title>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
        <style type="text/css">
        body {
                background: black;
                text-align:center;
                color: #eee;
                font-family: Helvetica;
                font-size: 2.2em;
                }
        </style>
</head>
<body>

<div style="width: 960px; margin: 0 auto;">
<h2>This website is..</h2>

<h1>BLACKED OUT!</h1>

<p>In protest of pending US legislation, which threatens the freedoms of websites like this one and the freedoms of the people who use them, this website is offline on January 18th, 2012 from 8am to 8pm EST.</p>

<p>Please <a href="http://americancensorship.org/">help protect our free speech</a> against the corporate and political interests which seek to take them away!</p>

<p>(And don't worry, we'll be back in business tomorrow!)</p>
</div>

<?php
die();
?>

    Which means your site will look like this on January 18th. You’ll notice I made some tweaks on mine. This is a default feature of WordPress, by the way. You can design your own maintenance mode page just with this one file, so y’know, party time.

    Now there’s only one catch. If you update WP via the automatic updater between now and then, you lose the .maintenance file. I don’t have a fix for that, but if you do, please comment!

    And yes, my sites are going dark on the 18th.

    ETA: If you have a Multisite and only want SOME sites dark, use Customize the Suspended blog page from WordPress Must-Use Tutorials. Suspend the sites and boom goes the dynamite.

    ETA 2: If you’re using MediaWiki (like I am on another site) I came up with this idea to go dark for SOPA. Its just a normal extension that, between those hours, redirects to the same page I use for WordPress. You could have it point to any page, of course.

    <?php

if ( !defined( 'MEDIAWIKI' ) ) die();

if ( time() >= mktime(8,0,0,1,18,2012)  &amp;&amp; time() <= mktime(20,0,0,1,18,2012) ) {
     
        include('/location-of/wp-content/maintenance.php');
    exit();
}
?>

    That code, sans the Mediawiki line, will also work as an extension for ZenPhoto, so pass it on.