November 2nd, 2007

Landed in Sydney

Next 3 weeks i’ll spend in Sydney. Its second time i come here. Previous trip was in March of the this year. This company trip going to be hardworking. We need a lot of things to do - VoIP setup, Linux Router configurations and many more. However its going to be fun as well. My task number one is to setup load balancing and backup links with BGP on autonomous system. I’m about to store this useful experience in my head for future :)

If anything interesting happens worth to know i’ll definitely share it :)

October 30th, 2007

10 Cool Things about Vista you may not have heard of

Wincustomize published nice set of “10 Cool Things about Vista you may not have heard of”. All i have to say – i like Windows Vista a lot despite i’m programing mostly on PHO for Unix/Apache based servers. However form an user perspective its very stong and nice featured OS which is a real and solid thing.

Now the text itself.

Windows Vista has a lot going for it that most people don’t really hear about. It’s understandable because marketing some of these new features would essentially be tantamount to saying “Oops, XP had some problems”.

What makes Windows Vista a much better experience aren’t due mainly to the major new features. Instead, it’s the hundreds of barely documented improvements to the OS that users notice but quickly take for granted — at least until they have to go back to using Windows XP for awhile. The big features like a new security layer, integrated search, game & DVD exploring, DirectX 10, backup, Aero, kernel overhaul, better audio handling, Windows Event logging, WDDM, SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, ReadyDrive support, WPF, WCF, and on and on (thousands of new features).

But what about the end-user experience that people may not have heard of? Below are 10 improvements in Windows Vista you probably haven’t heard about.

  1. A truly multithreaded explorer. In Windows XP, if you opened a file dialog or a window that had to connect to the CD/DVD drive or to the network the whole shell would hang while it did its thing. Not so in Windows Vista. In Windows Vista, that all is done in a background thread. Getting around the OS is always a very fluid experience.
  2. Wireless networking is much improved. The built in wireless networking in XP was pretty awful. Most users ended up having to a user a kludgy or bloated third-part wireless network manager instead. The one in Windows Vista is not only better looking, it “just works”.
  3. Incredibly good plug & play. While it is true that video driver support for Vista at launch was spotty (and not to say “I told you so!” but…read this article from over a year ago). The reality is that most things do work and work extremely well. If I buy a brand new device today and plug it in, odds are it’ll work without me having to do anything. And Vista has a nice little progress dialog that you can check to see how your new device is working. On XP, you just got little pop up messages during every stage. And how many times on XP did you run into something just not working when you plugged it in with no real explanation? That won’t happen on Vista. At the very worst case, you’ll be able to see where things went wrong in the progress dialog that you can look at.

  4. More polish. Polish matters. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be talking about the iPhone all the time. A good user experience matters. Look at the screenshot to the right here. Don’t be afraid. This is one of the reasons why Jenny Lam is my hero (her team at Microsoft really did a great job on this). This kind of improved experience throughout the OS makes Windows Vista much more pleasurable. While there are plenty of people who use our software to make XP look a lot like Vista, there’s no substitute for the real thing.
  5. More information about your system. A lot of us have big giant cases under our desk. In fact, in the age of the monitor having the USB ports, the case is getting farther and farther away from us. So the days of being able to simply listen to the hard drive crunching are long over. On Windows XP, if my system was slow, I’d bring up the task manager and check CPU. And if the CPU meter wasn’t pegged then I’d go and look at the case to see if I could hear the hard drive crunching. On Vista, the task manager will tell you how much of your hard drive bandwidth you’re using up and tell you what process is accessing the disk.
  6. Much higher tolerance for handles. On Windows XP, if your system runs out of handles, programs won’t launch and weird things start to happen. There’s no warning message about it. Almost nobody knows what a user handle is. On Windows XP, users would just reboot their machine. People who know what handles know how to kill them off. I wrote an article “How to keep Windows XP stable” that goes into this. On Windows Vista, the system seems to do just fine with high handles so far. This means a much more stable experience.
  7. Assessments. If you’re reading this, you’re probably the person who people call with computer questions. On Windows XP, you might ask them “What kind of computer do you have?” and the likely response was “It’s a Dell.” or HP or Gateway or Toshiba or whatever. On Windows Vista, you instead ask them what their performance index is which they can get to very easily. This instantly lets people see how fast their computers really are.
  8. Better thumbnails. Windows Vista has “Windows Photo Gallery”. But 99% of the time I’m going through photos in Explorer. In Windows XP, my choice was “thumbnails” which topped out at 128×128 thumbnails. In Windows Vista, I can have them as large or small as I’d like which can make for very handy viewing of lots of pictures at once.
  9. Better Laptop experience. In Windows XP, I didn’t ever know for sure if my laptop was really going to come back from sleep or hibernation. Some of my laptops still run XP and it’s a difference between XP and Vista I am constantly reminded of. In Windows Vista, my PC is definitely coming back from sleep. I know there are still people who complain, I’m not saying it’s perfect but it’s a lot more reliable for me than XP was (or OS X Tiger was) in this regard.
  10. Usability improvements. There are so many tiny touches in Windows Vista that you won’t see mentioned anywhere. For instance, in Windows Vista, if you click on the system tray clock, you get a nice calendar dialog. By contrast, in Windows XP, I would double-click to get the date and time properties and it was slow (the Vista calendar pops up instantly). It’s just a nice small but useful touch. The home folder is a really nice touch that wasn’t in XP in a meaningful way.
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October 28th, 2007

Mass Post Manager for Wordpress Now suports Wordpress 2.3

Mass Post Manager for Wordpress Plugin was updated tonight.

Added support of taxonomy scheme present in Wordpress 2.3 and higher versions. Please consider this release as beta but it worked under my test environment.

Now Plugin must work on all Wordpress installations.

October 23rd, 2007

Subscribe2 - Email subscription plugin for Wordpress

I’ve just found interesting plugin. May be its time to get little trackback to early 2000?

Subscribe2 is a Wordpress plugin that you can use to keep users up-to-date on new posts by sending them email every time you publish a new post, weekly or monthly. Email subscription seems like cavemen technology against the glorious wonder that is RSS feeds, but still, many people just don’t like RSS enough to use it.

Subscribe2 was relatively easy to install and configure, although it does require editing a file after uploading to configure the page the subscription will appear on. Configuring how email is delivered is easy using the plugin’s options page and comes with several different tags you can use in your outgoing mails. The plugin also supports automatically subscribing users that post a comment based on the email they submitted, although i find that a rather sneaky way to get people’s address.

Subscribe 2 Wordpress Plugin

Overall the Subscribe2 plugin is a solid way to keep readers updated via email and works with minimum hassle.

[Via Serverdome]

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October 9th, 2007

Just Upgraded to WordPress 2.3

Upgrade went pretty smoothly.

However:

WordPress database error: [Table ‘wp_post2cat’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT cat_ID AS ID, MAX(post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wp_posts` p LEFT JOIN `wp_post2cat` pc ON p.ID = pc.post_id LEFT JOIN `wp_categories` c ON pc.category_id = c.cat_ID WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ GROUP BY cat_ID

WordPress database error: [Table ‘wp_post2cat’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT cat_ID AS ID, MAX(post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wp_posts` p LEFT JOIN `wp_post2cat` pc ON p.ID = pc.post_id LEFT JOIN `wp_categories` c ON pc.category_id = c.cat_ID WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ GROUP BY cat_ID

After digging in Google i found this — You need to update Google Sitemaps plugin as found in this thread: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/135564

Worked out!

October 5th, 2007

Show will go on

After months of sleeping i decided to go on doing my blog.

My wide experience and good coder’s reputation, ultimate achievements with SEO and Adsense makes me happy and i decided to share some interesting techniques and things i know. So You are all welcome here for my experience. I will not blog too frequently but only when its sufficient and interesting. Also going to continue wordpress plugins development.

Also i can blog upon demand. Drop me a question if you want to know something extra among PHP, Wordpress, SEO and Ways of making money in internet, I’ll Keep You posted :)

May 16th, 2007

Mass Post Manager Updated

I’m pleased to announce update of wordpress plugin Mass Post ManagerThis plugin allow to do the following things:

  • Delete all posts and/or commentsOF selected state
  • Move all posts from one category to another

UPDATE: Now you may delete all unapproved/spam comments (i e spam) in one click. Very useful if your blog full of pending junk!More details available here

May 3rd, 2007

How to post remotely to blogger.com - Working PHP Example

Recently i met curious problem – how to make remote post to blogger.com.

This task was really trivial before Google implemented their complex authentication mechanisms. After spending 3 hours to debug things i made simple solution which is working fine for me.

All code was written and based on GData API .

I will not comment my code below – you must easily inderstand it yourself:

  • $arr – array to post ( indexes – title, subtitle, body, d_date, etc)
  • $blog – external blog parameters. $blog['xmlrpc'] – XML RPC URL of your blogger blog to post to (see link above)

Here we go:

$entry .= “\r\n”;
$entry .= ““;
$entry .= ”

” . date(”c”, strtotime($arr['d_date'])) . ““;
<![CDATA[{$arr['title']}]]> $entry .= “”;

if( $arr['category'] ) {
$entry .= ““;
}

if( $arr['body'] ) {
$entry .= ““;
$entry .= ““;
$entry .= “
“;
if( $arr['subtitle'] ) {
$entry .= ““;
$entry .= ““;
$entry .= “
“;
}
}elseif( $arr['subtitle'] ) {
$entry .= ““;
$entry .= ““;
$entry .= “
“;
}
if( $arr['author'] ) {
$entry .= ““;
$entry .= “{$arr['author']}“;
$entry .= “
“;
}
$entry .= “”;

if( ! $this->blog_token[$this->blog_id]['Auth'] )
{
// AUTHENTICATE WITH GOOGLE !!!
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, “https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin” );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 4);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, “Email={$blog['auth_login']}&Passwd={$blog['auth_pwd']}&service=blogger&source=Nst-Nst-4.0″);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);

$this->client->auth = curl_exec($ch);

if (curl_errno($ch)) {
$this->ret = curl_error($ch);
break;
} else {
curl_close($ch);
$this->ret = 0;

if( strpos( $this->client->auth, ‘Auth=’) == false) {
$this->ret = 1;
$this->clent->error = “Google Unauthorized”;
break;
}
preg_match_all(’!(\S+)=(\S+)!msi’, $this->client->auth, $o, PREG_SET_ORDER);
for($_i=0; $_i
$this->blog_token[$this->blog_id][$o[$_i][1]] = $o[$_i][2];
}
}
}

$ch = curl_init();

$headers = array( “Authorization: GoogleLogin Auth={$this->blog_token[$this->blog_id]['Auth']}”, “Content-type: application/atom+xml” );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $blog['xmlrpc']);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 4);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_UNRESTRICTED_AUTH, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $entry);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);

$this->client->message = curl_exec($ch);

if (curl_errno($ch)) {
$this->ret = curl_error($ch);
} else {
curl_close($ch);
$this->ret = 0;
}

April 30th, 2007

Mass Post Manager Plugin for Wordpress released

I’m pleased to announce my new wordpress plugin Mass Post Manager

This plugin allow to do the following things:

  • Delete all posts and/or comments in selected category
  • Move all posts from one category to another

Plugin was developed for may needs so its functionality is quite limited right now. Рowever i plan to add more and more features upon request.

More details available here

April 29th, 2007

topnews.com.ua launch

I’m glad to announce launch of news blog about events in Ukraine topnews.com.ua. Rather to say relaunch as it was suspended for a two years. Now it became nice designed blog with automatically filled content from leading news agencies. Content is crawled and exported by newstrack 4 wordpress – new generation feed crawling engine.

More information about this plugin will be available very soon as i plan to set up more subject oriented websites.

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