Web Development/Programming

If you have migrated your WordPress blog from another blogging platform but the post slugs weren’t generated, you can my Generate Post Slugs Plugin to have the slugs generated from the post title.

Why I Wrote This Plugin

I wrote this plugin for use on this very blog because when I ported my custom blog software entries to WordPress, I didn’t bother to generate slugs with the import script I cobbled together. A few weeks ago I made my URLs SEO-friendly and realized that all those posts I imported years ago were missing slugs.

License

By downloading, you acknowledge that this plugin is released under the GPLv2 License AS IS with no implicit or explicit warranty of fitness for any purpose. While I have tested the plugin with WordPress 3.2.1 and have used it to fix the slugs for posts on this very site, it is STRONGLY SUGGESTED that you make a backup of your WordPress installation prior to using it.

Getting the Plugin

If you accept the license terms outlined above, click here to download the Generate Slugs Plugin.

Installing the Plugin

Installation is just like any other WordPress plugin. On the plugin install page in your WordPress Dashboard, upload the zip file. Then activate the plugin under the Installed Plugins menu and follow the instructions provided there to use the plugin to generate your slugs.

I hope this helps someone.

In late April, my server got hacked. Most of my php files had code that looked like this placed at the top:

eval(gzinflate(base64_decode('DZZFssRYokOX... long string of gzipped-base64-encoded php code);

I’m not sure how the bad guys got in, but I changed all my passwords and updated all the software on the server. Then, like any obsessive programmer, I set forth making a script to clean up the mess programatically. My solution was a two-step process. I used GNU find command to find all my php scripts with the code “eval(gzinflate” in them. I chose to search by this code because I can’t think of too many legitimate reasons to do this, and it matched all the infections I found manually. The full command I used for this was:

find /full/path/to/public_html -name "*.php" -exec grep -li "eval(gzinflate" {} \;

This command finds all php files then uses grep to look inside each file for “eval(gzinflate”.

I copied the results of this command to a text file called fullInfected.txt .

After I had a list of infected files, I wrote a php script that’ll go through each file on the list, do a search, and remove all lines with the infected code in it. I saved the script in the same directory as my fullInfected.txt file. You can get that file (with a few sample supporting files) here: CleanEvalBase64_decodeHack script.

There are two variables that can be set at the top of the file: One for the name of the file with the list of infected files in it ($listOfFiles) and another for the text to search for ($findWhat). I uploaded the script to the server and ran it via SSH:

php clean.php

When the script runs, it will log a list of which files were cleaned.

This script is released as-is, with no implied warranty whatsoever under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Make a backup of your server before using this and test this very thoroughly on a small sample of infected files.

I’m sure there’s more efficient ways to do with with shell commands and/or regex, but I didn’t know how to do it that way. Good luck getting cleaned up!

Nerds of the world: rejoice! The browser wars are ablaze for the first time in over a decade. Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera are duking it out, feature-for-feature and there’s no clear winner. For the record, I don’t want anyone to win because competition makes software better since developers have to work hard to keep and maintain their market share. While the four major players volley for our affections, Netizens all over the world win! As I mentioned in a recent post, most of what we do with computers is moving to the net. Therefore, the availability of quality browsers is a big deal for techies and Luddites alike.

The First Browser Wars

The First Browser Wars ended around 1997 with the release of Internet Explorer 5. At the time, there was IE, Netscape, and (to a much lesser extent) Opera. When Microsoft decided to unload its war chest in 1995 with the intent of destroying Netscape, it was a matter of time before the boys of Redmond stomped Netscape into the ground. In the span of 2 and a half years, the battle was over.

In 1997, I was just learning how to make web pages. I couldn’t have been happier that Internet Explorer was the winner since that meant I didn’t have to work so hard trying to make my pages look the same on both browsers.  I still tested my sites in Netscape Communicator, but IE was the only browser I really worried about. Life as a budding web designer was good.

My happiness was ill-founded, though, because without competition, Microsoft stopped updating Internet Explorer after the release of IE 6 in September 2001. It would be seven and a half years before Balmer and company decided to release a new version. During IE 6, there were security threats uncovered at least every couple months. While it was nice having only one platform to worry about, it was frustrating and scary to have to worry about security every time you visited a page. Opera never went away during this time, but it never gained much traction in the U.S. at the end of the First Browser Wars

The Second Browser Wars and Beyond

A spunky upstart named Mozilla arose from the ashes of Netscape after Netscape’s Gecko source code was released in 2000. In 2004, Firefox 1.0 was officially released. I honestly never thought Firefox would gain as much traction as it did, but it turns out, FF 1.0 was the scout that signaled the beginning of the Second Browser Wars.

Fast forward 7 more years since FF 1.0 was released and Google has entered the market with Chrome, which shares common roots with Apple’s Safari (via the Webkit engine). It’s apparent that all are scrambling for more market share if you consider that the browser version numbers are increasing at an alarming rate. While some of the version incrementing is for marketing purposes (because we all know higher version numbers mean a better product…), the browsers really are getting better from all the vendors.  Here’s my quick breakdown of the strengths of each browser:

• Internet Explorer 9 – Microsoft has gone out of its way to make IE safer to use for everyday surfing. It automatically checks for phishing attacks, warns users if it detects so much as a mouse fart on a website, and integrates with MS Security Essentials. While it’ll take awhile to shed its reputation as the insecure kid on the block, Microsoft is trying hard to prove otherwise.
• Firefox 5 – Firefox is my favorite because of its vast library of plugins, especially plugins that make life easy for web developers. Mozilla keeps making Firefox faster and has taken an aggressive stance toward security since version 3.5.
• Chrome 12 – Google’s brainchild is the fastest kid on the block. It’s super clean interface and seamless updating architecture has appealed to millions since its debut in late 2008. Google is showing its serious about being the one and only browser folks turn to for their Internet needs.
• Opera 11 – The underdog of the roundup, the Scandinavian wonder invented tabbed browsing in 1996 and continues to set the bar for standards compliance, and it manages to be incredibly fast as well. The only browser found on the Wii, Opera can also be found on PCs, Macs, iPod/iPad, and mobile phones. Opera is the most hardware-agnostic of the bunch.
• Safari  5 – Admittedly, Safari is my least favorite, however, it is by far the best mobile browser in existence, as it renders pages on the iPod Touch and iPad perfectly. Safari is what all mobile browsers should strive to be.

I hope the Second Browser Wars rage on for a long time and we, the consumers of Internet goodness, continue to reap the benefits of the battle. Unlike the First Browser Wars, the current struggle is being fought on technical merit and security. Neither Microsoft nor anyone else can crush the competition strictly with wads of money. No matter who you choose as your browser, I wish everyone happy surfing!

For years, I have wanted a way to programatically find foreign keys in MySQL tables using PHP. After a lot of thought, I have written Phind. Phind basically consists of one function getForeignKeys() whose only parameter is the table name. If that table has foreign keys, Phind returns a multidimensional array containing an index for the key as the first index, and the part of the key as the second index.

My ultimate goal is to use Phind to create a PHP CRUD generator written entirely in PHP. That’ll probably be a long way off, though. I just don’t have time to sit down and finish something like that right now.

The source code for phind is here: Simply rename the file from phind.txt to phind.php when you save it. You can also go here to see Phind in action on a table in a database on my server named ‘contacts.’ Eventually, I will add more examples to the documentation included with the phind.php file, but for now, it’s sparse. However, I’m sure there are enough PHP guys who have been looking for a way to make sense of what foreign keys are in a table and where exactly they are pointing to.

I hope this helps somebody.

I downloaded the Free Arthemia WordPress theme the other day to use with my students’ FBLA site. I really like how the theme looks like a professional newspaper like the New York Times as wells as how easy it is to add Headline and Featured stories just by assigning a category to them.

One thing I could get working was the images that show up with the Headline and Featured stories when you add the Image custom field to an article. The images would just show up as a red x. When I tried to view them in Firefox, I got the following error:

After poking around on the Internet for a minute, I found that there are some files that PECL finfo uses to sniff out the MIME type of files. Apparently, the files are some sort of flat file database that holds, well, MIME types.  Luckily, I extrapolated a solution after seeing a workaround on a forum. If you’re using Arthemia Free Version 2 and are having the same problem getting your images to load, here’s all you must do.

Replace lines 216-220 of the /wp-content/themes/arthemia/scripts/timthumb.php with the following code:

$file_cmd = "file -ib  \"$file\"";
exec ($file_cmd, $exec_output);
$mime_type =  $exec_output[0];

That’s it! The only other thing you have to make sure to do to get your images to resize and show up properly is to put the absolute path to the images without your domain. So, in my case, I have an image whose full path is:

http://breathittfbla.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/foreman.jpg

To make it work, the value for the Image custom field has to be set to:

/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/foreman.jpg

After changing those lines of code and then putting the right file path in the Custom Field, Arthemia is resizing and displaying images in Headlines and Featured Stories without issue.  I hope this helps somebody!