Web Development/Programming

Tech Tips, Web Development/Programming

WordPress Meta junkies: Use Headspace2

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I haven’t been a WordPress user very long, but I have found one plugin that eased a big issue with me: Good meta descriptions in WordPress posts, categories, and archives. Out of the box, WordPress isn’t really equipped o use Excerpts as the Meta Description for a post. Enter Headspace2, which allows WP authors to edit Meta Descriptions to their heart’s content.

OS X, Tech Tips, Web Development/Programming

Solution to Deployment issue using Netbeans 6.5.1 and Tomcat 6.0.22 on OX 10.5.7

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Somehow I always find myself in the middle of a very strange computer problem. This particular issue is a result of my wanting to learn to write JSP applications using Netbeans 6.5.1 with Tomcat 6.0.20. I don’t have time to do a full writeup, so here’s a nutshell version of the problem and my solution:

Problem

When I tried to use the Deploy option to push my Netbeans project to my Tomcat webapps folder, the deployment would fail. I could manually copy the .war file into my Tomcat webapps folder and everything would work fine. But, I thought, “Why should I have to do this if Netbeans is supposed to do it for me?”

Solution

Since I’m running OS X 10.5.7, I opened the Netbeans configuration file at

/Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans6.5.1.app/
Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/Netbeans.conf

and added the following to the netbeans_default_options line:

-J-Djava.io.tmpdir=/tmp

Note: This must be added within the double quotes. Also, I didn’t distrub anything that was on the line already but merely added that tidbit of code.

Explaination

I found this piece of advice buried deep in a forum. Apparently, Netbeans puts the deployed files into a temporary folder before deploying them. The temporary folder it tries to use on OS X isn’t accessible (a permissions problem I guess). Adding that snippet of code tells Netbeans to use the OS X default temporary folder tmp for its intermediate work.

Enjoy!

Microsoft Windows, Tech Tips, Web Development/Programming

What to do if XAMPP for Windows won’t load anything under localhost

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I’ve used XAMPP for Windows on my laptop as a testing server for over a year with no problems. Today, though, I started the Apache and MySQL services as I have many times in the past only to find that both localhost and 127.0.0.1 did not work in my browser. Here’s some of the things I tried that did no good and some notable facts:

  1. I tried localhost:80 and 127.0.0.1:80 with no effect
  2. I disabled the Windows firewall. No dice.
  3. I uninstalled the Apache service. No change.
  4. I uninstalled/reinstalled XAMPP multiple times with multiple versions. No change.
  5. When I would put localhost in the browser, I did not receive a "Page cannot be found" error. Instead, the status bar would indicate "Waiting for localhost." I waited more than ten minutes to see if anything would happen at one point. Nothing did: The screen remained white.
  6. It didn’t matter what browser I used. IE, Firefox, and Opera all sat there and waited while nothing happened.
  7. I have made no system changes since the last time I ran XAMPP except for the regular barrage of Windows Updates.

While I don’t know exactly what broke my XAMPP installation, I can almost guarantee that a Windows Update killed it. I know Microsoft can’t keep every program under the sun from breaking with its updates, it could do a better job of telling you exactly what each update does without having to dig through 500 lines of the KB articles. Anyway…

I managed to fix the problem, as per this article posted in the Apache Friends forums. In the C:\program files\xampp\apache\bin\httpd.conf file, I added the following line:

Win32DisableAcceptEx

From the best I can tell, this has something to do with Apache’s interaction with Windows’ WinSock 2 API. I’d say some security update managed to fix a problem in WinSock but break Apache. It makes me feel really stupid that I don’t know exactly what caused the problem or exactly how the solution actually fixed it. I’m just glad everything is working now. I can actually get to work on the project I needed the server for in the first place.

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