Gimme Soda

So one of my co-workers from a previous job had me build a site for them back maybe two years ago – it never actually got finished. About two months ago he gets a hold of me and asks me to finish up the job.

So a quick conversation or two and I’m back on the job for him. I was working mostly on my off time but the work got done. They launched about a week ago and just got written about over on the ocregister.com website, leading to a nice traffic spike! Sure enough people seem to be talking about it, I’m seeing traffic coming in from the ocregister site, twitter, facebook, myspace, email services and various bloggers are making note of it.

Nice to see something I developed successful!

Cheers to Brandon Dorn, David Echanique, and ThriftyBeer.com!

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—-Update—-

I custom compiled PHP in order to get the daemons running. Apparently PHP5 has the “pcntl” functions disabled by default and I had to compile with –enable-pcntl, with those functions enabled the daemons ran without error.

Also, I modified the script for compiling PHP5 from the DreamHost wiki, normally found here:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Installing_PHP5

I’ve modified it so that it will compile a few PECL extensions into the binary statically and I didn’t have to go through the hassle of build a phpize that would work with the non-root user allowed me on the DreamHost environment. So I added memcache and mailparse to the binary and they are both working smoothly.

As mentioned earlier I was trying to get memcache to work on the PS and I am glad to report that I have gotten it working. Currently it’s setup to use a max of 512MB worth of memory and seems to be running nicely.

CPU   MEM%   COMMAND

0.0  1.4   0:00.11 ./memcached -d -m 512 -l 66.33.199.189 -p 11211

All in all – http://www.theserandomwords.com/ is coming along smoothly.

—-End Update—-

So apparently laconica fails to remote subscribe on various hosts – not sure if it is happening everywhere (I doubt it) but in any case DreamHost and BlueHost installs seem to be affected on version 0.7.3. Not so much fun!

http://laconi.ca/trac/ticket/1408

I’m investing some time into getting this fixed mostly because this type of problem (an issue on a core feature) really really bugs me. I think I’ve gotten close but no luck yet – any devs reading? Wanna get your hands dirty!? I’m pretty sure the issue is related to the actions/remotesubscribe.php and/or the extlib/OAuth.php files.

Beyond that I have some good news! Since I’m on a DreamHost PS I was able to spend some time in getting two things setup for use with my laconica installs.

Sphinx and the OpenFire XMPP Server are both working smoothly and integrated into Laconica. Memcache is next on my list and maybe a plugin that will allow users to register OpenFire accounts when they signup with the laconica instance! Nice, no?

Finally, I really am not enjoying the current installer – I think I’ll streamline my current class and convert it to a much simpler/cleaner version and submit it as a replacement, with any luck we’ll be getting clean web-based installs soon, one way or another!

Anyhow I need some sleep. Night… or ummm Morning!

JJ

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I finally got around to posting a rather bare-bones version of my own “Installing Laconica” page. I’ll add to it when I get more time but I couldn’t sleep so I figured I’d get it live.

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laconica, laconica installer

A customer wants to block an entire country from visiting their site… not something I approve of but it sounds like an interesting project….

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Just finished testing the updated installer for laconica version 0.7.3 codenamed “You Are The Everything“. I’ve gone ahead and cleared out the old laconica install at http://laconica.gimmesoda.com and tested the installer there with no problems. Also, there was a bug which allowed the installer to continue running even after failing to select the database. This has been fixed as well.

The installer can be downloaded from the usual location:

http://www.gimmesoda.com/laconica_installer.zip

One last thing, you have to call the install script from gimme_install.php instead of install.php (laconica now has it’s own installer at that location).

If people still need help with this I do offer an install service, just contact me.

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installer, laconica, laconica installer

So I work with the NextGEN Gallery plugin pretty often for various websites and one of the things we constantly find ourselves doing is downloading zip files of content, then uploading them to the system in order to import them. From time to time I would run into a max upload size problem which meant uploading outside the usual interface or doing things in portions.

I decided I needed to get around this problem so I went ahead and made what turned out to be a pretty simple modification of the NextGEN Gallery plugin. Here’s what I did:

1. I modified admin/functions.php and added a function:
   import_zipfile_from_url($galleryID)
2. I modified admin/addgallery.php in various spots

The first modification is easiest, I just took the code from the import_zipfile function and modified it so that rather then expecting the file from the $_FILES variable I used curl to grab the zip file from the URL, save it to the /tmp directory with a random name, then followed the process from the original function. Easy!

The only other modification that was needed was the admin form for adding a gallery. The file that handles that is admin/addgallery.php and after taking a look at it I found it really wasn’t a complex form at all. I did the following:

1. I modified the <ul> with the id “tabs” adding the following pointing the link to the following: <a href=”#zipimport”>
2. Then I added a div with the actual form with the id “zipimport” – it takes in the url for the zip file and the gallery selection
3. Finally I added another POST variable check: $_POST['zipimport'] which executes the new function which was added to functions.php

Test it out, as long as PHP was compiled with cURL this should work pretty smoothly. You can grab a copy of the files I modified from here:

http://files.gimmesoda.com/nextgen/nextgen_gallery_mod.zip

Let me know if you have any questions!

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nextgen gallery, plugin modifications

I had to do another install of laconica the other day and because of that I figured I would try out the installer that it comes with.

I’m sorry to say I was actually pretty disappointed. The config file that was generated had just a few lines in it, and when I loaded the site everything was basically broken theme wise.

I had to manually go in and fix up the config file. Looks like I will be updating my own installer after all – expect a release real soon.

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I keep seeing this more and more often. Apparently the proper mime-types keep getting set for mp3 files and browsers are properly responding – so rather then downloading (depending on your setup) the file might just end up playing from your browser! The horror! (People, just save the target file!)

Anyhow, if your application is meant to send the file as a download you really should be forcing it rather then relying on your visitor’s settings. Put the following into your .htaccess file to force the download:

AddType application/octet-stream .mp3

You can also add more extensions to that line in order to force the download of more file types such as:

AddType application/octet-stream .mp3 .flv .mov .wav

You get the idea! Any questions? Enjoy!

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htaccess, mp3 downloads, octet-stream

So there are quite a few people have asked about a code for removing the dreamhost setup fee. Just go ahead and use the coupon code “WTH“.

That code removes $50 from your initial payment, which is the cost of the setup fee if you’re going to pay monthly, or takes off a good chuck of the yearly price.

Enjoy!

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