SilentGap » SilentGap

Enabling, Disabling the WordPress debug setting

Tim of SilentGap — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:49:38 +0000

This is a handy feature that took a little while to figure out, but’s nice when WordPress is throwing you a blank page and you can’t figure out why.

To enable WordPress debugging on either MU or the standard version open up the wp-config.php file.

Add the code around line 100 (actually, this part doesn’t matter, but just a suggestion to keep wp-config.php organized):

// Turn Debugging On
define('WP_DEBUG',true);

To turn off debugging, just comment out the define line or change it to false (should work, never tried changing it to false yet).

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Keywords: WordPress, WordPress MU, Enable Debugging, Disable Debugging, Debug, WordPress PHP Error, PHP Error’s, PHP Errors, Turn on php error debugging

Renewable Power Source: Windmill

Tim of SilentGap — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:54:56 +0000

Ok, as you may know, I’ve been really interested in my shed project this year. One thing that’s been on my mind (well, at least I’ve been thinking about it) is electricity, more specifically, how do I get electricity out to my shed. I do have a 220 outlet already routed outside from an old hot tub (cue SNL’s hot tub skit – classic), installed by the previous owner. But where’s the fun in that, for me that involves more digging, which isn’t exactly what I would call a good time.

So, then I was thinking, why not just build my own windmill to charge a few batteries and power my lights off of that. The pro’s – the wind is free and it should give me enough to power a couple lights. The con’s – the cost in buying the batteries & the generator (which I’m going to have to part with no matter what – the generator that is).

Then I saw a cool episode on Make (http://makezine.tv) on how they built a windmill. Pretty impressive if you ask me, especially given the fact that a 20 mph wind should be able to generate enough electricity for me to charge a nice pair of batteries – Video below

Mustache

Tim of SilentGap — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:42:54 +0000

Ok, my brother (supplier (for coffee, that is)(twitter user @todewitt)) stopped by work and dropped off, from a vending machine, a fake mustache (SaWeeeet!!!!). So, it’s friday at work and I decided that it would be a good day to sport it around the office. Here are a few pic’s of activities i participated in – but with the mustache!!!

The shear excitement of having a full mustache – although it kinda looks like a blond Hitler stach – oh well. (Note: Nate in the back, totally awestruck and jealous about my new mustache)

My mustache tickling my nose (Note: Nate in the back, looking on ebay where he can get his own fake mustache)

Me, drinking coffee, with my new fake mustache in my Rush Limbaugh mug – speaking of which, Jimmy Fallon did an awesome Rush Limbaugh karaoke the other night -http://www.latenightwithjimmyfallon.com/blogs/2009/06/rush-limbaugh-karaoke/

On a confrence call w/ a client in San Francisco

Whaaaatt, that made it through QA ?!?!?!?!?!?!

Tim of SilentGap — Thu, 07 May 2009 07:47:45 +0000

This last month has seemed to be themed “Whaaaatt, that made it through QA?!?!?!?!” And by QA I mean Quality Assurance. Currently at work, I’m writing up a bunch of verbal QA scripts, later to be ran through either by a QA tester and/or handled automatically through some scripts.

As much as it hasn’t been fun to go through this process, it has taught me the importance of making sure all your “T’s” are crossed and “i’s” are dotted. I’ve heard from multiple developers at various firms that say “Develop in Firefox, and when the site is completed, debug your IE(6)”. The problem is, as true as that is for CSS and formatting your site, it’s becoming increasingly difficult (and will continue to be as the web develops and IE6 stays the same) to hold that philosophy when it comes to functionality (and I believe a lot of the developers that made that statement would or will start to agree in the next few years, if not already).

What we’re finding as an overall trend is that a lot of data is being pulled through the web through client side scripting, as opposed to server side. While libraries like jquery and mootools have done a tremendous job at making IE6 (Internet Explorer 6) work, I still find a lot of quirky things I have to work around in development. And although, most of it still comes back to CSS preferences, I still waste a tremendous amount of time at the end of the project going through and trying to figure out why IE6 doesn’t like a particular div, span or more recently tag (dealing w/ graybox – which could be it’s own post in bashing how they decided to structure their iframes), than I would had I just debugged IE along the way.

The other benifit would be as a particular site enters into our clients QA process and the client is chomping at the bit to get their hands on the site, we’ve had and have taken time to make sure IE (and really, all the major browsers) have going through multipule QA tests, over a period of time. The payoff is that if you’ve only been given 10 days for developement, by doing QA along the way, you also have 10 days of QA. Now we can’t really fit 20 days of work into 10 days (although at Blend we seem to do this on a regular basis), but knowing when and how a particular issue arrose is extremely valuable when it comes to debugging, esp when it comes to IE (which doesn’t have firebug (it does have a development tool bar, but I find many times it is less helpful than just adding a 1px solid red border to the

’s of a particular section I’m working on.

All in all, QA is and has been knocking on my door, and I cannot strees how important it is for those developers out there to go through some sort of QA process. It’s ok to do your QA at the end (and I still recommend for some projects, esp larger, longer deadline ones), but if you’re in the type of business where your deadline typically doesn’t allow for the nessesary QA time, doing QA all throughout the development life cycle may prove benifical to you.

Display only One Single View Post in WordPress

Tim of SilentGap — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:55:32 +0000

Hey everyone,

I’ve come across a problem when building out a template where we need to display one post one the home page, but it needs to be a single view (so that it displays comments on that post) but cannot impact the query that shows a list of blog posts below. So, here’s a solution:

is_single = true; ?>

Below is a wireframe pic

Hope that helps – let me know if you have any questions.

Amendment:

I left something out, in order to display the rest of the posts I had to output an additional query. Something like the below code should work:

posts) : ?>

have_posts()) : $additional_posts->the_post();  ?>

Windows Virus for Mac

Tim of SilentGap — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:56:00 +0000

Ok, for all of you that like to laugh, here’s a new scam (or an old one, repackaged). As many of you know, I’m all mac now, at home and at work. I also set up Google Alerts for my work and church (and a few other things too). Well, spammers (or a new breed) are now setting up plain sites that have business names in it, there’s no text, just a really long title, with all of the business names.

What happens is that Google, will crawl through the web, looking for the key words that you set up. Well these spammers sites have these same key words, so when Google crawls the spammers site, Google flags it as an alert and sends the spammers website url/address to your email, saying it’s found a site that’s met your criteria.

Well, when you click on the link, it brings you to the spammers site, which then will do anything from collect stats to redirect you to another site that looks like it’s scanning your harddrive. Below are a few screen shots of what happens when it scans your harddrive (even though it’s not really scanning).

The below pic is what happens after you click on the window. It asks you to install this virus scan (even though it’s a virus) – It’s an exe file, so on a mac (which doesn’t know what to do with an exe file), it doesn’t do anything. Notice my little Mac symbol in the upper left corner.

The sad this is that many fall for this – don’t you be one of them!

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

The pains of designing your own site

Tim of SilentGap — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:10:00 +0000

So i’ve taken a fairly big brake from the internet (a whole 3 days) by going up to my family’s cabin in the Black Hills (pictures and video yet to be posted). There’s no internet, and well, when your up in the mountain, there’s not much else, except for a few other cabins. I arrived on a Wednesday, only to find myself waking up on Thursday to 10 inches (and then some) of snow.

It was the perfect mini-vacation (except for the fact that I could still receive text on my phone and everyone decided it would be a good idea to check up on me EVERY day to see how i was doing – you know, if I’m alive, breathing, or dead). Our families cabin is a 2 bedroom, one full bath, with kitchen, dinning, wrap around porch, sleeping cabin (sleeps 4ish), and a huge slate fireplace. The carpet is a short green shag carpet, the kind you can feel the carpet fibers slip in between your toes when you’re not wearing socks).

It was a good time, complete with 2 channels on the tv, and a dvd / vcr player. I watched, Crocodile Dundee I & II, Die Hard I, George of the Jungle, Young Guns and a few other movies, all on vcr tapes, all of them in bad shape. There were Tonka Toasters you could make yourself some toasted desert pies – but you have to be careful, the toasters themselves melt if you leave them in the fire too long (a whole storry right there that i won’t go into). And I brought my MacBook Pro along & managed to get the majority of new mock done for this blog site.

The one problem I’ve noticed when you’re doing something for your own site is that you are your own worst critic. This isn’t anything new, but this past week, it really hit home. Especially since my photoshop skills are not up to par and my creativity doesn’t like to be stretched (unless i’m playing guitar).

So, in just a week or two SilentGap will be sporting it’s new skin & the new platform will be WordPress instead of Blogger (sorry Blogger, not a fan of your features – you just not my type and you don’t do it for me. It was a good time while it lasted, but I must break it off w/ you. Take care), which I’m quite supprised that a producted owned by Google isn’t done up better, but oh well, they can’t be perfect either.

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

Nice Car

Tim of SilentGap — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:22:00 +0000

I usually don’t get into cars very much, but this one on Jay Leno’s Garage is pretty sweet.

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

Fire the webmaster

Tim of SilentGap — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:35:00 +0000

I can’t believe this is on Walmart’s website. Hurry up and check it out before Walmart finds out about it. http://tinyurl.com/3ja5xw

If they do take it down, below is a screenshot.

People / Agencies using twitter

Tim of SilentGap — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:35:00 +0000

Through a little bit of research, I found a few Agencies / People who i thought were interesting that they were using twitter. Below are a few.

http://twitter.com/CitySiouxFalls
http://twitter.com/SenateFloor
http://twitter.com/USAgov
http://twitter.com/HouseFloor
http://twitter.com/NRSC
http://twitter.com/TheWhiteHouse
https://twitter.com/Drudge_Report
https://twitter.com/rushl (maybe rush limbaugh – not sure)

Can you think of anyone else?

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap