MacManX.com » Noteworthy

MacManX on Music

James — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 09:38:29 +0000

It’s a new year, which means that it’s time for new things!

As part of my own “Eat Your Own Dog Food” initiative and WordPress.com’s Daily Post initiative, I have dusted the 3-year-old cobwebs off of my own WordPress.com blog to launch MacManX on Music, where I will be blogging at least once a week on the music that keeps me focused whenever I’m on duty as a Happiness Engineer.

Stay tuned to MacManX on Music for the first “official” post, which could appear as early as tomorrow!

Filed under: Blogs, General, Music, Noteworthy

Provide Clean Water for Free

James — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 18:18:41 +0000

Three years ago, I published Save The Environment for Free, a post detailing some of the novel ways that you can help save our environment without having to spend a dime. Today, I’d like to talk about water.

Many of us are used to simply going to the kitchen for a cool and refreshing drink of fresh clean water, but over 800 million people worldwide lack access to clean water, and over 3 million people die from water-related disease each year.

Various charities are collecting donations to provide wells and water filtration to communities in need, but Children’s Safe Drinking Water is taking a new approach by providing two ways for you to provide clean water for free.

If you’re on Facebook, visit PUR’s Daily Drop to donate 10 liters of clean water for the cost of nothing more than a few clicks. If you aren’t already on Facebook, this may be the perfect reason to join.

If you have an iPhone or Android-powered phone, get the CauseWorld app. You’ll gain an average 5 karmas for every store you log visiting. Once you’ve gained 100 karmas, you can cash them in to provide 50 days worth of clean water for a child. 50 days worth of clean water for every 20 stores that you visit is not a bad deal at all, and you aren’t obligated to spend anything more than the effort (and perhaps gas) that it takes to visit the stores.

Want to provide more than just a few liters of clean water per day? Please consider making donations to Children’s Safe Drinking Water, Water.org, and Charity: Water.

Filed under: Noteworthy, Science, World

No More www on MacManX.com

James — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:57:21 +0000

After much thought, I have finally removed all traces of www from MacManX.com. Why? Aesthetics, really. There’s really no reason to have www preceding your domain, an ever-increasing number of sites are beginning to turn away from it, and it saves four characters when linking to MacManX.com in a tweet.

Removing www from your domain in WordPress is as easy as removing it from the two URL values at Settings/General, but I wanted to be as thorough as possible and remove all traces of it. Since the overall process involved a few steps, I figured that I’d share it with you if you ever decided to do the same.

The following instructions are Mac-specific using the plain text editor Fraise, but they can be easily reinterpreted using any Windows or Linux-based plain text editor and FTP or SFTP client.

Backup your WordPress database. (Never alter the database without a fresh backup on hand.)
Download and install Fraise.
Go to Settings/General in your WordPress admin panel and remove www. from the two URL values.
Export your WordPress database with phpMyAdmin.
Open the .sql file in Fraise.
Navigate to Edit/Find/Advanced Find & Replace, then find and replace all occurrences of “www.yourdomain” with “yourdomain”.
Save the file and quit Fraise.
Return to your WordPress database via phpMyAdmin.
Check all of the tables and choose “Drop” from the pull-down menu.
Navigate to the Import tab, choose your edited .sql file, and click the Go button.
Access your WordPress admin panel.
Re-save your permalink structure at Settings/Permalinks in the admin panel.
Re-save your upload directory at Settings/Miscellaneous in the admin panel.
If you have a sitemap plugin, like Google XML Sitemaps, make sure that the sitemap location is still set correctly and refresh your sitemap.

The process should only take a few minutes and everything should be working correctly.

My widgets reset themselves for some reason during the process, but they were easy to add back afterwards. Just take a screenshot of your widget settings and save your text widgets (if any) to a separate text file.

Update: I forgot to mention that WordPress will automatically issue a 301 (permanent) redirect for all incoming links that contain www. Thanks to WordPress core developer Andrew Nacin for reminding me!

Filed under: General, Noteworthy, Technology, WordPress

MacManX.com v2.0

James — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 22:05:59 +0000

MacManX.com v2.0 is finally here thanks to a new theme courtesy of Joen Asmussen. A while ago, I began to realize that MacManX.com was suffering from the very same thing that I often criticize other websites for: link overload with a lack of focus on the content. I’m proud to report that sidebar links have now been reduced by over 90% and the content is clearer than ever.

If you’re curious about how much the look of MacManX.com has changed over the ages, check out the new MacManX.com Themes gallery.

Filed under: General, Nostalgia, Noteworthy

Enter Weblog Tools Collection

James — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:17:14 +0000

Weblog Tools Collection, created by Mark Ghosh, has been the number one source of WordPress news for well over six years. Just two days ago, I applied to a newly open news editor position, and I am now trilled to announce that I was hired! In fact, my first post detailing WordPress’ impending requirements change has just been published! You can expect most of my WordPress-related posts to be published on Weblog Tools Collection from now on, while I continue to post about items of personal interest here.

Filed under: Noteworthy, Technology, Weblog Tools Collection, WordPress

Moving the Blog

James — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:38:09 +0000

Five years ago, I installed this WordPress blog in a subdirectory at macmanx.com/blog/, imagining that someday I would have some sort of fancy website at macmanx.com, and that this would be nothing more than just a blog. Since then, I have spent quite a bit of time turning this blog into more than “just a blog.” About two weeks ago, I finally made the decision to move this blog out of macmanx.com/blog/ and put it where it belongs, at macmanx.com. The process was relatively simple using just phpMyAdmin, a plain text editor, and an FTP or SFTP client. There were no problems during the overall process, but the cleanup took a bit longer than expected. For the benefit of everyone reading this, I’d like to share my process, the problems that I ran in to after the move, and how I eventually resolved them.

The following instructions are Mac-specific using the plain text editor Fraise and the FTP/SFTP client Cyberduck, but they can be easily reinterpreted using any Windows or Linux-based plain text editor and FTP or SFTP client.

Backup your WordPress database. (Never alter the database without a fresh backup on hand.)
Download and install Fraise.
Download and install Cyberduck.
Go to Settings/General in your WordPress admin panel and change the two URL values to the new location.
Export your WordPress database with phpMyAdmin.
Open the .sql file in Fraise.
Navigate to Edit/Find/Advanced Find & Replace, then find and replace all occurrences of “/old-directory” with “/new-directory”, or replace “/old-directory” with a blank field if you’re moving out of the old directory and into the root like I did. (You could make the task more specific by finding and replacing “yourdomain.com/old-directory” with “yourdomain.com/new-directory” etc, but this will only affect absolute URLs and completely ignore relative URLs.)
Save the file and quit Fraise.
Return to your WordPress database via phpMyAdmin.
Check all of the tables and choose “Drop” from the pull-down menu.
Navigate to the Import tab, choose your edited .sql file, and click the Go button.
Access your server via Cyberduck and navigate to the blog’s directory.
Select all of the files and move them to the new directory.
Access your WordPress admin panel at the new location.
Re-save your permalink structure at Settings/Permalinks in the admin panel.
Re-save your upload directory at Settings/Miscellaneous in the admin panel.
Edit (or create) the .htaccess file in your root directory with the following content: “Redirect permanent /old-directory/ http://www.yourdomain.com/new-directory/” or “Redirect permanent /old-directory/ http://www.yourdomain.com/” if you moved out of the old directory and into the root like I did.
If you have a sitemap plugin, like Google XML Sitemaps, make sure that the sitemap location is still set correctly and refresh your sitemap.

Everything should be working perfectly. The whole process should only take a few minutes, but there is going to be some cleanup involved, and that may take a while.

You may notice that in step 7, we used Fraise to easily replace every reference to the old directory with the new directory, or we removed the references altogether. This is certainly easier than changing everything by hand via the admin panel, but it can be a bit destructive. For example, I used Fraise to completely remove all references to “/blog”. This had the desired effect of changing things like “macmanx.com/blog/about/” to “macmanx.com/about/” throughout the entire blog, which saved me the time of hand-editing almost 3,000 instances. Well, I’m sure some of you remember the Blogroll Dive, and how the links looked like “macmanx.com/blog/2007/11/blogroll-dive-11307/”. Unfortunately, they became “macmanx.com/2007/11/roll-dive-11307/”. Notice the problem? In order to fix this, I had to re-open the database in Fraise and find and replace all occurrences of “/roll-dive” with “/blogroll-dive”. This also affected some links to other blogs, but Google Webmaster Tools was kind enough to point out the problems after re-indexing the blog, so I corrected those via the admin panel.

All of that aside, the move went quite well, and the ease of using Fraise to find and replace almost 3,000 references to the old directory far outweighed any time lost during the cleanup afterwards.

Filed under: Noteworthy, Technology, WordPress

The Blog has Moved Again

James — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 03:52:11 +0000

After five years, I have finally given in and decided to move both this blog and Sarah’s to the root directory. That’s right, no more /blog/ and no more basic redirect in the root. Five years ago, we planned on having some well-developed sites that included the blog along the side, so we placed the blogs in the /blog/ directory and a simple redirect in the root there for the time being. What actually happened is that over those five years we wound up developing our blogs into the sites that we wanted in the first place, so I felt that it was time to give them the placement that they deserved.

Fortunately, modern redirects have evolved in such a way that you don’t need to do anything, unless you really want to change your bookmarks or resubscribe to the feed. Everything should be redirecting to the proper place. Unfortunately, not all subscription services will be able to redirect to the new feed, but I’m hoping that they will at least make some sort of notice regarding the problem so that you can re-subscribe to the new feed URL.

I’ll be posting a writeup of the whole move process in a few days, so If you notice anything wrong, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

For your convenience, please feel free to use the large buttons below to re-subscribe to the feed and/or re-bookmark the blog.

Filed under: Blogs, General, Noteworthy

Clan Dragonas

James — Sun, 30 May 2010 21:59:19 +0000

I would have announced this sooner, but Sarah beat me to the punch, so I thought I’d wait until the website was done. For the past few months I have been lucky enough to play flugelhorn, and most recently sing backup vocals, with the awesome Clan Dragonas! To paraphrase the About page, “Clan Dragonas embodies Rock music as it was originally envisioned: an emotive and spontaneous performance art. . . . a Dragonas show will leave you spellbound.”

Speaking of the About page, I just finished putting together our website, so I hope you enjoy it.

Our first official concert is just a few days away on June 2nd at 8pm in Skinny’s Lounge. We hope to see you there!

Filed under: Colleagues, Dragonas, Music, Noteworthy

Private Consulting

James — Sat, 08 May 2010 01:10:59 +0000

I don’t know why I didn’t think about announcing this before, but I am currently available for hire as a private consultant on WordPress, web management, and Mac OS X.

I have been an avid WordPress user for over five years, the manager of three WordPress blogs, and a frequent WordPress Support Forum volunteer. Over the years, I have mastered several web management tools and techniques that exceed those of simply WordPress. I have been a Mac user for over twenty years and consider myself very knowledgeable in the operating system and a variety of applications. The scope of what I can cover is quite broad, but as a general rule, I will never charge for a job that I can’t handle.

Please contact me for more details.

Update: I am not accepting clients at this time. For WordPress support, please contact the WordPress Support Forums. For Mac OS X support, please contact the Apple Support Forums.

Filed under: General, Noteworthy, Technology, WordPress

Easily Convert Database Character Sets

James — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:53:03 +0000

If you began using WordPress prior to version 2.2, you may notice that your database has tables with two different character sets and collations. This is because all database tables created prior to WordPress 2.2 use the latin1 character set and the latin1_swedish_ci collation, and all database tables created after WordPress 2.2 use the utf8 character set and the utf8_general_ci collation. Outside of the obvious visual difference, no hard evidence has ever been submitted to prove that this difference causes any sort of problem. However, numerous random and unrelated issues have apparently been resolved by standardizing the character set and collation across the database. The WordPress Codex provides an article detailing the process of converting database character sets with MySQL commands. If the thought of destroying your entire database simply because you made a typo concerns you, then fear not! There is an easy way to convert your database’s character set using nothing more than phpMyAdmin (available through most hosting providers’ control panel) and a plain text editor.

The following instructions are Mac-specific using the plain text editor Fraise, but they can be easily reinterpreted using any Windows or Linux-based plain text editor.

Backup your WordPress database. (Never alter the database without a fresh backup on hand.)
Download and install Fraise.
Export your WordPress database with phpMyAdmin.
Open the .sql file in Fraise.
Select all of the text and select “Unicode (UTF-8)” from the Text/Reload Text With Encoding menu.
Navigate to Edit/Find/Advanced Find & Replace, then find and replace all occurrences of “latin1″ with “utf8″.
Save the file and quit Fraise.
Return to your WordPress database via phpMyAdmin.
Check all of the tables and choose “Drop” from the pull-down menu.
Navigate to the Operations tab, choose “utf8_general_ci” from the pull-down menu under the Collations section and click the Go button.
Navigate to the Import tab, choose your edited .sql file, select “utf8″ from the character set pull-down menu, and click the Go button.

Within minutes (or seconds), your database will be re-populated with all of the original tables, now featuring the utf8 character set and the utf8_general_ci collation.

Filed under: Noteworthy, Technology, WordPress