WriteSmith.com » Computers

Using Yahoo! Pipes to generate dynamic Web page content

Ed Smith — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:43:32 +0000

I was recently asked how a user could publish dynamic content to an otherwise static Web page. The user wanted to show a list of meeting minutes on his Web page that automatically updates from a remote source. My answer was to use Yahoo! Pipes to create an embeddable widget. Once the widget code is created and inserted into the static web page, it will remain automatically updated whenever the source of the pipe changes. So far, we have created two pipes. One of them parses a Blogger RSS feed and presents relevant items in a list view. The content expert can update the blog, and the changes are reflected in the Web site without requiring a full author-edit-publish cycle. Here is the process:

New information is published on the blog.
When the pipe is next run, this change is detected via its feed.
The pipe badge is embedded in the target Web page, so it is run whenever the page is loaded.

WordPress and PHP Safe Mode

Ed Smith — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:12:49 +0000

WordPress is turning into quite a learning experience for me. After last night’s joy revolving around the version upgrade, I thought things would be smooth sailing for a while. Then today I tried to post about Google Latitude on the iPhone. I took some screen shots and attempted to upload them to my site. The upload attempt failed with an “Error saving media attachment” message. Unfortunately this is not very descriptive, and without additional diagnostic information I was at a bit of a loss.

Much Googling led me to the following knowledge: WordPress is a PHP application, and my hosting provider runs PHP in Safe Mode. This means that there are additional restrictions on PHP scripts which made creating directories and writing to files more difficult. Nearly Free Speech explains their position in a blog post which proved to be most informative. I experimented with changing the permissions on the directory, and changing the group of the PHP script and the directory. However, it was not until I finally understood chmod sgid bit that I had a breakthrough. This is also known as the “sticky” bit. The owner of a directory can set this bit with chmod g+s directory_name and all subsequent directories or files created in that directory will inherit the group id of the directory automatically.

Here’s the necessary steps:

Change the group of the script to match the group of the user who runs the Web server.
Change the group of the directory to match the same group.
Give the same group write permissions on the directory.
Issue the command chmod g+s directory_name.

You’ll need to do this before there are any subdirectories in the directory, because the inheritance only applies to new directories. Finally, go the Admin screen of your WordPress site and make sure in the Miscellaneous Settings section the correct directory is identified for storing uploaded media.

Let me know in the comments if this works for you, or if I’ve misunderstood something. Here’s the image I was trying to upload:

Google Latitude in Google Maps Web app on the iPhone

Manual Upgrade of WordPress

Ed Smith — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:52:42 +0000

So it turns out that upgrading WordPress is quite easy, but fraught with a danger known as the WSOD, the White Screen of Death. After some frustrating hours of trying to fix this problem when I upgraded tonight, I finally ran across Manual Upgrade of WordPress. This page takes you through the process in excruciating enough detail that important steps are not missed. Lesson learned: you need to be more detail oriented about this than I am.