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Kill those Flash ads in your browser. It’s easy and free.
October 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Firefox has an add-on that will give you the option of playing or not playing those annoying Flash ads that appear in Web site banners. Even Technorati, which should know better considering its audience, has one of those “you’ve won some sort of crap, click here” ads in its banner. Once you’ve installed the Flashblock add-on, a page that has Flash in it shows just the Flash logo and a play button where the offending ad would be. You have the option to play the ad or not. This is very handy–by default, you don’t have to view the garbage, and when you get to page that has Flash that is legitimate, you just hit the play button.
Best of all, you can allow certain sites to display Flash by default. This is handy for me when I check client Web sites where I have used Flash. Just go to Tools > Add-ons, select Flashblock, click the Preferences button, and list the sites that you want to allow. Be sure to enter just the domain name (e.g. sparklingdawg.com) without the slashes or http protocol info.
I downloaded FlashBlock from Mozilla: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433. As with all Firefox add-ons, just click the “Add to Firefox” button on the downloads page, and the installation is done automatically, after which you’ll be asked to restart Firefox. Firefox restores the previous session on restart, so there’s no reason to wait until later to restart.
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My versions: Firefox 3.0.2, Flashblock 1.5.6. NOTE: Flashblock 1.5.6 is designed to work only with Firefox 1.5 and newer, Netscape Navigator 9 and with Flock. For other browsers such as Firefox 1.0.7, Mozilla Suite, Seamonkey, and Netscape 7 and 8, check out Flashblock 1.3.9:
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/installation2.html
Flashblock currently blocks the following content types:
* Macromedia Flash
* Macromedia Shockwave
* Macromedia Authorware
Upgrading to WordPress 2.6.2 - missing categories
September 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I just upgraded from WP 2.2 to WP 2.6.2 and things went well enough, but my listing of categories disappeared when I went to Manage > Categories in the Dashboard. I looked at some posts to see if they had the appropriate categories in the post metadata, and they did, so I knew that some vestiges of my categorizing were in the database. (WP 2.6.2 installation does an automatic “Upgrade” of the database, by the way, so always backup the database before upgrading.)
After looking at some truly arcane solutions on the Web, I decided I’d try something simpler. I am using the Revolution Theme, and in that theme all categories must be subcategories of a category named “Blog.” So I recreated the Blog category, and everything worked fine. Post metadata is still correct, and under Manage > Categories, the blog category with all of the subcategories I had created before were there. Whew!
And wordpress.org deserves a big smack upside the head. They changed the wp_categories table in the database to wp_taxonomy without giving folks who read the upgrade instructions any info at all. I’m not sure if that is what messed things up, but there is a reported bug about categories disappearing and they know about it. A warning and a workaround would have been nice. Shame on them
As ever, always make a backup of your WP files and folders, as well as your WordPress database before upgrading or making other big changes to your blog.
SiteMeter blog statistics tool makes a huge mistake
September 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I’ve been using SiteMeter.com for my blogs and some of my client blogs. Last night, and without warning, SiteMeter rolled out an entirely new user interface. The new interface is simply dreadful (e.g. reports were scaled down to fit into into widgets with type so small that they were barely legible) and page loads were incredibly slow. It is also very buggy: if you had set up a count-visible counter, it was converted into a plain SiteMeter icon with no count visible; to revert to my old counter I had to go to SiteMeter and reset counter preferences, and then enter the new code in all of the blogs where I had it installed. Even logging in to my old accounts proved to be a hassle.
I spent some time looking for alternatives, but decided to wait it out because re-doing all of my blog stat counters would be so tedious. Given the most recent message (below), I might start that search for a replacement again.
Just now, when I tried to go to SiteMeter.com to look at some stats, I found this message on the home page
“We are in the process of rolling back SiteMeter to the former system. SiteMeter should be back online soon. Please check back later. Sorry for inconvenience. Sincerely, SiteMeter Support Team.”
The only thing less vetted, more shoddy, and less right for the audience is Sarah Palin.
[Later: SiteMeter did roll back to the old interface, which meant I had to go back and insert the JavaScript for the old counter all over again, but at least I've got the better interface back. I just hope they drop the idea of doing any more upgrades for a while, or at least improve the interface and fix the bugs first.]
Windows Internet Explorer blank page problem
September 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I had a weird Internet Explorer page display problem with one of my Web sites. All but one of the site’s pages displayed just fine, but one just resulted in a blank page. After Googling for similar problems for hours, I gave that up and tried some basic debugging. More of that in a moment . . . . The Google results pointed to a lot of similar problems, e.g. opening a link in a new window caused IE to open a blank window. One suggestion had to do with Active X controls and trusted sites. Even after I got into the IE Tools > Internet Options > Trusted Sites > Sites dialog box and making the site a Trusted Site, I still had the problem. I undid the Trusted Site changes, and then went back to basics.
Using Dreamweaver CS3 (as I had done for the original), I created a new blank HTML file, and then cut and pasted the original file into it, one code block at a time. That way I could test each iteration of the file and isolate the code block or line that might have caused the problem. I was able to display the page as I went, adding all of the original HTML. The only thing I omitted were the commented lines that get inserted into an HTML file when you create Image Ready slices.
The end result is that when I removed the comments the problem disappeared; the page displayed just fine. I’m happy it worked, but mystified because I have had no problems on the same platform (described below) with loads of other files that contain the Image Ready comments, as well as other sorts of commented lines.
The scenario in which the problem occurred: Internet Explorer version 7.0.5730.13 on Windows XP Professional running on my iMac’sParallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac. HTML files created in Dreamweaver CS3. Original created from slices/HTML in ImageReady CS2. [Yes, I know I don't need ImageReady anymore if I have CS3, but I prefer to use the Photoshop CS2 and ImageReady CS2.] Page validates as HTML 4.01 Transitional.