In Which a Long Term Chrome User Discovers How to Make Chrome Open Local .html Files!

 

Hi computer people!  I know a lot of you will laugh at this and say “well, duh”. You may take your superior selves elsewhere. The rest of us need some help. Anyway, on to the eurekas.

I’ve been using Google Chrome as my primary browser for many many years. Before I made the switch I was a die-hard Firefox user. Before I bothered to finally figure out how to get Chrome to freaking open a local .html file for crying out loud, the only time I used Firefox was to do some cross browser QA or to open an .html file from my local files. It was a pain because I prefer troubleshooting stuff in Chrome because I’m used to it but when I’d have to launch the file in Firefox I’d grit my teeth, struggle through whatever task I was trying to complete and get out, ASAP.

I knew there must be a way to make Chrome do it but I just never bothered to figure it out. Until this morning. I had to deliver a Magento site’s header html.

As a shortcut, I saved page as and then opened the file in a code editor so I could get rid of all the stuff that wasn’t needed.

After gutting a ton of extraneous HTML,  I had to check the page didn’t look like utter hell in a browser. So I launched the page in Firefox –  as usual.  And then it occurred to me that this was as good a time as any to finally figure out how to make Chrome open the file.

I searched for “open local files in chrome” and, after wading through some pretty heavy handed and, in my opinion, way overly technical solutions involving doing things via the command line or wiffle about file permissions, I eventually landed here.  

The actual instructions provided in the article linked above didn’t work for me because I use a Mac. So instead of typing file:///C:/ in the address bar, I just typed file:/// then went to Users/<my user>. After that,  I just had to navigate to the directory the file was, click on the file and Chrome opened it and now everyone is so happy they could die.

WordPress: are all your posts a single paragraph? Upgrade the NextGEN Gallery plugin

I don’t spend as much time on my site as I should so I do not know how long this was going on but today I noticed that all my posts were one single paragraph – and I am really into formatting my posts with paragraphs. I was confused!

But I quickly got it together and Googled the issue and found this forum post, https://themegrill.com/support-forum/topic/paragraph-spacing-not-working-after-update/. And even though the OP thought it was the theme they were using (well, so did I for that matter but updating the current theme and activating other themes didn’t resolve things) it turned out not to be the theme’s fault but the fault of the NextGEN Gallery plugin.

I didn’t note down what previous version of this plugin I had that was causing all the paragraphs to be removed from my posts but upgrading to NextGEN 2.2.3 resolved the problem 100%.

Hope this helps!

Trying to login to Magento 2 dashboard but get stuck on “It’s Time To Change Your Password” page

Just another little treat thrown at us today. I tried to login and got stuck on the It’s time to update your password page. I updated my password, logged out, cleared cache, cleared cookies, logged back in, tried changing the password again. Blah! Still stuck on that darned page.

This problem is documented in the magento2 github repository of course but none of the suggested fixes helped me. I’m special that way!

So I couldn’t get into the dashboard. But I could get into phpmyadmin and because this was the dev Magento site I felt real relaxed about poking at the tables.

Hold up! If you have the same issue and you Googled it right you’d land here https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/4331 and if you are really lucky one of the suggested fixes will help you fix it. But if they do not help you and you are stuck on the It’s time to update your password page, try  what I did.

Login to phpmyadmin or whatever db tool you use. Locate the admin_users table and note your user_id number. Then go to the “admin_passwords” table. You will see there is a row for Expires. That seemed suspiciously like a place I could extend the expiration of my password. For some reason each user_id has 2 password_ids. Don’t ask me why.

What we want to do here is edit the number under Expires.

My Expires number was something like 1569633535. I changed it to 1969633535 for both of the password_ids that were listed for my user_id. I could then login and go to other places in the Magento admin.

Hope this helps.

 

Magento Scares Us, Like Daily

hairy-scary

For ages I was able to avoid the nightmare that is Magento because I was focussed entirely on freelance jobs working with LightSpeed Webstore.

Once in awhile someone would try to ruin my life with a Magento project (usually fixing something that had worked then “mysteriously” just broke) but I had so much LightSpeed Webstore stuff going I could just say no, thanks.

Irony is now I provide support to a folks running Magento stores. Ha Ha! It’s what I do from 10 am to 6pm. Every day. And when I got started I knew only that Magento was a beast like creature of terrible proportions and that it would make me cry. Because it breaks like all the time. I was totally spoiled by other eCommerce shop platforms because they don’t break nearly as easily. I still have a site with an online store built with a really old version of WordPress e-Commerce plugin. It’s so old it should be on life support. But it’s fine. We keep everything else updated, of course. But even applying the latest version of WordPress doesn’t break the store. See? Spoiled.

Magento releases patches that break stuff. All the time. That’s why I have a job. I shouldn’t complain. Except I have to because I’m alive.