Category: Technical Blog

Back from vacation

This was my third trip to Israel. A and I didn’t travel around this time, at least not together;I went to Tel Aviv with his mom while he was with his pals in Jerusalem.Our main reason for going was attending another friend’s wedding. Guys seem willing to get married at a younger age in Israel than they do in NYC.

Packing
I’ve never had to be so conscientious about packing ever before because I never had to worry about strict weight limits per suitcase. But I knew that I don’t actually like that much of my wardrobe so there was no need to pack every bit of it and my baggage was pretty light.You should have seen the massive trunks and boxes folks want to fly over there with.It must cost as much as another plane ticket.

Downsides
Home is where Bozzio is. Many places around the world may be very nice indeed but they enforce a no pitbulls can visit/live here law and so we must leave our sweetie pie behind.
We tended to say every 20 minutes how much better the vacation would be if he was with us.Aww.

No wireless internet connection
The network on the kibbutz has a monster firewall and I was told I would not be able to connect via wireless to my host’s internet connection.Not being all that IT capable and my boyfriend’s parents also had no idea I decided to just skip the hassle and just be on vacation during my vacation.

The flight there
They confiscated A’s aftershave, it broke the 3 oz rule.
We slept for 9 hours. When we woke up there was food. I made the mistake of knocking on the bathroom door and angering a woman who was taking a very long time in there.When she came out she snarled at me.I guess it’s really rude to some folks to knock but on a domestic US flight you try spending more than 1 minute in there and folks will start hammering on the doors until you get out.And then they glare at you.This woman glared at me. She was short but very scary.
I forgot a suitcase at the airport.The kibbutz is a 4 hour drive from Tel Aviv(where the airport is).I only remembered it when we got out of the car at A’s parent’s house.

The actual vacation
I have the pictures from the second week but I forgot to take the disc we burned of the 1st week.Also I just bought a mac mini and all my pics are still on my old hard drive.Need to transfer then load em up.
The wedding was nice.What else can you say but that it was nice? It actually was,though.Although I don’t know if it was such a good idea to have 3 different kinds of cocktails before eating any breakfast(which was the wedding reception dinner).

The flight home
It was hell and we are never flying Delta again.But I suppose I should thank Delta for messing up the booking of our flight and keeping us at checkin for 2 hours.This prevented us from shopping the duty free so I had money left over to buy a mac,who hoo.

Going On Vacation-404’s

I’ll be away from the 22 cnd of Sept. until Oct. 6th.

My website is messed up.
If you click on a link in my menu for a page chances are 50/50 you will get a Page Not Found Message.Even typing http://mccormicky.com into the address bar triggers a 404,sometimes.

If you refresh the page once or twice the page will load.But this is not how a website is supposed to work.

I’m very confused by this recent development – thankfully it is only happening on my domain and not on any of my client or friend’s websites.

I’ve checked the .htaccess.I’ve changed permalinks.I’ve checked the code in myheader. I have no idea.I am totally stumped.
Everything seems to be back to normal.Crosses Fingers.

A Fully Widget-ized WordPress Theme

Updated August 3rd,2009 » So You Want A NextGen Gallery Slideshow as a Banner(!?!)

Learn how to add more sidebars to your theme and be able to use widgets in any part of your theme. Confused? Well, many plugins provide widgets and if you want to use them they have to go into the sidebar(s). But what do you do if you want to use a widget in a part of your theme that isn’t a sidebar?

I’m going to tell you how to make any part of your theme into a “sidebar”. So you can put widgets in it and be happy!

What is a WordPress sidebar? It contains PHP and HTML, right? Well then, a sidebar doesn’t have to be a long skinny rectangle on the side of your blog or website. It can be a banner with rotating images(or whatever you want) and that is what I am going to show you how to do in this post. You can use these steps and your own ingenuity to stick widgets from other plugins wherever you like. It’s not limited to nextGen Gallery slideshow widget. I’ve used this technique to add Random Quotes, the WP-E-Commerce Shoppingcart widget…etc. If it has a widget it can go anywhere. That is my point. Anyone who is very comfortable hacking their templates and themes can follow this post just fine.
Read on to follow the tutorial on adding more sidebars and getting the nextGen slideshow widget in the header/banner of your theme.
Continue reading A Fully Widget-ized WordPress Theme

No Input File Selected Oddity

I tried to view my website about an hour and a half ago and all I got was a blank white page with the message “no input file specified”.No matter what page I tried to see as long as it was a php file I got this message.I could see jpgs and html pages.
So I checked the database and all the files and everything was neatly in its place.
Then I searched “no input file specified” to see what came up.

I found this suggestion, create a custom php.ini and put it in the root,containing this little line:cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;
Once my website decided to load I couldn’t login to the dashboard. And I had to refresh each page about 4 times before no input file message would clear off and load the page.20 minutes later though, I was able to login again and it was as if the problem had never been.Back to normal then? But I have no idea if adding a php.ini file to the root(as well as the admin folder) helped or if this was something caused by my host.

More searches turned up a boatload of various forums with posts about this issue.Some suggestions were to put a question mark after index.php.But since WP writes the .htaccess file correctly using Request Filename I also read that using a question mark after index.php is unnecessary.
So basically I don’t know why this happened or if it will happen again.
Boring.