Mike Walsh's random thoughts and musings …
Technology
Technology
WordPress Google Form bug fix
471 days
In the process of trying to solve the multipage Google Form problem, I found a bug with the “Confirmation” page. When a custom confirmation page isn’t supplied, the plugin is supposed to use the default Google conformation page. It currently isn’t, instead the page the form is on is rendered again. This is incorrect behavior and I’ve fixed it in my development thread and it will appear in the next release.
EX495 WHS Server Recovery Successful
072 days
I finally ran through the Server Recovery process on my HP EX495 Windows Home Server over the weekend. My WHS has been acting up for a while now and I have been unable to fix it. It was visible on my home network through \\ServerName mapping but WHS Connector wouldn’t work and the Server had stopped backing up the clients.
A WHS that doesn’t do backups isn’t real useful, it is just an expensive media and file server. After trying to track down a solution several times over the last two months, I gave up and decided I’d have to do a Server Recovery. I was apprehensive about doing this to say the least. I have all of our family pictures on my WHS so I needed to copy them to another drive before I could go through the recovery process even though it is supposed to be non-destructive. I also had some video and a reasonably large music library. All in all, about 4.5GB of stuff to copy somewhere while I did the recovery.
Thanksgiving weekend seemed like a good weekend to do this since I would be home and could monitor the process I expected to take a while. Copying all of the pictures took the longest – I have about 35,000 digital pictures spanning about 10 years – they pile up! Once I got everything copied and felt that if everything disappeared I wouldn’t be completely SOL, I started the recovery process. I followed the procedure and it went exactly as described. The whole process took about two hours and left me with a WHS which was working again. I was thrilled to see that none of my data was gone – everything (pictures, videos, music, etc.) was all there just as it was before I did the recovery. Whew!
The server was a bit slow throughout the day as in addition to trying to reconfigure all of the clients, of which I have seven or eight, the WHS was also updating itself with the various Windows Updates which have been released since the media was created.
This morning I got up to check on it and was happy to see that my laptop had been backed up and my wife’s PC was almost done. Yeah. A level of comfort has been restored. I am not exactly sure why my WHS went AWOL on me, I added to modules to it: Tivo and McAfee. I no longer use a Tivo so there is zero reason to re-install that and I am on the fence about McAfee. Actually, based on this article, it looks like there is no reason to install McAfee again since it isn’t supported any longer. Avast appears to be an option, I’ll have to do some digging to see if it will really work. I have no desire to go through this process again anytime soon!
Hiding a Google Form’s Title
0116 days
Since a WordPress page or post will have a title, there is a good chance the Google Form’s title is redundant. If hiding the title from the Google Form is desired, the easiest way to do it is with CSS. The title on a Google Form is an H1 element which is assigned the class ss-form-title. To hide the title, we add the following CSS to either the theme’s CSS or to the CSS overrides available with the WordPress Google Form plugin’s setting menu.
h1.ss-form-title {
display: none;
}
Using my Sample Form, here are the results of adding this CSS to the plugin settings.
Form before adding CSS
Adding CSS to wpGForm settings
Form After Adding CSS
WordPress Google Forms include quite a few CSS classes so using this technique, the appearance of the form can be customized quite a bit.
Form Validation Working!
4129 days
I have required field form validation working. I haven’t released it yet but in my testing, it appears to catch all of the fields I defined as required. WordPress Google Form incorporates the jQuery Validation plugin.
When a page loads, the jQuery script runs and scans the Google form for required fields. For each required field it finds it adds the gform-required class to the input or textarea tag. When the validator runs, it looks for fields which have the gform-required class and if any are empty, a label is added with the gform-error class.
The gform-error class is defined in the default CSS to display the text in red and float it to the right of the input.
As can be seen in the image, if there isn’t enough room to the right of the field, the error will be shown just below it. As with most CSS solutions, there are a bazillion ways to customize the output, I have elected to use something real basic and let the plugin user add more CSS if desired.
If you would like to try this early release of the plugin and give me some feedback, you can download it here. The version in the WordPress repository is still the older v0.9 release.
WordPress Google Form (34)
Child theme or not? That is the question …
0140 days
Off and on over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a Thematic child theme. I’ve always had a hesitation with child themes in that you need the parent theme in order for the child theme to work. Duh. While it may be pretty obvious to anyone who is familiar with WordPress, it isn’t so for the casual user.
When I was working with Sandbox I figured out a way to essentially build a child theme while ensuring that the parent theme dependency wasn’t an issue by including all of the Sandbox code using a SVN external reference to Sandbox and some other tricks to include the code. It worked well and I was able to distribute my themes without concern as to whether or not Sandbox was installed. It simply didn’t matter.
I was not planning to do that with the Thematic child theme I am working on right now but am having second thoughts. It turns out that the version of Thematic that I need (0.9.8) is not the version which is in the WordPress Theme Repository and I have no idea when this will change.
If I got the SVN external route again I can ensure that my child theme will work with a known revision of Thematic. However, it is a fundamental shift in my approach and I don’t know if it will work the same way I did it with Sandbox. Decisions, decisions.
It looks like there have been some recent commits to the Thematic SVN repository so maybe it will be updated and released soon. That would help address my dilemma.
WordPress Google Form Plugin
0152 days
For the past couple of days I have been working on a new WordPress plugin I am calling WordPress Google Form. This morning I received the approval for adding it to the WordPress plugin repository so I will be doing that over the next couple of days. I spent much of the last two days on an airplane so the plugin is currently in a state where I have it modified to work offline but I’ve done enough online testing that I am pretty confident I have something working.
My interest in Google Forms stems from the work I am doing on a site for our Middle School. We have a need to collect information in the form of Booster Club memberships and while there are a number of Membership type plugins, none of them really do what I want. Ultimately what we need is a spreadsheet of names, addresses, and phone numbers and Google Docs will work well for that. Putting a Google Form on the front end will allow us to capture the data online.
I thought integrating the Google Form with our WordPress site would be pretty simple, Google offers the ability to embed a form using an IFRAME. Unfortunately the ability to style the form is pretty limited and the Confirmation page even less so.
I have been using the Google Inline Spreadsheet Viewer plugin to display the data from our Google spreadsheets, I was somewhat surprised to find that there doesn’t seem to be anything similar for Google Forms. So I decided to write one. Borrowing some ideas from the Google Inline Spreadsheet Viewer plugin, I have created a plugin that defines the shortcode gform. The gform shortcode takes a Google Forms URL and extracts the FORM body content, cleans it up, and outputs it for WordPress posts, pages, and widgets.
There are a number of attributes that can optionally control the output, the most significant is the confirmation page which can redirect to a page within the WordPress site instead of the default Google conformation page.
More details to follow soon and I hope to have an example up and running later today.
Moving forward with Thematic
0167 days
I haven’t had much time to work on any of my theme projects but in the last week or so I’ve been trying spend some free cycles on something I am called “Middle School – High School Boosters Club” theme.
My wife is the president of our Middle School Boosters Club this year and much like the swim team was years ago when I got involved, the Boosters Club has no web presence and just about everything is done on paper. Bleh. She has asked me to build a web site for the Boosters Club so I am using it as an opportunity to choose a new theme framework (I’ve settled on Thematic) and see how much stuff I can leverage from Google Apps to build them a solution that doesn’t require me to babysit it all the time. We’ll see how that goes!
As I noted in a prior post, the Wicked WordPress Themes book has been a good resource to get me going with Thematic. I also found a Thematic Child Theme called Byty which caught my eye and I decided I wanted something similar. The downside of Byty is a lot of the nice gradient effects have been achieved with images as opposed to CSS. That is understandable as gradients were not available until CSS3. However, I want whatever I build to be fairly modern so I’ve decided to go down the CSS3 route.
I am specifically not building a theme for our school but instead and building one which can be tailored for any school by selecting a color scheme. We’ll see how well I accomplish that! These are some of the requirements that I am working against which I suspect would be similar for any other school boosters club that may want a web site.
- Online Store with PayPal/Credit Card Payments
- Support for Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages
- Color schemes
- Custom Logo(s)
- Calendar(s) for game and practice schedules
- Sport specific pages featuring just the posts relevant to that sport
Since Google Calendar is dead simple to use and with so many people using Gmail already, it seemed like the logical choice to base the calendar solution on. Google Apps is free for organizations like a boosters club to use to registering our domain with Google Apps was the first thing I did. This also makes it easy to create e-mail accounts for the various people associated with the club (president, secretary, etc.) so they can perform their task without polluting their personal email.
Once Google Apps was configured, I created a Calendar for each of the sports we will support (Football, Volleyball, Boys and Girls Soccer, Softball, Boys and Girls Basketball, etc.). These calendars can be viewed separately or combined making it easy to view the whole calendar or just the calendar for a specific sport. Even better, WordPress supports Google Calendar vias oEmbed turning a Google Calendar URL into a Gcal short code! About the only downside I have found so far is it is very hard to style the Google Calendar, I’d really like the light blue Google uses to be a different color to match the rest of the site but I will live with it based on how easy managing the calendar will be!
I’ve decided to use Simple Twitter Connect and Simple Facebook Connect, both from Otto, for Twitter and Facebook integration. I’ve used them before so they were familiar to me. Based on the recommendation from the Wicked WordPress Themes, I also tried AddThis but it is a bit more invasive than I want so I went back to SFC and STC.
For an online shop, I am going with eShop which is a very simple shopping cart plugin. Since we’re selling just a few items (e.g. t-shirts, sweatshirts, etc.), we don’t need anything complex and eShop looks like it will do what we need.
The site isn’t online yet so there isn’t anything to see but hopefully I will have a demo up and running fairly soon. I need to do some more CSS work and get the custom page loops I want. I am impressed with how easy Thematic has been to work with.
Why doesn’t the new iPod Touch have GPS?
0523 days
Yesterday was the big Apple iPod announcement event for 2010. There has been oodles of coverage of the event. I was surprised that the iPad didn’t get an OS update and was pleased to see buttons back on the Shuffle. The Nano is ok although I am not sure losing the slim rectangular shape and click wheel is a good idea, only time will tell.
The real interesting device was the iPod Touch. I have a second generation 8GB iPod Touch which I bought off of Craig’s List before I committed to the iPhone. I was unsure about only having a touch screen key board so a used iPod Touch let me test it out without committing to a two year contract for the iPhone which I eventually did.
I like the Touch and actually use mine quite a bit even though I have an iPhone. I was looking forward to the new Touch, in particular for the rumored camera feature. Having an HD video camera would be nice, the camera in my 3GS is so-so at best.
Today I was speaking with my co-worker Nick and we were talking about the Touch and my desire to have one, even though I don’t need it. Nick mentioned that if it had GPS, the Touch would be perfect. It got me thinking – why did Apple leave out the GPS?
If the Touch had GPS then it could:
- Geo tag photos and video
- Enable navigation with Google and/or Bing Maps (there is nothing worse than using my iPhone for GPS only yo have a call come in)
- Possibly replace dedicated GPS hardware
- All the location based services that Apps offer
I am sure there are other uses too but these came to mind. Lack of GPS is really the only short coming that I could see.
I was hopeful that the rumors about the new Apple TV would be true and it would be a screen-less iPod Touch for the TV. While the new Apple TV has some pretty cool features, I don’t see much differentiation over comting products from Roku, Western Digital, Boxee and others. Each of these streaming devices seems to have one limitation or another. I haven’t seen anything that says the new Apple TV supports UPnP which both my Xbox and WDTV Live do support.
I am disappointed in the Flickr support from the WDTV Live so was hopeful that the Apple TV would be more compelling than it is. As it is, if I had to buy something right now, I think I’d get the Roku HD for $69.
Home networking woes
0532 days
Sunday afternoon my home network went down. The way it went down I assumed it was simply a hiccup in the service from our ISP. After waiting a while I went to check on it and it was still down. Obviously not a glitch. Ugh. I don’t have time for this!
I spent some time with it late Sunday night and determined the router had gone bad. Odd? Yes. Unprecedented? No. I had a Linksys WRT54G go bad a few years ago. What is odd is that the whole thing wasn’t dead, just one interface, albeit and important one, didn’t work. When this happened a couple years ago I ended using the WRT54G as an extra access point (can’t have too many right?) and it has worked just fine in that capacity.
The WRT110 I replaced it with was behaving similarly. I figured I’d pick up a replacement in the AM at Wal-Mart. Unfortunately Wal-Mart didn’t have what I was looking for so I then went to Staples. At Staples I was going to buy a Linksys E2000 Wireless-N router but it was $129 which seemed high to me. I checked Best Buy on my iPhone and they had it on sale for $79 this week so I figured I could wait a while and ordered it over the web.
I should have stopped there. But I didn’t. When I got home I started thinking and for some reason, decided it couldn’t be the router. One interface just doesn’t go bad and the rest of it work fine. In my case, the router would not get an IP address via DHCP from the Cable Modem. Everything else worked as it should.
I decided to pull the router out of the loop and connect my laptop directly to the Cable Modem. A simple ipconfig /release followed by an ipconfig /renew didn’t work. But a reboot did. After rebooting my laptop I was on the Internet. That helps me but not the rest of the house. Back to the router. I reset, I updated firmware, I tried a number of things. None worked. I called Earthlink (who at one point told me I wasn’t a home networking customer and would have to pay an additional $18 per month – uh, no, I don’t think so) and called Linksys. Neither had any ideas. I hindsight, think I got off track because the woman from Linksys I was speaking with assured me the router was working properly based on the information on the status page and the lights on the box.
I dug up the old router and tried it (I had forgotten why I replaced it) and it too didn’t work (as it shouldn’t have). I was trying to take care of this while I was working and had to stop messing with it to attend a couple conference calls. I had to go a meeting and left the house to deal with it later.
Later in the day I still hadn’t made it to Best Buy to pick up the router I purchased but happened to be passing by CompUSA. I ended up buying a Linksys WRT160N for $35. Seemed like a pretty low risk solution. Took it home and plugged it in, change a couple settings, and ta-da, the Internet was working again! There was much rejoicing from the rest of the family.
It really is amazing how dependent my family has become on the Internet, myself included. Going without it or having limited access for 24 hours was a challenge. Can’t imagine what we’ll do if the power goes out for a few days! It’s been a while since we’ve had a hurricane or an ice storm to knock out the power, we must be due.
First impressions with a Verizon MiFi
1799 days
by Mike Walsh
in Technology
Today I got a Verizon MiFi (Novaltel Wireless MiFi 2200) to replace the AT&T Broadband card which came with my Dell E4300. For the last couple months I have really struggled with the AT&T card and I’ve finally given up. I think this is a Dell issue more than an AT&T issue. Dell’s software stinks, I’ve had nothing but problems with it when I ran XP and again now that I am running Windows 7.
Even though Verizon has flooded the airwaves with their “There’s a map for that” advertising campaign I’ve been happy with AT&T’s 3G coverage. The places I go it has worked well. I went back to using my Express Card but ever since I broke the antenna off, it hasn’t worked very well and getting a replacement from AT&T has been difficult.
I have been holding out using a Sony-Ericsson Z750i UMTS phone as a modem in hopes that AT&T would offer the GSM version of the MiFi (Novatel Wireless MiFi 2372) but last week our AT&T rep told me they have no plans to offer anytime soon. Bummer – the GSM version is newer, faster, and has a few more features. So I could continue to limp along with the Z750, keep fighting with my built in card and Dell’s crappy software or I could get a MiFi from Verizon.
The MiFi is really what I wanted so I decided to drop my AT&T broadband service and get one from Verizon. It arrived today. Set up was pretty simple and it seemed to work fine in the office but testing in the office isn’t a real test. I used it for a while in the car this evening waiting for my daughter to finish basketball practice and it worked well.
I have a netbook now so having a solution which I can use with my laptop, netbook, iPhone, or iPod Touch is pretty appealing to me. Now that I have it, I am sure that AT&T will announce the GSM version of it within the next month!
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