Development

In the book “the Davinci Code” there was a fun little device called a cryptex.. A Cryptex has 6 dials with 6  letters on each, and only one combination producing a word will open it. The most straight forward way to crack it would be to try every combination one by one, but there’s a substantial number of combinations and we know only those which a valid words is a candidate.

A great strength in PHP is that it’s so accessible, that almost anyone can get access to a PHP site and often will download “applications” for their site such as discussion boards, photo galleries and others. While it may easy to download such applications, it often happens that the people trying to get things to work, doesn’t read the requirements section of the install.txt or readme.txt file, and thus never get the application running and doesn’t understand what the problem was and how to fix it. This is a brief guide with some tips on how to improve usability in this area.

Publishing a list of which pluins you use seems to be popular among Wordpress users, so here’s my contribution in case you’re wondering, which plugins are in use around this site.

• Askimet - Anti-comment spam (comes with wordpress)
• Amazon Showcase (hacked) - Displays the “Currently reading” on the frontpage; hacked to display valid XHTML.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith - Handles the Feeds from the site (and moves load a way from this server).
• Google SiteMaps - Helps Google index the site.
• Sociable (hacked) - Places “sharing” links on posts & pages (StumpleUpon seemed to be broken).
• Tiger Style Administration - Beef up the backend of wordpress and make it look nicer.
• Underscore Permalinks - I like underscored permalinks over the default dashed permalinks.
• WordVerify - A simple spam-prevention method.
• WP-ContactForm - Used for my contact page.
• WPG2 (and friends) - Trying to make Gallery2 and Wordpress play nice together (not quite successful yet though).

In line:

Gmail from Google is usually great, but it does have some bug-like features.

One of the most annoying is when your inbound mail is tagged with a label and should have been auto-archived, but is caught by their spam filter and placed in the spam folder. Discovering and finding the mail in the spam folder is easy, but when you tell Gmail, that the mail isn’t spam, it doesn’t pop in to the archive (where the filter-rule should have put it). It pops back into the inbox, and you can then archive from there.

A number of podcasts and websites have mentioned that you can get your Gmail SSL encrypted by just adding a small s in the url (from http:// to https:// in the url). Cool. But wait there’s more… it seems to work for Google Docs and Google Reader too. While I doubt the usefulness of an encrypted RSS Reader, there’s certainly a great vaule in having encrypted access to documents used with Google Docs.