A friend of mine who was looking to set up shop on his own section of the internet, asked me for help getting started. Over the past couple of evenings, we were able to get his site up and running, so without further ado…

http://www.heslermotorsports.com/

-Tim

WordPress iPhone App

Just an FYI,   I found out today from TUAW that the latest version of WordPress for iPhone is out as a free download.   Now, I’m not a heavy iPhone blogger.   I generally like to sit down at my laptop with some coffee in the morning (or a beer in the evening) when I blog, so I can’t comment a whole lot about using the app.   What I can tell you is that it has provided some usefulness to me.   I had the first version and kept it on my phone because it provided me a quick way to view comments or review drafts while away from home.   The newest version has an improved UI and allows me to quickly upload media from my iPhone to my blog for future use (not that the previous version didn’t support that).   So, for me it has its uses but for those of you who are heavy mobile bloggers it may be of interest.

-Tim

For the last couple of weeks, I have had an ENORMOUS problem while trying to insert images into my posts.   To be honest, I really haven’t had the need to add many images to my posts (yet) but I would like to rest assured that I have that functionality if I needed to call upon it.   Basically, my problem would occur when attempting to upload an image to the server.   I would only get a “blank screen:”

Blank Screen

My initial assessment was that it was the recently added Flash image uploader to WordPress.   Well to make a long story VERY short, the problem was an added cascading style sheet in Safari.   I use a custom CSS in Safari to block most internet advertising at the websites I visit which is very useful for me but bad for WordPress image uploads.   For those of you interested in what the CCS file looked like, here you go:

/*
* turns off €œblink € element blinking
*/
blink { text-decoration: none ! important; }
/*
* hides many ads by preventing display of images that are inside
* links when the link HREF contans certain substrings.
*/
A:link[HREF*="ad."] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="ads."] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/ad"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/A="] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/click"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="?click"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="?banner"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="=click"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/ar.atwo"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="spinbox."] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="transfer.go"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="adfarm"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="bluestreak"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="doubleclick"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="a.as-us.falkag.net"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="tribalfusion.com"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="a.tribalfusion.com"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="tags.expo9.exponential.com"] IMG { display: none ! important }
/* disable ad iframes */
IFRAME[SRC*="a."] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="ad."] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="ads."] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/ad"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/A="] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/click"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="?click"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="?banner"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="=click"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/ar.atwo"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="spinbox."] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="transfer.go"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="adfarm"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="bluestreak"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="doubleclick"] { display: none ! important }
xIMG[usemap] { display: none ! important }
/* turning some false positives back off */
A:link[HREF*="download."] IMG { display: inline ! important }
A:link[HREF*="click.mp3"] IMG { display: inline ! important }

Now, I’m not a CSS ninja, so I couldn’t begin to tell you which of the above lines was the culprit, but if one of you know please leave a comment.   Once, I removed this CSS from Safari (Safari–>Preferences–>Advanced), the flash uploader worked like a champ.

-Tim

I’ve come to realize that WordPress is a pretty popular piece of software for bloggers. As such, I decided to see if any iPhone applications existed for it. Of course, there is one. Since, I’m a heavy iPhone user I naturally grabbed it right away. Unfortunately, when I tried to set up the app on my phone I received this happy little message:

NSXMLParserErrorDomain error 5

Well, isn’t that just par for the course! Time to do some digging. The first (and most obvious problem) is that I didn’t have WordPress configured for XMLRPC. I’m not going to put you to sleep with the details about it but it is necessary for my iPhone and WordPress to communicate. Ok, now that it is enabled in the control panel of WordPress let’s try it again on the iPhone:

NSXMLParserErrorDomain error 5

Figures, right? I then had the same idea I did about the PHP and GD issue. Was I missing a PHP exstension for XMLRPC? Yep, I sure was. Time to install it:

cd /usr/ports/net/php5-xmlrpc/ && make install clean

Success! I can now blog from my iPhone. Pretty cool, huh? Nothing else was needed. It was all server side.

-Tim

I’ve only been playing with WordPress for a day now and my initial impression of it is very positive. However, I have run into a couple problems a long the way. I installed this neat little plugin for WordPress called Scissors. I say neat now only after fixing the problem. Unfortunately, Scissors showed me that I had a problem with my PHP install. When I tried to modify an image in my media library I got the following error from PHP:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function imagecreatefromjpeg()

Good times! Some googling showed me that the issue had something to do with GD and PHP not playing nice. My server (which runs FreeBSD) already had GD and PHP installed, but for some reason PHP didn’t notice. A search through the ports lead me to find php5-gd. Awesome. Let’s get it installed:

cd /usr/ports/graphics/php5-gd/ && make install clean

I can now crop, rotate, resize and do other fun stuff with playing with scissors!

-Tim