WP-Secure Plugin for WordPress

I should have known by the “what others are saying” on the WordPress Plugin page for this plug in HERE.

What Others Are Saying Screen GrabI have been testing a lot of security plugins lately, and even though this one rates poorly, and the comments aren’t flattering, I thought I would take a look anyway and make my own decision. As I installed it on a hosted server, here’s what I got:

Supenssion ScreenNot only did this plugin crash my WordPress site, it got my hosting account suspended! Upon liaising with tech support at the hosting company, it turns out that this plugin created infinite loops which pushed server load beyond acceptable levels, and in a hosted server environment earns you instant suspension in the form of a “terms of service” violation.

Modifying WordPress’s Tag Cloud Widget

Wordpress Tag Cloud WidgetWordPress ships with a Tag Cloud widget built in. Unfortunately, this widget is not customizable from the admin panel. You need to modify one of the systems .php files.

To modify the widget, you need to get into your WordPress installs files using your favorite FTP program , and in the “wp-includes” folder you will see a file called “category-template.php”. This is the file we will be working on, so please make a backup copy of it and store it in a safe place before you start. That way if something goes wrong you can recover quickly and easily by re-uploading the known good file. Once you have a backup tucked away, open up the file in your preferred editor ( I usually just use the Text Editor on Mac, or Notepad on Windows) and look for (or search for) “Display tag cloud”. This is the beginning of the part of the file we need to edit, and you will see by reading the commented out text, that there are a few parameters you can adjust. For this article we will look at the font sizes, and the number of tags that  appear in the cloud.

The default settings are:

'smallest' => 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 45,

As you can see, the smallest tag size is set to 8 points, the largest is 22 points, and the number of tags in the cloud are the top 45. Feel free to enlarge or shrink your font sizes, and ad or subtract the total number of tags displayed. The font sizes are ok for me, but I did increase the number of tags displayed to 150 for this web site.

Once you have made your changes, replace the category-template.php file on your server with the file you just modified, and when you refresh your browser you will see your changes in place.

No Concerts for You!

Steve Jobs

FRIDAY:

Like him or hate him, Steve Jobs is easily one of, if not THE best CEO’s, and visionaries of the modern Tech world. Now, I know you are going to label me “Fan Boy” after reading that, and to an extent you are correct. But I confess to being a “Fan Boy” only within the boundaries of my own productivity and prosperity. My Mac Pro allows me to edit HD video, and process my photos with color calibration, in a way that Windows and Nix’s are not quiet able to do yet (If you see it differently, please comment – I would love to hear your thoughts). Please keep in mind though, as a newly labelled “Fan Boy” by you,  if one of my dogs was sick, and as I was carrying it through the car park to the vet surgery and my iPhone fell out of my pocket, I wouldn’t look back, and I wouldn’t think twice, even if a car ran over it. I am not one of “Those” people who “Would Just DIE” without their iPad, You know the type. Even though I love my Mac Pro, I do have Windows XP and Puppy Linux set up in VMWARE Fusion Virtual Machines on my Mac Pro, and I do use them both more than often, especially to view my web creations on non mac browsers like IE, Konquerer etc.

Today, Sir Stevie of Jobby-Land decreed that thou shalt not be able to film concert events with thine iPhone!

Immediately the media were on this, and it does raise some interesting questions. All of which are valid.

The way I see it, I expect the RIAA, Sony BMG, RCA etc have gotten into Sir Stevie saying that the iPhone is a piracy device. Now, to Sir Stevie’s credit, I don’t think that would bother him. He has “flipped off” the RIAA before – remember when iTunes was born? But in this case, I think Lord Jobbyness stepped up to the plate as the greatest CEO in the Galaxy, and put his company and his shareholders first, and told the RIAA and the record companies, that he would oblige, and fit their infrared anti piracy, anti music stealing, anti seal clubbing, anti granny/cop killing laser to the death star to protect the universe from the scrappy band of rebels who want to pay hundreds of dollars (or half a weeks wages) to go to a concert and record P!NK on her Trapeze thingy!

Because GOD HELP US ALL IF THAT GOT OUT!

But why?

Why would the universes greatest CEO who has proved that he is not scared of the RIAA in the past put his beloved “fruit company” in harms way, and jeopardize the companies good name to it’s customers by restricting the device and not allowing them to use it to record live performances?

I don’t believe for a second that Sir Stevie would allow this issue to make it to the global media if there wasn’t some bigger picture that we all don’t quiet see yet. Again, love him or hate him, he is just too smart, and has proved dozens of times that he is able to manipulate and control the media to his advantage.

(my prediction)

MONDAY:

Some wonderful new reason justifying why everything that’s wrong in the universe is suddenly right, and we can all smile, feeling re-assured that Apple would never hurt us, and go back to listening to U2 (soon to be renamed “I2″……..I just made that up 🙂 ) on our iPods and iPhones,  with our iMacs, taking a iDump on our iToilet…………..

He’s the “Wolf in sheep’s clothes (with a liver he purchased from a third world country)” today, but next week his “Grand Plan” will all become clear, and as a result we will all want to go and purchase new iPods/iPhones, and some Beatles music from iTunes as icing on the cake.

And just for a giggle,

Lets take a look at the App store shall we!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/concert-recorder-cd-quality/id338045354?mt=8

Apple Concert Recorder

 

Apple iPhone High Quality Concert Recorder

Download it while you can!

Awesome File Merge Utility on your OSX Disc

Mac File Merge UtilityI wrote yesterday about how there are some really cool things in the Mac Applications-Utility folder, but if you have ever purchased a Mac OSX operating system disc, there are also some pretty cool programs on it that aren’t actually installed by default. The first one that comes to mind is FileMerge. Its a app that allow you to take two files or folders, and compare them side by side, and it will highlight the differences between the two.

Mac File Merge UtilityI used this recently when Greg Smith of Cyberhawk Designs modded a WordPress template I created and put three widget positions in the header! I just HAD to know how he did it, so I used file merge to compare my original files with the modded files he sent back! Cool Huh!

Greg has since written a tutorial about adding the header widgets, and you can take a look at it on his cool Cyberhawk web site HERE.

Mac Grab Sceen Capture Utility

Mac Grab Screen Capture Utility Icon

The amount of goodies tucked away in Mac OSX never ceases to amaze me. There have been so many times I need a app, only to find the good folks in Cupertino have already included what I need as a standard utility. Grab is one of those apps. It is a simple and very good screen capture utility. It can capture a selection, a window, or your entire screen, and even has a ten second automatic screen capture timer if you need to set something up before your capture. The default capture format is TIFF, which is great for capture quality, but can get a little annoying if you need to capture a lot of things and convert to JPG for web. I noticed last time I was playing around in “Tinker Tool” (A free program to unlock hidden features in OSX) that it will allow you to change the format of the captured image, but when I set it to JPG, it still saved as TIFF for me.

So there you have it, a really cool and very useful utility that you probably didn’t even know you had! There’s heaps of cool stuff in that Utilities folder so open your Applications folder, then Utilities, and take a look around!