Rolling Resource

I use Twitterfeed to spread another blog around the internet via Twitter and Facebook

This normally works very well, but sometimes Twitterfeed seems to miss a series of posts. To understand why, we must look at the raw RSS feed. Each item in Blogger’s RSS feed has the following parameters:

• <item>
  • <guid> (unique identifier)
  • <pubDate> (timestamp)
  • <atom:updated> (timestamp)
  • <category> (one per tag)
  • <title>(of article)
  • <description> (text of article)
  • <link> (to article)
  • <author>
  • <thr:total> (number of comments)
• </item>

The problem is that Blogger feeds its posts sorted by Update time (<atom:updated>), while Twitterfeed expects the feed to be sorted by pubDate.

In order for your posts to appear, you need to change some of the Advanced settings. Change the ‘Post Sorting’ parameters so that new items are posted based on GUID and clear the checkbox ‘Feed is sorted’

While looking through the HTML code generated by WordPress, I have come across several tags I was unfamiliar with. One of these was ACCESSKEY. At first sight, this would appear to be a very useful way of moving quickly about the page; indeed the Connections theme I use here uses accesskeys of a (About), c (Contact), h (Home/Recent), l (Links) and the UK Government came up with some standard definitions

• S – Skip navigation
• 1 – Home page
• 2 – What’s new
• 3 – Site map
• 4 – Search
• 5 – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• 6 – Help
• 7 – Complaints procedure
• 8 – Terms and conditions
• 9 – Feedback form
• 0 – Access key details

However, the use of ACCESSKEYs can cause problems as described by the RNIB due to the fact that they override the default Browser keystrokes, so their use has rather fallen out of favour, especially on pages where data entry is required.

Useful resources for improving accessibility are:
BBC – http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/
Abilitynet – http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/
Equality Commission – General web accessibility guidance – BS 8878, PAS78
BECTA (Archived) – Making Accessible Software

I just installed a new WordPress based domain for a customer. Everything went tickety-boo with the installation, until I made the final changes. When I moved the domain from its temporary server at test.tempwebhost.com to the live domain at www.example.com, the site stopped working (for me).

Before moving the domain, I had set up the new host and checked that its nameservers were resolving correctly using the command nslookup mydomain.com newnameserver.com. I had also changed the configuration in WordPress (under Settings / General / WordPress Address and Site Address) before moving the setup to point to the new domain, so that was not the problem.

My prime suspect was DNS, so I checked that the URL was resolving properly using the shorter nslookup mydomain.com. It was, so my problem was not the TTL or caching by my ISP’s DNS Servers. I tried starting and stoppng the “DNS Client” service in Windows, which normally sorts out DNS issues. I also tried shutting down and rebooting my laptop. Still no joy.

Using BrowserShots, I was able to verify that the site was loading properly for other people. The problem was obviously on my laptop, but what?

It turns out that despite the fact that I had rebooted, stopped and restarted the DNS client and forced a lookup for the domain on the correct nameserver, Windows was resolutely refusing to clear its cache. Cursed OS.

The solution was to force Windows to clear its DNS cache, after which everything worked flawlessly. To do this, type ipconfig /dnsflush at the command prompt.

I decided that it really was time I upgraded my installation of WordPress from version 2.2.1. This is normally a really simple process, but not this time.

Rather than overwriting the existing installation, I always start afresh. I backed up the databases as usual, disabled all plugins, downloaded the latest version (2.9.2) and then proceeded to incoroprate my edits into the new version. I also copied across the theme and plugins.

However, when I tried to run the upgrade script, I got the following error logged in Apache’s error_log [notice] child pid 19836 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

After speaking to my Hosting company, they advised that they had had a lot of compatibility problems with PHP 5.3.0 and advised downgrading to PHP 5.2.12 instead.

All is OK now

I have been asked to layout a newsletter for the local civic society as the usual person was too busy. Although I have an uninstalled copy of Microsoft Publisher somewhere, I had never used it before and wanted to find an open source alternative. Enter Scribus and GhostScript. In order to get this to work on Windows 2000, I also needed to download the GDI+ SDK.

Getting started was fairly simple, but in order to run the tutorials at docs.scribus.net I needed to download various ICC profiles and fonts

• Adobe RGB (1998) ICC profile
• Euroscale Coated v2 ICC profile
• Luxi fonts

Simply extract the contents of the two ICC files into the /libs/profiles subdirectory of Scribus and extract the .ttf files from the Luxi fonts into your Fonts folder (Start>Settings>Control Panel>Fonts)