Eric Thoreson

Customizing phpBB Template Files

Eric — Sat, 02 May 2009 23:54:26 +0000

I spent the better part of today installing a phpBB forum on a new site (specifically phpBB 3.0.4). This was my first experience with phpBB, and it looks pretty cool. I won’t cover the install process here — there are plenty of great resources available for that — suffice it to say that it was very easy to install.

Once I had the software installed, I wanted to make some modifications to the header — include my own logo, etc. This should have been easy, it’s just a matter of editing the overall_header.html file (download file via ftp, edit in text editor, upload, refresh). But…no matter what I did, I couldn’t get my changes to show. After quite a bit of time, I found a solution in a forum (yes, ironic).

To hopefully save others some frustration, I’m re-posting it here. The key is that you need to refresh your template before the changes will show on the site. To do this:

Go to Forum ACP->Style Tab->Template->Refresh your Template

That’s it! Wish I would have known a few hours ago

How to Exclude Internal Traffic from Google Analytics Reports

Eric — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:36:42 +0000

There are two methods for excluding internal traffic from appearing in your Google Analytics reports: you can filter out a specific IP address or a range of IP addresses, or you can use cookies to filter out visits from particular users. More info here. I’m using the cookie method on my sites and have found it to work well. This is the better method to exclude traffic from dynamic IP addresses.

How to exclude traffic by cookie:

1. Create a new page on your site containing the following code:

Note that this code is in addition to the Google Analytics tracking code that you have on every page of your website

2. In order to set the cookie, visit your newly created page from all computers that you would like to exclude from your reports.

3. Create an Exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie. Follow these instructions to create a filter with the following settings:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: test_value
Case Sensitive: No

Now any visitors with this cookie will be excluded from showing in your Analytics reports.

My Mac Setup (Part 2)

Eric — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:13:29 +0000

In a previous post, I listed my top Mac applications. What follows are the key web-based services I use to round out my computing experience.

My Top Web Applications:

Gmail. Quite simply the best email service available, IMHO. Can’t imaging interacting with email without the threaded messages or Google search capability.
GrandCentral. As they describe it, “a new way to use your phones.” Basically it’s a single phone number that rings your other phones when someone calls (with custom settings that allow you to set which phones ring depending on the caller), a web-based visual voicemail box, and many other call-management features. Google acquired the service, and unfortunately closed it to new signups.
Google Reader. Terrific web-based feed reader (so it is always up-to-date regardless of which computer I’m on), and like Gmail has Google search functionality (which is invaluable for researching companies, locating the article you remember reading but can’t find, etc).
Remember the Milk. A wonderfully intuitive yet powerful and sophisticated web-based task management application. And with features like the Quicksilver plug-in and the iPhone app it seamlessly integrates into my life, letting me capture and manage tasks without getting in the way. Free for virtually everything you need, but the Pro account is well worth the $25 annual fee.

My Top Firefox Extensions:

Better Gmail 2. Add useful extra features to Gmail, like hierarchical labels, macros, file attachment icons, and more.
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. Syncs and backs up your bookmarks and passwords across multiple computers. And unlike Apple’s MobileMe service, it’s free!
SearchStatus. Toolbar extension that shows Google PageRank, Alexa, etc. data for every website you visit.
DT WhoIs. Adds a toolbar button for easy access to whois data using Domaintools.com’s whois service.
Tamper Data. View HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters, trace and time http response/requests, and more.
TwitterBar. Allows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar.

Tough Times for Sun Valley

Eric — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:06:34 +0000

It’s looking like a tough winter for Sun Valley.

First the terrible Castle Rock fire last year, then the fire along Main St. that destroyed Whiskey’s and damaged the Sawtooth Club, and now the dismal economy. You can’t help feeling bad for the local merchants. And as of today, the mountain is still not open.

At least the Sawtooth is reopening on December 13.

UPDATE: Thanks to the west’s largest snowmaking system, Sun Valley will begin its 73rd season on Wed, Dec 10.

Not much snow!

My Mac Setup

Eric — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:04:13 +0000

I fully transitioned to Macs over the past couple of years. As a long-time PC user, it took me some time to develop a system that enabled me to work as efficiently as I did on a PC. Like anything new, there was a learning curve. At this point, I can’t imagine working on anything but a Mac. What follows are the key applications and utilities that tailor my Mac experience for how I work. In a follow up post, I will list my favorite web applications and browser extensions.

My Top Mac Applications:

Firefox. Best browser on the market, IMHO. Safari is fast and stable, but the extensibility of Firefox makes it a winner in my book.
Quicksilver. Hands down the best productivity application on the market today. I have tried many times — mostly unsuccessfully — to explain the goodness of Quicksilver, this time I’ll leave it to other experts.
Google Notifier. A nifty little application that shows you alerts in your menu bar, so you can see when you have new Gmail messages or upcoming Google Calendar events without opening a web browser.
Vocito. A desktop UI for GrandCentral . It allows you to easily dial anybody from the menu bar, rather than having to open your browser.
Adium. Multi-client IM app. Works with virtually every IM service, only drawback is that it doesn’t support voice chat.
Skype. To make up for the lack of support for voice in Adium Unfortunately not everyone uses Macs, so iChat isn’t an option.
Microsoft Office 2008. In the business world, don’t really have a choice. And as much as I love Google Spreadsheets, I just can’t imagine life without Excel!
FolderShare (soon to be Windows Live Sync). Syncs files across multiple computers (both Windows and Mac). This simplifies your life immeasurably if you use multiple computers. And it’s free!
TextWrangler. Great (free) text editor for programming and other text-based activities.
Transmit. Terrific and easy-to-use FTP client. Supports FTP, SFTP, or TLS/SSL, etc.

Some Great Mac Utilities:

Witch. Freeware window switcher that gives you more control over how you access and switch between open windows with your keyboard. Unlike Command-Tab, which switches between open applications, Witch enables you to switch between open windows via a user-defined keyboard command.
Growl. From the developer: “Growl lets Mac OS X applications unintrusively tell you when things happen.” Kind of difficult to describe, check out the about page for more info.
Precipitate. Includes information you have stored in the cloud (e.g., Google Docs) in Spotlight searches.
Calaboration. Syncs Google Calendar with Apple’s iCal app. UPDATE: Now that Google has enabled calendar and address book syncing with iPhones, I no longer need this.
Screenshot Plus. Great little screen capture widget.
WeatherBug Alert. Add weather alerts and live local temperature to the menu bar.

Stop Unsolicited Delivery of Phone Books

Eric — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:59:46 +0000

The other day, we received — along with the rest of the neighborhood — another stack of phone books on our doorstep. Oh joy. We have not used printed phone books for years, relying instead on Google and other online directories. Yet we continue to receive multiple stacks of phone books.

Normally I just dump the phone books in the recycle bin without a second thought, but this time I got to thinking: just how much waste does this create? Turns out quite a bit.

Apparently there are over 7,000 different titles of Yellow Pages published in the U.S., including competing industry-specific, ethnic-targeted, and “underlay” or neighborhood-specific titles. Over 540 million directories are distributed per year — that’s nearly two books for every person in the country! This industry practice is called “saturation distribution.” There are no rules, other than market demand, limiting the number of Yellow Pages titles printed in a single market.

To produce 500 million books requires:

19 million trees
1.6 billion pounds of paper
7.2 million barrels of oil
3.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity

Only 40% of the paper used in phone books is recycled, and over 700 tons of phone books were dumped in landfills in 2007, consuming 268,000 cubic yards of landfill space.

This is just outrageous. The yellow pages industry claims that nearly 90% of adults use print yellow pages each year, but I don’t know anyone who actually uses phone books anymore. I’m sure there are those who continue to find value in printed phone books, but it seems to me there ought to be a way to opt out of delivery for those of us who no longer use phone books.

There are a couple of websites where consumers can sign up to be removed from delivery distribution lists — Paperless Petition and YellowPagesGoesGreen. I don’t have personal experience as to whether this method is effective.

I launched a little website — Eco Yellow Pages — to add my voice to the opposition of yellow pages delivery practices, and to provide additional information and resources to consumers who want to stop delivery of phone books. Check it out at www.ecoyp.com.

You can also fan EcoYP at Facebook

How To Clear an Obstruction in a Child’s Nose

Eric — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:13:53 +0000

I know, I know, this title sounds like a joke, but it’s not! We recently learned a neat trick, something that every parent should know. Our three-year-old daughter was playing with little beads and somehow got one stuck up her nose. It was lodged way up the nasal cavity, likely because she had been picking at it trying to get it out. We briefly tried getting it out ourselves, but quickly gave up out of fear that we were only pushing it further in.

We rushed her to the emergency room, and the nurse taught us a neat trick: simply plug the other nostril (the one without the obstruction) with your finger and blow into the child’s mouth. The important thing is to seal your mouth over the child’s (like you would for CPR) and to blow forcefully.

A couple of strong puffs later, the bead popped out. No big deal!

How to Embed Quicktime Videos on your Website

Eric — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 01:42:55 +0000

I spent the better part of today trying to figure out how to host and play video files on my website. This caused me endless hours of frustration, probably because I was trying to use Dreamhost’s QuickTime streaming service. It doesn’t work…or at least I wasn’t able to figure out how to make it work, and believe me I tried (grr). In the course of surfing around the web to find help (could Dreamhost’s support wiki be any more worthless??), I pieced together a solution. Here are the steps:

1. Prepare your video file with QuickTime.

Open the file with Quicktime
Export the file using “Movie to QuickTime Movie” setting (see below). Make sure you select the “Prepare for Internet Streaming” option and select “Fast Start”

2. Upload the file to your site. I created a new “media” folder (e.g., domain.com/media) for all my movie files.

3. Create a new html page and save as a regular html file (i.e., with .htm or .html extension). Here is the code to embed the video file:

width="640" height="496" codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">


Note that you want to add 16px to the height value to show the controls on the bottom of the video player.
I have tested this in Firefox and Safari and it works fine, still need to get on a PC to test it in IE.  I’m using QuickTime Pro Version 7.4.1 hosting with Dreamhost.
Here’s an example of the final product.



Dreamhost, PHP Scripts and cURL
Eric — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 23:19:40 +0000
In an effort to teach myself basic programming, I have been playing around with stuff on my personal site.  One thing I wanted to do was take the RSS feed from my blog and put headlines on the homepage of my site.  I briefly considered trying to figure out how to do this myself, but quickly decided I would be better off just looking for an existing script that I could modify.  I found a great PHP script (RSS2HTML) that seemed to fit my purpose perfectly.  So I downloaded the script, customized it in TextWrangler, uploaded it to my Dreamhost server, tried to run it and…got the following error:
URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration
Well, this meant nothing to me.  After a lot of research and trial and error, I found an article on the Dreamhost support wiki that says:
DreamHost has disabled the PHP option allow_url_fopen. This would normally allow a programmer to open, include or otherwise use a remote file using a URL, rather than a local file path.
I took this to mean that the script as written would not work on Dreamhost.  Apparently the problem was the use of an ‘include‘ command in the script.
Here is the snippet I was trying to use:
include("http://www.example.com/script.php");
The alternative, according to this article, is to use cURL.  Well, long story short, this solved the problem and now it works great.  Here is the new code:
$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.example.com/script.php");

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);
You can see the final product here.   

         


How to Change the Host File on a Mac
Eric — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 16:25:46 +0000
Changing the host file on a Mac is very easy, but it’s certainly not intuitive.  This little tutorial will show you how.
Launch Terminal
Type:
sudo su

vim /etc/hosts

shift-a
Scroll to your desired insertion point and enter the info in this format:   
IP address [space] www.example.com [space] example.com
Then the following to save and close the file:
esc

:wq

enter

exit
Done!
This comes in handy when doing development on a new site — point your host file to the dev server and test the site before pushing it live.
Remember to delete the entry when you want to go back to the live site.  You can also comment out the entry (if you think you may want to use it in the future) by prepending the entry with a  # — example:
# IPaddress www.example.com example.com
Thanks Casey!
Bonus:  Disabling the Firefox DNS cache