Brad Williams Blog

WebDevStudios.com Gets a Face Lift!

By StrangeWork.com: WebDevStudios.com, the New Jersey based software development company I co-founded, just launched a much needed new site design! Not only is the design new, but we also completely changed our website platform to WordPress.

WordPress is a leader in the open source software community, and a perfect fit for what we needed in a content management system.

Yes, I said content management system. WordPress is a great fit for any size company to manage their public website, and can become a powerful CMS with just a few plugins. Since we specialize in open source website development, it only makes sense to practice what we preach.

WordPress also gives us the much needed ability to blog! Thus the Official WebDevStudios.com Blog has launched. This blog will focus more on open source technology news, tips, source code, publicly released WebDevStudios plugins, and more!

Stay tuned as more website updates are sure to follow!

WordPress Theme Showcase Plugin

By StrangeWork.com: I’m excited to announced the release of my latest WordPress plugin, the WordPress Theme Showcase Plugin.

This plugin will display all themes located in wp-content/themes in a showcase gallery with theme screenshots and preview links. This is a great plugin for designers looking to showcase their work or anyone that wants an easy way to display and preview multiple themes.

Updated: I added screenshots at the bottom of this post

This plugin is based off of the WordPress Theme Preview plugin created by Ryan Boren.

Features:

Display a showcase of your themes
Theme screenshots are displayed with titles and descriptions
Easily preview all themes loaded in WordPress
Allow anyone to preview themes, not just administrators
Works with both WordPress 2.x and WordPress MU
New settings page allows you to pick what themes are displayed

Installation:
Step 1.
Unzip the file and upload theme-showcase.php to your WordPress plugin folder.

Step 2.
Activate the plugin in your WordPress Admin section under the plugins menu

Step 3.
Insert this code:

[showcase]

Anywhere in your post or page and save. That’s it!

Download: WordPress Theme Showcase Plugin
Compatible up to: WordPress and WPMU 2.8.2

Please visit the Support Forum with any bugs, comments, feature requests, or hate mail!

Theme Showcase Screenshot 1

Theme Showcase Screenshot 2

Theme Showcase Settings Page

Date July 30, 2008
Author Brad Williams
Comments 35 Comments

Twitter Follow Limits Are Jacked

By StrangeWork.com: Last week Jennifer Leggio of ZDNet posted an article about Twitter’s new anti-spam efforts and how royally jacked they are. I’m here to confirm that the Twitter follow limits are still jacked.

So what are the limits? Here is Twitter’s answer:

What are the limits?
We’re starting with a few limits based on various parameters, and we’ll be adding more as time goes on. We reveal some limits only when you reach them, and tell you about others in advance. Twitter applies limits to any person who reaches:

* 1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices
* 250 total direct messages per day, on any and devices
* 100 API requests per hour
* Maximum number of follow attempts in a day

Follow limits are based on several things, one of which is our belief in a person’s good standing and intention. The behind-the-scenes portion of follow limiting varies by account, relationship, and changes over time. Based on current behavior in the Twitter community, we’ve concluded that this is both fair and reasonable. While we figure out what works best for everyone, the limits may change occasionally, but this is the nucleus and future limits will be based upon the success of these.

source: http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=242

None of the above follow limits apply to my situation. Twitter is blocking my ability to follow new people.

I’m currently following 2100 people on Twitter and I have 1451 people following me. So my current follow to following ratio is 1.44:1. So for every 1.44 people I follow 1 person follows me back.

Does this ratio strike you as ridiculously skewed to either side? Of course not. So why can’t the techs at Twitter see this? I’m sure Twitter looks at other stats to determine who to put a limit on, but posting about 10-15 tweets a day about random stuff shouldn’t trip their spam filter.

I submitted a couple support tickets to Twitter, but have not heard a response yet. There are a few posts on GetSatisfaction.com regarding this issue, but none seem to give a solid answer on the follow issue:
Can’t follow Twitter members since last week
What happens if i hit a Twitter limit

I just hope the Twitter techs can get this problem resolved so I can start following more interesting people on Twitter!

Date July 28, 2008
Author Brad Williams
Comments 10 Comments

WordPress Weekly Live Tonight with Alex King

By StrangeWork.com: After a break last week for the 4th of July, the WordPress Weekly Podcast returns tonight Friday, July 11th at 10PM EST. Alex King will be joining the podcast for an hour long interview with the gang.

If you have ever used WordPress in any fashion then you have probably heard of Alex King. He is responsible for some great contributions to the open-source community including being a founding developer of WordPress and some excellent WordPress plugins and themes.

Alex is also the founder of Crowd Favorite, a web development company who specialize in WordPress development and web-based applications.

As the founder of WebDevStudios, my new web development company who also happens to specialize in using open-source technologies, I’m looking forward to asking Alex a few questions to gain from his experience in the industry.

Make sure to join the WordPress Weekly Podcast LIVE tonight at 10pm EST on TalkShoe.com

Date July 11, 2008
Author Brad Williams
Comments No Comments

Asbury Park Chess Fest 2008 – Going for a World Record!

By StrangeWork.com: I’ve been working on a lot of great projects recently. One of those projects has been creating the new Asbury Park Chess Fest 2008 website.

The great folks at Prevention First, a not-for-profit agency, and the city of Asbury Park New Jersey will be joining together to host Chess Fest 2008 on September 27th. The event is going to try to break a Guinness Book of World Record for most simultaneous chess games. The current record was set in 2006 in Mexico City with 13,500 chess players.

“ChessFest 2008 will be star-studded and attract the world’s finest and most famous chess players. Pre-event chess-related festivities are planned for the week prior to the event and include a movie, a play and much more.”

Chess Fest Social Presence
We are currently working on building a “social presence” for the event. Currently we have launched four social network accounts:

Chess Fest Facebook Group – The obvious first choice. Facebook is becoming the standard for organized groups and events in a social community.

Chess Fest MySpace Group – by far the most annoying site to create an account for. Now have to wait 7 days before being “allowed” to create a group. coming soon I guess…

Chess Fest Ning Social Network – Ning is an awesome site that allows you to create a social network within minutes! Really looking forward to growing this site and getting the discussions going!

Chess Fest Twitter Account – Of course our good, and sometimes bad, friend Twitter is here. Twitter is a great tool to send out short blurbs and news posts for anyone looking for more information on the chess fest.

These four sites will help us spread the word and build a network of enthusiastic chess players! The next phase will include a couple more networks and possibly a social network application or two.

Now I need to study my chess moves so I don’t get hit with a Fool’s mate at the festival!

Date July 1, 2008
Author Brad Williams
Comments 1 Comment

How to: 301 Redirect from one domain to another using mod_rewrite

By StrangeWork.com: Recently I created a new E-commerce website for a client of mine. I developed the new site as a subdomain under their existing domain (ex http://newsite.domain.com). Google ended up indexing around 4000 links from the subdomain I had created, so upon launching the new site I wanted to 301 redirect the subdomain links to the primary domain of the new site.

Sounds easy right? Of course! I quickly found many sites that recommended this rewrite rule using mod_rewrite:

RewriteRule ^(.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

However there is a problem with this method that no article seemed to address. This works great at redirecting from the subdomain (http://newsite.domain.com) to the new domain (http://domain.com), BUT if you navigate to http://domain.com you will hit an infinite loop.

So, how do you correct this problem? Easy, you need to create a rewrite condition to only apply the rule to your old domain or the subdomain in this case. Just add the following two lines to your .htaccess file in the root of your website:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(newsite.)?domain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Now this rewrite rule will ONLY apply to anyone who hits the old subdomain at http://newsite.domain.com and 301 redirect them to http://domain.com with the entire URL structure in tact. This method is easy to apply to a stand domain as well, just replace newsite in the above example with www.

I was pretty baffled at the amount of bad information there is on this method so thought I would share the proper method with everyone. Hopefully the update rewrite rules will help anyone having the same issues I had.

Date June 30, 2008
Author Brad Williams
Comments 4 Comments

WordPress Weekly Episode 22

By StrangeWork.com: Yesterday I joined Jeffro and crew for another episode of the WordPress Weekly Podcast.

We covered a lot of topics including the release of WordPress 2.6 beta one and the launch of WPForSale.com.

Jeff also announced that he is looking for a co-host. If you are interested in co-hosting a great WordPress podcast make sure you contact him ASAP! Rumor has it there is a nice finders fee! 😛

Be sure to catch the next episode of WordPress Weekly on Friday July 11th when we will be interviewing Alex King of WordPress plugin fame!

Date June 29, 2008
Author Brad Williams
Comments 2 Comments

WordPress MU Aggregator Plugin

By Strangework.com: I’m excited to announce the release of my first WordPress plugin, the WordPress MU Aggregator Plugin.

This plugin will display the most recent posts from all blogs in a WordPress MU network. The Aggregator only returns blogs updated in the last 30 days.

Created for WordPress MU 1.5.1

Features:

Supports permalinks, non-friendly links (querystrings), or a mixture of both
Pulls new posts directly from the database, not an RSS feed
Main WordPress MU install is not displayed in the list
Style-less to allow for easy implementation in any theme.
Easy to read comments for easy edits and styling
More features and sidebar widgets coming soon

Installation:
Step 1.
Unzip the file and upload wordpressMU-aggregator.php to your WordPress plugin folder.

Step 2.
Active the plugin in your WordPress Admin section under the plugins menu

Step 3.
Insert this code:

Anywhere in your theme. That’s it! Change the number to alter how many posts are returned.

Download: WordPress MU Aggregator Plugin v0.5

Please comment with any bugs, comments, feature requests, or hate mail!

Date June 12, 2008
Author Brad Williams
Comments 21 Comments

How To: Run Apache HTTP Server and IIS on Windows Server 2003

By StrangeWork.com: This is the first article in a series of articles I plan to write on setting up a WAMP stack (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on Windows Server 2003.

I decided to install Apache HTTP Server on my dedicated Windows Server 2003 machine. I thought I would write a detailed article explaining the process for anyone else wanting to accomplish the same task. With just a few minor config changes you can easily have IIS and Apache running alongside each other on the same Windows server.

Step 1: Download Apache Server Win32 Binary (MSI Installer) from http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi
Step 2: Install Apache with the default settings. Read the Apache Windows Help Documentation for more information.

In order to run IIS and Apache on a single server you need to specify what IP IIS and Apache will listen for port 80 on. You must have two different IP addresses available for use.

Step 3: For Apache: Edit the http.conf file to force Apache to run on a specific IP. Find the below text in your http.conf file. If you left the default install location unchanged the file will be located here:
C:Program FilesApache Software FoundationApache2.2confhttpd.conf

# Listen: Allows you to bind Apache to specific IP addresses and/or
# ports, instead of the default. See also the
# directive.
#
# Change this to Listen on specific IP addresses as shown below to
# prevent Apache from glomming onto all bound IP addresses.
#
#Listen 12.34.56.78:80
Listen 80

Change the line Listen 80 to:
Listen xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:80

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the private IP address you want Apache to listen on.

Step 4: For IIS: Install the Windows 2003 support tools.
Insert your Windows 2003 CD and open up the file:
SUPPORTTOOLSSUPTOOLS.MSI
This will install additional support tools in “C:Program FilesSupport Tools”

Open up a command prompt (start menu > run > cmd)

At the command prompt, switch to the “C:Program FilesSupport Tools” folder (cd /d c:program filessupport tools)

Type the following command:

httpcfg set iplisten -i xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the private IP address you want IIS to listen on. This must be a different IP from the one used above for Apache.

Restart IIS and Apache for the changes to take affect. You might need to reboot depending on your server settings. Now IIS and Apache will run in harmony on the same Windows 2003 Server!

Troubleshooting Apache
If you run it to problems, the first place to start debugging is in your Apache error.log file. The file is located in your root Apache folder logs directory. The default install location is:
C:Program FilesApache Software FoundationApache2.2logserror.log

Common Errors
An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions. : make_sock: could not bind to address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:80

You will receive this error in your error.log if IIS is still listening on the private IP that you set for Apache. If you followed my directions correctly an IIS reset should resolve this problem. If you are still having issues try rebooting your server.

Date June 11, 2008
Author Brad Williams
Comments 14 Comments

Startup Weekend Indianapolis Set For September 12-14 2008

By StrangeWork.com: Startup weekend is coming here to Indianapolis! I guess I should say “going there” since I just moved to New Jersey.

Startup Weekend Indianapolis has been scheduled for Friday September 12th through Sunday September 14th 2008. You can register online if you plan on attending.

I’ve participated in two Startup Weekends to date, but only for one night each time. As luck would have it I should be back for that weekend. I’m flying back to attend the MotoGP race in Indianapolis with my Dad the weekend after.

I’m looking forward to the event and can’t wait to reconnect with some Indy Techies!

Don’t think I’m not keeping an eye on you guys!