I found a great article from a guy whose work I have liked and used on several occaisions over the life of WordPress. Once again Meall Dubh explains clearly how to use the built in power of WordPress to pull RSS feeds in.

His code has one typo in the following line:
echo "<li><a xhref=$href>$title</a><br />$description</li>";

Should actually be minus the x or you won’t have good links:
echo "<li><a href=$href>$title</a><br />$description</li>";

Further his code included the description from the feed. In my case I found it helpful to delete that part of the code:
$description = $item['description']; and just use the title and url link.

I was working this up to a widget when I visit a newer install and find that there is an rss feed built into the sidebar widgets. It would appear the lifting is already done, although again I may wish to go modify it.

See it in action at MichFamLaw.com (about Michigan Divorce, Custody, Collaborative Divorce and Divorce Mediation) where the site pulls in the last five posts from DomesticDiversions.com (about the lighter side of marriage, divorce, human relationships and children) and displays them in the right sidebar.

In a tough fought battle, the Microsoft OpenXML file format failed to become an ISO standard. This is only a temporary issue because they get another chance at the plate early next year and they are likely to succeed when that happens.

Why is that bad you ask? Well in short, Microsoft Office is really very expensive and the full kit really only runs on Microsoft software. (Mac users tell me the Mac version of MS Office is decidedly inferior) So if Microsoft’s file format is a standard, (that doesn’t mean it is patent or royalty free) Microsoft will stick with that format as the default while dismissing the ODF format that already is a standard and which is royalty free and totally open.

They don’t want to support ODF as their default format, and the reason is that to do so would put them on a level pegging with other Office suites and they would lose $$$ as a result because it wouldn’t matter what office suite you used, your documents would be the same. Because Microsoft are far and away the office suite market share leaders, and because they know people are concerned about being compatible and able to open others office files, they will stick with the market leader as a result. Meaning Microsoft continues to make big dollars on MS Office.

We don’t know if free and open source office suites will have unencumbered royalty free access to Microsofts format either, that remains to be seen. But either way, if OpenXML becomes an ISO standard, it will mean that Microsoft will get to carry on charging crazy amounts of money for MS Office and people will go on paying it to ensure compatibility with those they share documents with.

To do your part to stop this, regardless of where you are, right to your pollies and let them know that a vote for OpenXML may have consequences for their own vote count at the next election. Also it might pay to stay up to date by visiting www.noooxml.org and/or Groklaw.

The Australian government has recently blown though 84 million dollars creating a new website and arranging the use of the Netalert Porn filter. This software was then broken in mere minutes by a 16 year old school boy. This is what happens when politicians assume they actually understand IT issues and think they can solve problems that more knowledgeable people have been trying to solve for years. The government is now going to put the responsibility of blocking sites onto the Internet Services Providers instead of with the parents where it belongs. Making the ISP’s block access requires significant financial outlay and a good deal of reconfiguration, something that it is unlikely the Government is going be much help with. It will also most likely result in our already low broadband speeds becoming even more dismal compared to the rest of the world since all traffic will have to be parsed by filtering rules before allowing/disallowing.

The Australian Government needs to understand a few things.

1. Every kid over 12 knows more about the family computer than their parents do. Parents (unless they are IT parents) learn just enough about the PC to get the work they need to do done, and that’s it. Kids on the other hand, really dig this stuff and will learn and evolve their habits much more quickly, swap tips with mates, read PC magazines and search the net for information. No solution that requires parental implementation will be all that successful, since kids can find out about msconfig, control panel/services and so on from a myriad of sources.

2. Putting the onus on ISP’s to block undesirable traffic won’t work either. There are many problems with this sort of thing.
a. Do sites like Myspace, Facebook, Bebo etc get blocked nationwide? These are the sites under the international spotlight now for pedophile presence.
b. Do all sites with chat programs get blocked by default? (since traditionally this is where child predators find their marks)
c. Does IRC get blocked altogether, along with MSN/ICQ/YAHOO etc chat access?
d. Do we want to be an Internet 3rd world country with access speeds far below the rest of the western world? (what good are 20mbit ADSL2 connections if the traffic gets slowed right up due to filtering?)
e. Do we risk losing sites containing medical information or tribal information because some prude in the government decides a picture of a boob or something similar is classed as porn? Where does that end? Do we then start blocking access to chemistry pages because the info could be used to make a weapon? Is this a road down which we want to go?

3. Educating parents on the dangers and solutions is the only way that will work. Make it obligatory that every Australian adult attend a workshop on child safety online and make them aware that the only way to stop a kid finding unsavory content or finding themselves talking to unsavory people is to WATCH THEM WHEN THEY ARE ONLINE!
a. Have your Internet PC or PCs in a central room where you can watch them. Let them have a computer in their room sure, but do not put a PC with Internet access in their room.
b. Use an Internet filter, but never rely on one alone.
c. Give the kids a certain period of time every day when they can browse the web, and make sure you are never far away when they are doing so.

It isn’t difficult and the only requirement is parental attention. If that is too much to ask, why are they having kids?

As far as the government goes, we must not let either side use this issue as an election gimmick. I usually vote Liberal simply because they have done very unpopular things, (like the GST) simply because they knew it was good for the country (and in the case of the GST, even Labor doesn’t disagree that they (Liberals) were right, though they strongly did at the time). Labor on the other hand never seems to intentionally do anything unpopular. They appear much more focused on staying in power, than the good of the country. The IR laws are another example, hugely misunderstood and likely to cost them the election, and yet unemployment is at all time lows and the economy is booming. They knew it would hurt them, but they did it anyway, because we needed it.

Any government solution to the Internet problem that involves palming the responsibility of onto others should result in their exit stage left, because there is to much to lose by messing it up.

I really don’t like Microsoft. I was working on a website the other day, MichiganPrepRadio.com (that broadcasts local sporting events in west Michigan like high school and college football games — and I do like them) in an effort to improve the usability of their site. As a result of using that site to listen to a broadcast, Windows Media forced me to update. So I did … and then before installing it required me to phone the mother ship (not literally but via the web) to authenticate my copy of Windows XP (thankfully I am not yet forced to use the lousy new Windows Vista). It finally gave me the green light and then … it tried to change my defaults all over the place to “use Windows Media Player 11”. They were kind enough to give me a select all button so I could wreck my experience universally, but didn’t bother to give me an unselect all button so that I could affect as little as possible. Common courtesy dear Microsoft programmers says any time you add a select all, you add the opposite toggle for unselect all. That is why I dislike you: you always try to force content on me.

I was having a dickens of a time tonight extracting content from a WordPress install. The template tag the_content() always wraps your content in paragraph tags <p> and this caused me problems as I wanted to substitute <li> tags.

I found a great little plug-in called “Content Extract: Taking control of excerpts in WordPress“. Now granted it didn’t do exactly what I wanted to be sure as it would actually use the excerpt if there was one, but I modified it to my liking by always forcing it to use the actual content, strip the paragraph tags if any were present and then use the content after wrapping it in a set of unordered list tags.

Excellent find.

As you know we are a big fan of shared work on the net. Someone today pointed out a PHP mail form handler script that appears to be drafted with some thought to avoiding spam, serves as a nice replacement for Matt’s Old Perl Formmail Script and even helps you to configure itself.

I have not examined the coding, but they certainly address many of the issues I would be concerned about in their text and claim they are on top of those issues.

I am looking forward to giving it a try and digging into the code a bit.

As a web designer, if you install formmail scripts, you should log those installations and check at least quarterly to see if they have been updated. While this script claims no known vulnerabilities that have been exploited, of course there is someone out there as we speak trying to find one. Eventually if you don’t keep upgrading, changing, etc. they catch up to you so regular updates (this script was updated yesterday) are good.

We regularly help people get OSCommerce installations set up. We sometimes write a custom piece, but more commonly adapt something someone else has started (no sense re-invention wheels right?). For a project I am working on today, I am looking for a modification for OSCommerce that will allow a customer to upload a logo or other image when they buy say, a can cozy. I found several things which look a little promising, but thus far not quite right.

I find a contribution that looks ideal:

File Upload .7 (for PA – Option Type Feature)

This is a file upload utility for use as an attribute on the product_info.php page. Using the standard HTML upload utility (FILE box with a browse button), one can upload a file and link it to a product as an attribute.

I tried it and didn’t get it functioning. It appears to be a little stale and OSCommerce has moved to osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 Release Candidate 1, so perhaps that is causing issues. I also see that there are several bug fixes and I’ll go through those again slowly, maybe I missed something.

I also found a T-Shirt Program that looked hopeful, but before shelling out $150 I wanted to know if it is adaptable (because I am not selling T-Shirts). Anyway, I wrote them and no reply. That program is Custom T-Shirts” module for Oscommerce by Zaur Nagiev. Perhaps another user can share with me if they were able to use it in another fashion such as I want to do. I don’t really need the image preview like this product has, and yet, it might work well with or without the preview.

So any help would be appreciated!