The feeds were served by the standard [...]]]> Apart from its own Ice Tea tech blog, Dipot.com also displays two external feeds relating to Optimization and Standards. I needed to optimize the post titles of these two feeds by getting rid of their long suffixes, both for better looks and for more content within the same space.

The feeds were served by the standard RSS WordPress 2.7.1 widget, which is fine, except it does not support much customization. After some search, I found Advanced RSS 1.0.1 WordPress plugin and KB Advanced RSS 2.1.3 WordPress plugin. Smart RSS only works until WP 2.7.0 and I didn’t want to tweak with that. Advanced RSS only works until WP 2.6.2 and requires PHP5, DOM and XSL extensions loaded on the server and I don’t want to depend on those if I don’t need to, so the choice was easy.

Installation of KB Advanced RSS worked flawlessly right from within wp-admin. Then, on my first attempt to configure it, I came across a problem which could very well had been a show stopper: for some reason, except for the feed’s URL and Title, the widget would not commit any of the other parameters to the “Options” table of the database. Troubleshooting this issue, I ended up reading all the users’ comments on the plugin’s site. As usual, I was not alone; this is a common issue. Thankfully, Wesley of  http://www.improvingtheweb.com had already posted the solution to PHP4 not committing widget field changes in WordPress. The solution worked like a charm. And, as expected, when I later upgraded to PHP5 the problem wasn’t even there to begin with.

KB Advanced RSS is well thought-out, very straight forward with good documentation and examples. It supports all the features of the standard widget (including multiple instances) plus formatting and full support of all the feed’s fields to display or not (including the debugging tool to show which these fields are)! It further supports two modifiers to optionally manipulate the string before display, by taking out a number of characters from the start (ltrim) and/or trimming it to a specific length (trim).

Alas, what I actually needed was to take out a number of characters from the end of the string. Fortunately, as it turned out, KB Advanced RSS’s code is pretty straight-forward and extending it with my own modifier (rtrim) to do just that was only a matter of 3 lines of PHP code added to the version of the plugin that runs by my version of Wordpress; there’s one for versions up to 2.7 (pre-wp-2-7.php) and one for versions after that (post-wp-2-7.php). Here is the PHP code from the modified post-wp-2-7.php (my rtrim extension is in blue):

///////////////////////////////// CUSTOMIZATIONS /////////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// If you want to write customizations, put them here. The variable to modify is $text. See the FAQ.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// right trimming
// cuts $rtrim characters from the right
// by ageor, April 9, 2009
$rtrim = (is_numeric($rtrim) && 0<$rtrim) ? (int) $rtrim : null;
if (is_int($rtrim))
$text = substr( $text, 0, strlen($string)-$rtrim );

// left trimming:
$ltrim = (is_numeric($ltrim) && 0<$ltrim) ? (int) $ltrim : null;
if (is_int($ltrim))
$text = substr( $text, $ltrim );

// length trimming (do after left trimming)
$trim = (is_numeric($trim) && 0<$trim) ? (int) $trim : null;
if (is_int($trim))
$text = substr( $text, 0, $trim );

return $text;

The way this is written, the string in question can undergo any mix of all three trimming types necessary.

All setting up and troubleshooting took place by adding one instance of the widget and configuring it, then a second instance. When all was done and I had what I wanted, I removed the original two instances of the original RSS widget, positioned the new ones on top and saved, certain I was done. However, as the resulting “Widgets” Wordpress admin page suggested after saving, something was very wrorg. It displayed the message ‘You are using 3 widgets in the “Left Sidebar” sidebar’ but not the widgets themselves, nor the “Save Changes” button. Sure enough, I ended up with an unworkable site, as these where the first 2 widgets on the left column of Ice Tea tech and the page that appeared ended with the title banner. Disaster!

To cut a long story short, plenty of “trial and error”s later and with the help of Vicki of neTWire, here is my conclusion: For KB Advanced RSS widget to work with WP 2.7.1 and the Atahualpa WordPress theme, the WordPress RSS widget needs to be activated and positioned above it. That’s how I temporarily solved my problem, until (if ever) I have the time to look deeper into the code involved or newer versions of  the theme and/or the plugin solve it for good.

Just to be clear, none of the problems and troubleshooting it took to solve them can be traced back ato KB Advanced RSS alone. Atahualpa is a great but complex theme and it is their combination that turned out to be problematic. It’s not the first example of a bad mix and it won’t be the last. On the flip side, with each such incident we get to learn something new that will potentially save others and ourselves some frusrtation and time in the future.

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---

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I apologize for the flood of links of the past few days.

I have been trying to implement Yet Another Autoblogger to bring my Delicious and StumbleUpon bookmarks in WordPress-based Ice Tea tech. It seems that, while everything finally worked fine with Delicious, StumbleUpon kept returning the same posts over and over to Autoblogger causing a [...]]]>

I apologize for the flood of links of the past few days.

I have been trying to implement Yet Another Autoblogger to bring my Delicious and StumbleUpon bookmarks in WordPress-based Ice Tea tech. It seems that, while everything finally worked fine with Delicious, StumbleUpon kept returning the same posts over and over to Autoblogger causing a flood in the blog itself and to its RSS feed, FriendFeed & Twitter by extension.

I stopped using StumbleUpon a while ago, because it didn’t support greek-encoded titles. It seems there is also an issue between its feed and Autoblogger. So, at least for the time being, I removed it, which is not that much of a problem, as I don’t post there any more.

Sorry about that, I’ll try to contain such incidents in the future. Thank you all for your patience and especially @Sotomi, @Cybereddie, @Chriiiiis, @Botchagalupe, @Alexnewbee, @Skoroneos, @Jimeh, @Vtripolitakis, @Spdd and those I may have missed for taking the time to notify me about it.

In an attempt to minimize the impact, I erased all the Ice Tea tech feed (with posts) from FriendFeed (I don’t know how to bulk-erase the relevant twits, any ideas?). The sideffect is that, as I am about to recreate the feed in FriendFeed, multiple blog and bookmark posts will appear at once, possibly in Twitter as well. Please forgive me, hopefully it will be the end of this annoyance.

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I have been trying to organize/visualize the way I post, be it blogging, a comment on FriendFeed, an interesting link a came across etc. During the time it took me to complete the flowchart, more services were added as sources or carriers of my posts. As a result, the chart got more complex than originally [...]]]>

I have been trying to organize/visualize the way I post, be it blogging, a comment on FriendFeed, an interesting link a came across etc. During the time it took me to complete the flowchart, more services were added as sources or carriers of my posts. As a result, the chart got more complex than originally anticipated. Interestingly enough, there is a pattern and the flowchart works for me most of the time.

Also get the Posting Flowchart as built in Dia (hence the crudeness), for your own use. So, there it is:

Posting Flowchart

Please do comment. Is posting a one-way street for you? Are there any general rules or do you post on a case by case basis?

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Provided there is an ADSL in the premises, the task is trivial, tech-wise. In this case, the heart of the system is an AVM Fritz ADSL modem, 4 port switch, wireless Access Point [...]]]> Two weeks ago I was asked again to install a couple of cameras to watch a newborn baby at home (with the sitter…).

Provided there is an ADSL in the premises, the task is trivial, tech-wise. In this case, the heart of the system is an AVM Fritz ADSL modem, 4 port switch, wireless Access Point with SIP, complemented by 2 VIVOTEK PT7137 wifi IP pan-tilt (but not zoom) VGA cameras.

The first problem in serving content from a non-static (dynamic) IP address is how to hit the correct IP, which is a moving target (I recently came across the fact that, in Greece, ISP OTEnet actually disconnects dynamic ADSL connections every 54 hours, just to change IP address!). The solution to this is dynamic DNS, in this case in the form of the free service DynDNS (other such services also exist). What dynamic DNS does is have a client program automatically update the current IP address of an ADSL connection to a host of the form <myhost>.dyndns.org. In this case (lucky me), both the router and the cameras have dyndns.org support built-in. If this wasn’t the case, I could set up a dyndns.org client in a windows or linux pc to do the job. I could, alternatively, buy a static IP address, which I do not prefer for security and cost reasons. More than one dynamic DNS client can be set up for redundancy, if needed.

The other problem in serving content this way is that the Internet IP one’s router uses is different from the local IP address of this same router and each of his local network devices (yes, it’s too technical). The router takes care of back-and-forth IP translation for the outgoing connections (browsing, email reception & transmission, Instant Messaging etc.) automatically (using NAPT, Network Address Port Translation). However, when a local server needs to listen to Internet incoming traffic, this must be routed to it in a way that cannot be automated (not until UPnP, anyway, which is another story), so port translation must be manually programmed to the router and the method is called “port forwarding”. What this does is tell the router what to do with any incoming traffic, depending on the Port it uses: drop it or forward it to a different internal IP and Port, where a server is standing by.

When similar content is served by more than one servers (in this case all the IP cameras transmit audio & video using the http protocol which by default “listens” and “transmits” on port 80), we have the third problem: We need to reference two (or more) different servers serving the same service (http) using the same single external IP address.

The solution here is in the way protocol calls are made: when our browser shows it connects to http://blog.dipot.com, it is actually connecting to http://blog.dipot.com:80, where 80 represents the connection’s port number (which has possible values from 1 to 65535). The port value of 80 is implied, because it is the standard port number for the http protocol (other protocols by default, but not necessarily, connect to other ports). This essentially means that we can reference ~65000 different services (protocols) on the same IP address. So, what we do is agree between ourselves and the router to use these two (or more) addresses to call our two (or more) IP cameras (the “http://” prefix is important, because the specified ports are not usually intended for this protocol):
Camera 1: http://<myhost>.dyndns.org:12001
Camera 2: http://<myhost>.dyndns.org:12002
Camera n: http://<myhost>.dyndns.org:1200n

So, assuming the cameras addresses are 192.168.1.21, 192.168.1.22 (& 192.168.1.2n) and all transmit to port 80 (the default) we program the router to forward calls to ports 12001, 12002 (& 1200n) to 192.168.1.21:80, 192.168.1.22:80 (& 192.168.1.2n:80). It is important for the cameras IP addresses to be static, so we don’t have another moving target to cope with.

In case the router didn’t support forwarding to a different port than the incoming, we should then program the cameras to listen and transmit to ports 12001, 12002, … 1200n, which is perfectly possible, if not simpler.

This came out larger and more technical than intended. All these, however, can be implemented in about 30′ and are applicable to other services as well.

For router-specific instructions to program port forwarding, refer to the excellent guide “Free Help Setting up Your Router or Firewall“.

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