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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I can’t understand why Android-based HTC G1 and other [...]]]> I read about Open Handset Alliance’s Android platform and cellular phones with great interest. The web is full of specs, reviews, comparisons and the like. I just can’t help but share the following thoughts:

• Sometimes it seems Google’s Android is the second touch screen platform after Apple’s iPhone

I can’t understand why Android-based HTC G1 and other touch devices are automatically compared to the iPhone. Yes, it is a great looking device. It has a great touch screen. And that’s where innovation ends and limitations begin.

Great as the iPhone may (or not) be, it’s not clearly and objectively superior to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile devices hardware-, software- nor appearance-wise. Plus, Windows (Mobile and its previous incarnations) has been, so far, dominant in the touch arena. So, how come the iPhone (a new comer with plenty of flaws of its own) is the ad hoc point of reference? And how come all Windows Mobile’s long-standing features (touch screen, great sofware library, multitasking) are rarely mentioned?

• Android, anyone? Sure, on what hardware?

Maybe I understand a new platform like Android needs to come with new hardware for psychological (marketing) reasons. Now that’s over and done with, why not introduce Android for old and new hardware? Wasn’t one of Linux’s advantages better performance on old PCs? I’m sure I would love to run Android on my current Windows Mobile Phone but I fear this won’t happen any day soon, if at all. How about selling the HTC Touch HD (my favorite, in the absence of an Android phone with no hardware keyboard. With a camera flash, please) with a choice between Android and Windows Mobile? Better yet, sell it able to dual-boot both platforms? I would buy it right now. Now this is not so, I just have to wait and I am not happy about it at all.

Consider how nice it would be to compare different platforms’ sales and performance on the same hardware (isn’t that what Apple avoids at all cost on the PC market?)! How different the HTC G1 is from the Touch HD or any other current model?

It is my prediction that we will see Android and Windows Mobile running on the same hardware not later than 2009. And this will be the start of a new era on the “choice” and “objective comparison” fronts.

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Today I installed an Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS NV+ with 4 Seagate ST3500630AS Barracuda 500GB SATA2 hot-swappable hard disks and 1 gigabit ethernet port. [...]]]> I have been hooked on the idea of NAS (Network Attached Storage) since around 2000, when I first read about it. Of course, capacities and costs back then were out of this world.

Today I installed an Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS NV+ with 4 Seagate ST3500630AS Barracuda 500GB SATA2 hot-swappable hard disks and 1 gigabit ethernet port. For a total cost around 1.400€, I got a 3-disk RAID5 configuration with 875 usable GB and a hot-spare disk. In plain english, 2 disks have to fail before any data is lost.

I preferred the Infrant (now owned by Netgear) solution to the much cheaper (~900€) 2 gigabit Ethernet Intel Entry Storage System SS4000-E, (also with 4 500GB SATA2 disks) for its Active Directory support. However, apart from increased peace of mind (thanks to the hot-spare) the NV+ offers some nice built-in backup and media streaming features, in addition to the 3 USB ports with support for a UPS, printers, flash and USB disks.

I am fairly sure that NAS is the way to go for shared storage. With LAN speeds, disk capacities, users and uses increasing at a hectic pace NAS is cheap (starting at <200€), scalable and very easy to setup. Please note I am not referring to server applications storage; that’s a different, much more expensive, story.

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