A Tasty Pixel » Geekspeak

Taking the 404 further

Update: I have now written a WordPress plugin that does all of this for you. Please use this plugin instead.

I’ve just changed my permalink structure for my blog to something a bit prettier. In the process, I realised that some previously-working permalinks weren’t operating any more, despite having a plugin set up to maintain old permalinks.

WordPress is fairly good at figuring out what viewers are requesting when a post can’t be found immediately – for example, if you’re using a permalink structure with an ID number in it, and the requested ID is incorrect, WordPress seems to be able to redirect to the correct address.

However, it’s not 100%, as I recently realised.

Consequently, a few pages were heading to the 404 page, which isn’t ideal. I changed my template’s 404 page to do a search for what the viewer was really after, and redirect them there. If it can’t find an exact match, it’ll perform a search with keywords extracted from the URL. If it finds a single result, it’ll redirect, otherwise it’ll put up a few results as suggestions on the 404 page.

It also works as a nice search shortcut. Try it: http://atastypixel.com/wordpress 404 redirect

Adding Twinkle to Twitter posting lists

Twinkle from Tapulous is an iPhone Twitter application with a twist – it uses location information, to introduce local social networking, and supports photos, a great extension to the standard Twitter recipe.

Twinkle handles photographs by uploading them to Tapulous’ server, then appending a ‘snipurl’ to the Twitter message which points to a page displaying the image. That works fairly well, but wouldn’t it be nice to actually see images inline, when viewing Twitter posts?

Well, now you can, if you have a self-hosted Twitter post list. See my Twitter feed on the right for a demo (although there may not be a post there with an image).

Smart redirects

After migrating my blog over to WordPress, files have moved around a bit. Sites that linked to files on my site (including Google Images, as a prominent example) now link into the void, which is a bit of a pain. As a partial solution, I’ve added some .htaccess rules to help route visitors to the right place:

Redirect 301 /feeds/index.rss2 http://atastypixel.com/feed Redirect 301 /feeds/atom.xml http://atastypixel.com/feed

However, that doesn’t solve all problems – after I reorganised my uploads, files are located at a very different path to their original home. So, I added a short script which does a search for requested files if they can’t be found, then redirects visitors to the right file.

Here is the script, and an accompanying .htaccess file needed to hook into it:

redirection.zip

To use it, put the script and the htaccess file into a folder on your site where you want it to take effect (for me, it went into ‘wp-content/uploads’). Then, modify the htaccess file – just set the RewriteBase field to the directory you’re in – and rename it to ‘.htaccess’.

Re-organising/assembling uploads for WordPress

Migrating from Serendipity, I’ve had a few hiccups in data migration. It doesn’t help that I’m extremely OCD when it comes to data, so everything’s gotta be perfect.

I had a problem with the way my uploads (the resources linked into the blog) were organised from the old Serendipity days – all in one big ol’ folder – and wanted to re-arrange them the way WordPress does it, which is to arrange them into folders by year and month.

This is also useful if you’re changing your domain, or splitting up one blog into two. The entries link to the old domain/blog, and thus the alternative is to do keep the old site around or muck around with clever redirects.

My way’s neater.

So, I put together a script which goes through all posts, pulls out links to uploaded files, and moves/copies them into a better arrangement, fixing the link in the process. If it can’t find the files, it’ll use a ‘find’ command to attempt to locate them.

In case it’s useful to others, the script is here: reorganise-wp-media.php.zip

It goes in the WordPress webroot; put it there, then edit it to apply your settings. Give it a ‘dry run’ test, make sure all is well, then go for it. Beware, although I used it and it worked okay, I offer no guarantee that it won’t mangle your data, delete random files or eat your dog.

Serendipity (S9Y) importer for WordPress

Update 2: Jon reports that he’s improved on Carsten’s 1.3 version, and has released Version 1.4!

Update: Carsten Dobschat has continued the fine tradition and improved the importer further, adding support for extended posts, and tags. Grab S9Y importer version 1.3 over at his site.

In the process of merging this site from Serendipity over to WordPress, I came across an importer which lets me migrate the data across. Unfortunately it was a bit buggy, not properly assigning categories and timing out when processing the post data.

I made some improvements, and here’s the new version, if anyone else finds it useful:

Version 1.2 of Serendity importer for WordPress (patch)

Replacing the existing Leopard PHP installation with a more complete version

The good folks at entropy.ch have packaged up a pre-compiled version of PHP to replace OS X 10.5 Leopard’s barebones installation. The entropy.ch build contains most of the good stuff that the Apple folks in their infinite wisdom didn’t see fit to include – entropy-phpinfo.pdf

See the instructions at Entropy’s forum, or read below.

sudo mv /usr/local/php5 ~/Desktop/php5.old
curl -O http://www2.entropy.ch/download/php5-5.2.5-6-beta.tar.gz
tar -xzf php5-*-beta.tar.gz
sudo mv php5 /usr/local/
sudo ln -sf /usr/local/php5/entropy-php.conf /etc/apache2/other/+entropy-php.conf
sudo apachectl restart

Convert text to iTunes audio book

After reading a hint on macosxhints on how to create an audio file from text, because I wanted to keep reading my book while I was driving, and figured that holding the book in front of me probably wasn’t the best option, I figured the process could probably be streamlined a bit.

So, I’ve made a service which appears in the Services menu and operates on selected text. So, select it in Safari, or from an eBook in Preview (or Textedit if it’s just plain text), and click ‘Speak to iTunes Audio Book‘ to speak the text into a track in iTunes that will appear in ‘Audiobooks’.

Nasty long sleep times with SleepWatcher

If you followed my prior hint on automatically ejecting volumes on sleep (@ macosxhints), I’ve just discovered that SleepWatcher adds about 30 seconds to the time taken to sleep. This has been a big frustration to me over the last month or so, and now I know why.

I’m removing the utility – I’d rather shorter sleep times than automatic volume ejection. What a shame, though.

Incidentally, while we’re talking sleep, recent Macs also save the contents of RAM onto disk when they sleep. For the purposes of comparison, my 2 Ghz Macbook Pro with 2 Gb of RAM takes about 18 seconds to sleep. There are a variety of ways to alter sleep behaviour, but the easiest is the SmartSleep utility, a preference pane that handles it for you.

My favourite feature is its namesake, smart sleep, which will only do a hibernate if the battery is below a pre-set level (default 20%) – that means fast sleep until it’s a good idea to actually backup the session to more long term storage, when the battery is about to fail. Voila, simultaneous cake have-age and eat-age.