August 12th, 2009
Hate having to type your server FTP details when upgrading WordPress? Would you like WordPress to remember your FTP login details? then read on…
Anybody familiar with WordPress will know that when adding/removing or upgrading any of your plug-ins, even upgrading the WordPress itself, you are prompted for the FTP connection details for your server, while not a big or frustrating step, it can be a pain if you don’t have the details to hand or want others to be able to upgrade your blog to ensure its secure but not give them the login details for the server.
The answer is surprisingly a simple one, you don’t need to install one of the various FTP Saver plug-ins and spend hours trawling through the code, and any updates, to check your details will be secure, all you have to do is add a few extra lines to your wp-config.php file by defining the connection details, WordPress will do the rest.
The constants should be defines as follows,
/** Store Server FTP Details */
define("FTP_HOST", "domain.tld");
define("FTP_USER", "username");
define("FTP_PASS", "password");
Once you have saved the config file, all you need to do is test it…
Tags: wordpress
Posted in Tools of the Trade, WordPress | 3 Comments »
August 11th, 2009
Microsoft announced via its Internet Explorer blog yesterday that it will continue to support IE6 for those that don’t wish to upgrade it, until the end of the relevant windows product lifecycle. According to the Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search, extended support for Windows XP (the only officially supported home of IE6) is not due to end untill April 2014 meaning unless something drastic happens IE6 still has a good few years left to go and will reach its 13 birthday before it is officially retired.
The Microsoft blog post was made in responce to a Digg blog post made a few weeks ago asking visitors to the site using IE6 to comment and vote on why they still use the ageing browser. The results showed that while numbers are decreasing, there are still a lot of people using the browser, a statistic backed up by numerous other sources.
It did however once again highlight that the majority of these users were at work and unable to upgrade it due to internal IT policies and potential cost of upgrading, so the question of “should you support IE6 when building a website” comes down to one thing… Your target audiance.
If your site isn’t aimed at people in the workplace, a social networking site, an online shop or gaming website for example, then you can probably get away with your site not looking or working as flash and fancy as it does in a modern browser, although you should check users can navigate around or display a message advising they re-visit in an alternate browser. If your target audience is the home user… add as much javascript and inline-blocks as you can handle.
I think the news Microsoft will continue to support an out of date version instead of “persuading” office users to upgrade to their flagship browser isn’t in the best interests of itself or its customers, numerous security issues, non-standards compliant..need i go on.
I think the line they have taken that as it comes with a default installation of windows they must support it till the end of that products lifecycle is a blow to developers everywhere and will ensure the pothole on the internet roadmap will be with us for another few years yet.
Tags: IE6, Microsoft
Posted in Microsoft, Tools of the Trade | No Comments »
August 11th, 2009
Internet giant Google have announced a preview of their new upgraded search engine for developers and web masters to test. While the UI is pretty much the same , there have been quite a few ‘under the hood’ changes. Nicknamed Caffeine, the update is mainly to the algorithms and code base used by the indexing giant. It will allow more relevant results and real-time data to be returned by searches.
You can preview the new search engine by visiting the sandbox at – http://www2.sandbox.google.com
If you would like to test country/language specific results you will need to edit the query parameters
read more at…
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/caffeine-update/
Update – 13/08/09 @ 08:48
the sandbox is currently off-line due to server maintenance
Update – 15/08/09 @ 08:48
the sandbox is back up and running
Tags: caffeine, google, search engine
Posted in T'Internet News | No Comments »
August 11th, 2009
Unless you use Opera, Safari (windows version), Chrome and several others… not to mention IE6 used by more ‘Office’ workers than anyone.
The Microsoft Office team working on the new web version have announced in a very ironic blog post that the new service will only be supported via the following browsers
- Internet Explorer 7 and 8
- Firefox 3.5 on Windows, Mac and Linux
- Safari 4 on Mac
They haven’t ruled out support for other browsers in the future and just say to “Give it a try … and let us know if you see issues”.
They do make a good point tho andstatistics wise they have chosen the most popular browsers used (although I would swap Safari for Opera in my list) and focused on them for launch support and the fact they have left off IE6 could be a blessing for all of us.
Microsoft Office is used by almost all businesses around the world at some point or another, most of which are also still using IE6 as their main browser for one reason or another (that’s a different argument for another day). By not supporting IE6 and pushing businesses to use the web version of office instead, they are in a great position to quietly force businesses to upgrade and join the rest of us in standards compliant (almost in IE’s case) browser world. whether or not the big cheeses will go for rolling out a browser upgrade or just stick to using existing versions of office will be interesting to see but I for one hope they do…
You can read more on this story by reading the microsoft office blog post by clicking the link above.
Tags: chrome, firefox, internet explorer, linux, mac, office, opera, safari, windows
Posted in Microsoft | No Comments »
August 9th, 2009
Mozilla have announced the first developer milestone of Firefox 3.6 is now available to download for developer testing. Code named Namoroka, it is built on a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform and introduces several new features, most noticeably speed improvements to TraceMonkey and more support for CSS3.
You can download Namoroka using the following links
Mozilla have, as always, released a developer guide to the new features, for a full list of additions to Firefox 3.6 follow this link
Tags: alpha, firefox, fx3.6, gecko, mozilla, namoroka, Tracemonkey
Posted in Mozilla | No Comments »