Hacks - Alex Mansfield

Delicious Bookmarks and Firefox 4

For those of you who are really missing your Delicious bookmarks after upgrading to Firefox 4 (or who haven’t upgraded because there is no Delicious add-on yet), there is a solution! First, go to the Delicious add-on page, click the “Continue to Download” button. Then, instead of simply clicking the “Accept and Install” button, right click it and save the resulting XPI file. For all practical purposes, an XPI file is simple a ZIP folder for Firefox add-ons. You’ll need to open that folder and make a few changes. First, open the install.rdf file with a text editor and find this line:

em:maxVersion="4.0b3pre" />

This is what is keeping the add-on from installing properly. To allow the add-on to be installed on any version of Firefox 4.0, you’ll need to use this line instead:

em:maxVersion="4.0.*" />

Make sure you save the the changes you’ve made. Next, delete the entire “META-INF” folder from within the XPI folder. It holds the checksums of the original add-on. Now that we’ve modified the install.rdf file, the checksums are wrong. Removing the “META-INF” folder will take care of that. Now open Firefox and go to “File > Open File… ” Then find your newly modified Delicious XPI file and open it. This should bring up the dialog box for installing Firefox add-ons. After restarting your browser, you should be greeted by a fully functioning Delicious add-on running on Firefox 4!

Update: It has come to my attention that there is also a beta version of the plugin with Firefox 4 support: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/delicious-extension/

PublishedMay 25, 2011
Posted InHacks
DifficultyBegginer

Simple PHP Redirect in WordPress

Note: This post was originally written for my blog over at sackclothstudios.com. However, with the changes I’m making to that site, I figured the post would be of more use here on this site.

Sometimes when using WordPress you want to include a non-Wordpress page in your main navigation while still maintaining the simplicity of the wp_list_pages() function. I know there are plugins that do this type of thing, but many of them are just overkill. I just needed one non-Wordpress page on my menu, so here’s what I did. First, I created a page from within WordPress and gave it a heading but left the body blank. My page was called “Purchase” but you can name it whatever you’d like. This is the name that will show up in your navigation menu. Then I went to the header.php file of my theme and added this at the top:

<?php
if(is_page('purchase')){
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Status: 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.example.com/");
header("Connection: close");
exit(0); // Optional, prevents any accidental output
}
?>

Obiously, you’ll want to change the if statement to check for the blank page that you set up. Then change “http://www.example.com/” to whatever page you want the redirect to point to. Make sure that you put the code at the very top of the header.php file. If something else comes before it, it won’t work.

I first found this PHP redirect on Steven Hargrove’s blog. He gives examples of this in a number of different languages. However, I adapted it to WordPress and added the ” header( “Connection: close”);” line to get it working properly. I’d love to hear how you solve this little WordPress problem. If you have a different solution, please leave a comment below with a brief explaination. Thanks.

Update: If you want to make a temporary redirect (302), rather than a permanent one (301) use the code below:

<?php
if(is_page('purchase')){
header("Location: http://www.example.com/");
header("Connection: close");
exit(0); // Optional, prevents any accidental output
}
?>

Algen asked if it was possible to do a delayed redirect. It is possible, but not with PHP. Here is the HTML necessary to redirect a page after 30 seconds:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;url=http://www.example.php">

PublishedJune 17, 2010
Posted InHacks, Wordpress

Menus Hiding Behind Flash

hiding-menus

I ran across an issue today where a drop down menu was dropping behind a flash object rather than in front. It seems to be a pretty common problem, so I thought I’d share the solution.

1. Start with the embed code

To make sure that the drop-down menu appears above the flash object, there’s a single parameter we need to add to the embed code. First of all, here’s what a normal YouTube embed code looks like:

<object width="425" height="344">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Z19zFlPah-o&amp;amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;amp;fs=1&amp;amp;amp;rel=0"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
<embed
src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Z19zFlPah-o&amp;amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;amp;fs=1&amp;amp;amp;rel=0"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
allowscriptaccess="always"
allowfullscreen="true"
width="425" height="344">
</embed>
</object>

2. Add a parameter

We’ll need to add the parameter in two places. First we’ll need to add the following code after the other param fields (or before, it doesn’t really matter).

<param name="wmode" value="transparent">

Next, wmode=”transparent” needs to be added to the actual embed tag like this:

<embed
wmode="transparent"
src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Z19zFlPah-o&amp;amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;amp;fs=1&amp;amp;amp;rel=0"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
allowscriptaccess="always"
allowfullscreen="true"
width="425" height="344">
</embed>

That’s it!

So all together, this is how it should look when we’re done:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="425" height="344" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0">
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
<param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Z19zFlPah-o&amp;amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;amp;fs=1&amp;amp;amp;rel=0" />
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<embed
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
width="425"
height="344"
src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Z19zFlPah-o&amp;amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;amp;fs=1&amp;amp;amp;rel=0"
allowscriptaccess="always"
allowfullscreen="true"
wmode="transparent">
</embed>
</object>

Hope that helps!

Image by Lili Vieira de Carvalho

PublishedAugust 6, 2009
Posted InHacks