Web Development

I recently installed CentOS 5.3 version of Linux on a new testing server and started configuring all of the bells and whistles. I made some initial tweaks to Apache, MySQL, and PHP to set up my web server test environment. Everything seemed to be running smoothly until I happened to run an older PHP script I wrote to manipulate image files. The script resizes and renames image files in specified directories. Only one problem, the script was dying without a trace, no errors, nothing.

I have a Perl script that one of my clients uses to upload files. It is a script that I created and has been working flawlessly for a couple of years now. Today I received a call saying that this client is no longer able to upload files.

I use a great WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools to update my Twitter status with posts from my blog. It’s a great way to get the word out about new content on your site. The only thing that the Twitter Tools doesn’t do automatically is shorten your urls to make it easier to fit in the 140 character limit of Twitter. Fortunately, the author of Twitter Tools did think of this and built in a way for us to do it fairly easily.

If you are still using the Fedora Core 4 (FC4) version of Linux you may have a need to upgrade your version of PHP. Unfortunately the Fedora Project hasn’t put out an update to PHP past version 5.0.4. There have been some functionality updates to PHP since then. The project I was working on at the time needed the functionality of SimpleXML (for handling XML responses; built into PHP 5.1.4 or higher).

The easiest way to upgrade PHP on Fedora, in my opinion, is using YUM. YUM makes it easy to download and install rpm packages on Linux systems. So let’s take a look at what we need to do.

This is something that has plagued Wordpress for a long time in my opinion and is one of those left overs from when Wordpress was strictly ‘blog software’. When using functions like wp_list_categories or even the Categories widget, Wordpress inserts the word ‘category’ into the urls for no apparent reason. While I am sure there is a reason, I don’t know why the developers over in the Wordpress camp have not made some way to remove this behavior from the admin interface. You can change ‘category’ to another word of your choice but you cannot remove it without editing some of Wordpress’ code.