William D Buchanan » Web Development

No GD Library For PHP By Default on CentOS 5

William Buchanan — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:24:22 +0000

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 [...]

Permission Denied When Uploading Files Through CGI

William Buchanan — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:48:11 +0000

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.

When they tried to upload files to their server they received an error saying something to the effect of:

The server encountered an error. The script either created no output or an error. [...]

Shortening URLs with Twitter Tools

William Buchanan — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:36:38 +0000

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 [...]

Need to Upgrade PHP on Fedora Core 4?

William Buchanan — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:27:43 +0000

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 [...]

Remove ‘category’ From URLs In Wordpress

William Buchanan — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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 [...]

Problem with sessions on iPower

William Buchanan — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:15:43 +0000

I work with several sites that are hosted by iPower and was having some real trouble with a couple scripts that required the use of sessions. Everything worked great on my test server which runs a similar version of Linux and Apache. For some reason the session information just would not carry over from page to page like it should. After a going over the code again and again, everything looked good, I couldn’t see any problem. So I turned [...]

Adding Tags to Your Pages in Wordpress

William Buchanan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:20:13 +0000

A site that I was working on was using mostly pages in Wordpress 2.51 but the owner was very interested in putting tags and a tag cloud on their home page. Wordpress doesn’t natively support tags on pages only on posts so I had some homework to do.

I was able to find a plugin called tags4page version 1.1 that I thought might just do the trick. So I downloaded the plugin, installed it and viola I was able [...]

Podpress – ‘Before More tag’ bug fix

William Buchanan — Sat, 17 May 2008 23:32:37 +0000

I was having an issue using Podpress 8.8 and Wordpress 2.5 on one of my projects. Even though I set the ‘Before <!- More -> tag’ option to ‘No’, the flash player was still showing up in the short version or excerpt of the posts. Setting the option to ‘no’ is supposed to keep the flash player from showing in the short version of your posts but there was some kind of bug in the coding.

After taking a look at [...]