Blog Random

I spent two hours today trying to figure out why paypal wasn’t sending any instant payment notifications (IPN) to one of our new projects. Everything seemed right, I had notify_url in the form, the script could be accessed remotely, I had logging on for http and the script itself. After processing a payment I had 0 requests from the paypal servers hit our development server.

I read around various blogs and discussion forums for obvious problems, of which there are many (see below), but I was sure I had done everything right!

Eventually I stumbled across some posts on the paypal developers forum where a few posters were complaining that the sandbox IPN posts were either really slow (hours) or just never got sent. Worse still, there was one post where paypal acknowledged that payment notifications just did not work on the sandbox for two months!! Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been trying to find the start dates for a few of my favourite TV series over the last week as I think this is the start of the winter season. I don’t watch that much TV, but I like to get hold of a few series and watch them when I get some free time.

I soon found that there isn’t a difinitive place (website) I can go to that clearly lists the next new episode of whatever series I’m interested in. I’m planning to rectify this in the near future with a simple (but hopefully useful) site thats sole purpose is to display this information. I know there are larger sites that have the information hidden among various other facts about the show but you have to search around.

Chances are I’ll never get the site listed very highly in search engines but its worth a shot. For now, these are the series I’m interested in and their air dates:

• Heroes (season 3): 22nd September
• NCIS (season 6): 23rd September
• Scrubs (season 8): Unknown, apparently some controversy
• Dexter (season 3): 28th September
• Dirty sexy money (season 2): 1st October

Please don’t judge me. If in the mean time anyone finds a decent site that already does this, let me know!

It has been a while since a post, I was hoping I wouldn’t slip in to a bad routine. Thanks for the comments so far, especially for the rb-internal-links plugin, can’t believe so many people are using it! Need to find a way to push it out there to more people if I can.

Back on topic, I’ve just installed release candidate 1 of the new version of wordpress. Matt mentioned on his blog that it would be a big one and it certainly is! From what I can tell the admin panel has been majorly revamped, both design wise and code wise. Logging in after the upgrade I had a few doubts but the new administration panel is impressively better (I liked the old one anyway). So far no major issues in upgrading from 2.4.x but I can see that I need to fix up the internal links plugin as the button has disappeared from the wysiwyg editor.

I was having some trouble getting sounds to play dynamically using javascript today. I’m not sure dynamically is the right word but basically I wanted different sounds to load and play on the click of a button using javascript without having to preload the sounds.

At first I tried using a single embed object, then changing the src of the embed on a button click and using embedObj.Play(); but for some reason changing the source of the file stopped that happening.

My second idea was to replace the entire embed code each time, and then call Play on the embed to get it to play. Still no luck!

Finally after a bit of searching I found somebody that had managed to do it. Its similar to my second idea only instead of calling .Play() on the embed object you just use autostart=true in the embed code, simple!

Read the rest of this entry »

When designing and coding the template for this blog I didn’t have access to IE6 (thanks MS), but I finally got hold of Virtual PC and managed to sort out a number of issues that made it look worse than it is supposed to be!

Unfortunately there are still many people using IE6, at least 15% of visitors to this site and a lot more to other sites that have a less technical audience. Luckily that number is falling day-by-day and hopefully soon we can all stop wasting time making exceptions for IE6. I’ve found there are far fewer issues with IE7, hopefully it will stay that way in future versions.

I’d apologise to IE6 users but I think its about time they upgraded! :p

I’ve neglected both the plugin and the blog a little lately due to the run up to Christmas but have made some time to release a major upgrade to rb internal links.

Some of the new features include:

• Changing the charset to utf-8 for tinymce plugin (thanks to vanco)
• A switch from the {{ … }} method to <!– … –> for entering a link
• Putting in the option for ID or slug returned to editor, default to be ID (good idea, thanks again vanco)
• Support for creating an internal link with an image
• The intlink code is now hidden in visual mode, replaced with the highlighted text
• The parsing engine has been completely rewritten for speed and scalability
• Some code changes that should help people with problems related to the wysiwyg icon not turning up
• Added filter for ‘the_content_rss’

I’d like to thank everybody that has commented on the blog so far regarding the plugin, it has been more popular than I had hoped for and I really appreciate it. More feedback, ideas and code very welcome!

I was reading through the Web Design survey by AListApart and found some of the results quite interesting. As a director of a web design company it was good to see how we compare to other companies. One statistic I’ve always wanted to know is the average price a website design/development project.

Broad I know but the price of website design and development fluctuates greatly and its something that has always bothered me. I tried looking for a decent guide or survey on the matter but couldn’t find anything. If anybody knows of one please let me know!

On some quick research of this topic I put “website design prices” in to some search engines hoping to find some sites or blogs that gave an overview of prices across the industry but to my surprise all I got were company guides for individual companies. From these results and a little experience, I grouped prices in to the type of company. I got it down to:

Read the rest of this entry »

As promised I’ve written another wordpress plug-in. I am hoping this plug-in will become a useful tool for bloggers when linking to posts and pages within their sites.

When I came to link to a couple of pages from my Extras page I presumed there would be an easy way to do this. I couldn’t find one anywhere and there didn’t seem to be any plugins either. I took a look at the plugin ideas forum over at wordpress and it seems I wasn’t the only one wanting a simple and flexible way to add internal links to my posts.

For more information and to download the beta version of this plugin visit the plugin page.

Introducing my first ever word press plug-in: Random Blog Article v1.0 (yay!).

Having set-up wordpress and had a play around I was very impressed by

1. the usability of the administration panel
2. how powerful and yet easy to install the plugins were

I did some research in to how wordpress had done this and discovered that making a plug-in myself wouldn’t be too difficult. On a side note, if you are interested in developing a plug-in, definitely start here: Writing a Plugin

On to the plug-in (at last). For more information on what it does, how to download it and how to install it, click here.

Put simply it is a replacement for the blogroll only it displays just one random article from each of your favourite blogs and, by default, only one at a time. More than one at a time will have to wait for v1.1 if people take up any interest. At a set interval the current blog and article is replaced with a random new one via AJAX.

Using the admin panel page you can add as many of your favourite blogs to the plug-in as you wish, all cached to keep things speedy.

Take a look at the screenshots or just scroll to the top of the page for a preview.

It is in-fact a lot like the “Hot Blog” plug-in I’ve seen on the Wordpress Stats dashboard page. I couldn’t find any plug-ins like it, hence writing my own. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were in fact hundreds and I was just looking in the wrong place but at least I can say I tried!

I’m thinking for my next plug-in, something that will allow me to easily link to other posts and pages within a blog without having to put in the full URL. That way if I ever change my permalink structure (for some strange reason) I don’t have to go back and change all my links. After some research I could only find one other plug-in like it which was Easy Post-To-Post. Please let me know if there is already a better way of doing this and I’ll stop reinventing the wheel.

Testing cat link

Having just launched the blog I’m setting up as many SEO tools as I can, ensuring that the blog has a reasonable chance of getting any audience at all. I just set up the site in Google Webmaster Tools and noticed that google already had data for the site.

My first reaction was “blimey, that was fast!” thinking that Google had started to index my site in under 12 hours. After a little research I realised that Google had kept data from the last owners website in its records. To no surprise it seems my blog name is a little unoriginal.

Thanks to the way back machine I managed to find out a little about the previous site. I’m not sure how it was styled but at least you get to see the content. I wonder whether the data Google has from the previous site will have any advantages or disadvantages to my future rankings.

I’ve never really thought about the history of a domain name before but in tribute to the previous random blog: http://web.archive.org/web/20070504032044/http://www.blograndom.com/