Author Archives: Ammon

We’re getting the band back together!

By Ammon | May 13 2011

I met my wife 5 years ago at the beginning of a run of the Sondheim musical Assassins at ART here in Portland. I played John Hinckley, Jr., the guy who shot Reagan in ’81. It was an amazing show, and not just because I met the love of my life. The show itself is [...]

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Clever checkbox handling with PHP

By Ammon | May 6 2011

An unchecked checkbox returns nothing when a form is submitted, but most of the time you want it to return something, so you can work with that $_POST variable. This is easy with the addition of a hidden input with the same name as your checkbox: <?php     // If the box was checked, keep it [...]

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Lightbox + jQuery UI Dialog + IE8 = conflict city

By Ammon | March 30 2011

It worked fine in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and even IE7, but for some reason if you have the Lightbox 2 plugin installed and you enqueue jQuery UI Dialog you will get a whole mess of errors in Internet Explorer 8 when you create a dialog. The solution is simple: disable Lightbox 2 and install the [...]

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The cobbler has shoes! Finally!

By Ammon | March 30 2011

After years of using the plain-jane but wonderful Thematic default theme for my personal site, I’ve finally gotten around to designing a theme of my very own. Its a child theme of Thematic like all my sites these days. The colors are from the Tango icons color palette. It was drawn in Inkscape and Gimp. [...]

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Show the jQuery version number

By Ammon | February 22 2011

This prints the version of jQuery you’re using: $.jquery(); Which is handy in situations where you don’t have direct access to the script itself. In Firebug you might do something like this: console.log(‘jQuery version: ‘, $.jquery());

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Control error reporting level in WordPress

By Ammon | February 15 2011

When you enable error reporting in WordPress you automatically get all errors, notices, warnings and what have you written to your wp-content/debug.log. One of my plugins was creating so many undefined index errors it made the log impossible to read. I needed to fine tune my error reporting. WordPress error reporting bypasses your php.ini settings [...]

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Serve web pages from your home directory in Ubuntu 10.04

By Ammon | December 13 2010

This guide assumes that you have lamp installed already (which is super easy in Ubuntu). Enable the userdir mod $ cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled $ sudo ln -s ../mods-available/userdir.conf $ sudo ln -s ../mods-available/userdir.load Enable php parsing from a user directory $ sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5.conf Comment out this code: <IfModule mod_userdir.c> <Directory /home/*/public_html> php_admin_value engine Off </Directory> [...]

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A fix for WP e-Commerce error: “The following directories are not writable”

By Ammon | December 6 2010

If you get this error: The following directories are not writable: * /var/www/mysite/wp-content/uploads/wpsc/downloadables/ * /var/www/mysite/wp-content/uploads/wpsc/previews/ * /var/www/mysite/wp-content/uploads/wpsc/product_images/ * /var/www/mysite/wp-content/uploads/wpsc/product_images/thumbnails/ * /var/www/mysite/wp-content/uploads/wpsc/category_images/ * /var/www/mysite/wp-content/uploads/wpsc/upgrades/ You won’t be able to upload any images or files here. You will need to change the permissions on these directories to make them writable. When you click on “Products” in WP [...]

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Your WordPress blog already has custom feeds

By Ammon | November 17 2010

I was this close to wasting a ton of time coding a plugin to produce a feed for a single category when I came across this: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds Which let me know that WordPress already does what I need. Say you have a category, ‘events’, that you want to make into a feed. Here’s the URL: [...]

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Make your phpMyAdmin session persist… forever!

By Ammon | November 11 2010

Or for a year, which is a pretty long time. NOTE: This is for local development purposes only, cause it’s not safe enough for production servers. Open up /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php in your favorite text editor (you must have root priviliges) Add the following lines to this file just inside the first if clause: /* * Prevent [...]

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