Category Archives: Software

WordPress RSS Feed Not Including Images

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Ok so searched high and low for this and finally found out that it was my theme that I had added which was wrong.  Look for feed_rss2.php in wp-includes and look for some code in there, that uses use_excerpt_rss my theme used this whether the rss setting->full (rather than summary) was selected or not in the settings->reading.

If you change the else to be “the_content()” rather than “the_excerpt_rss()” it works.  Your images are sent in the description so then the rss readers can read the whole article.

Changed My Blogs Theme

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The standard themes that come with wordpress are OK !! but if you want something really good / different you have to go elsewhere.  I found quite a lot of themes on WordPress Themes and particularly liked the Modern Sofa 10 theme.

This is particularly relevant these days as I am always falling asleep on the sofa and wake up in the early hours of the morning.

It was a good starting point but something were lacking which I modified by hand ie. put the title on the search box, modified the footer to take out the advertising etc etc.  There are still somethings that arent quite right for instance the tag cloud isnt formated properly but that is not the themes problem that is a problem with the tag cloud that comes standard with wordpress as it really needs a tag cloud div html tag created around it.  When I have more time I will try to sort that out.

Any way think it looks quite alright for the mo….

WordPress Search & Permalinks

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Using the carrington theme and after switching to permalinks I noticed that the wordpress search doesnt seem to work.  Not sure if this is by design or what.  After a little bit of scrabbling around I decided to hack the scripts so I changed the search.php script which sits in themes/carrington-blog/forms.  I commented out the permalinks section of the if like so

/*
if (get_option('permalink_structure') != '') {
    $onsubmit = "location.href=this.action+
'search/'+encodeURIComponent(this.s.value).replace(/%20/g, '+'); return false;";
}
else {
    */
    $onsubmit = '';
//}

so that it always does the non permalink bit whether or not it is selected.  Seems to work still, all comments welcomed on this.

Adding Google Adsense To WordPress

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Well tried several and dont think any of them are that good.  For one thing that is a problem is that google only seems to work in internet explorer which I guess is by design.  I cant get any of the google adsense stuff to appear on my wordpress blog using firefox to surf the pages – unless my adblocker is stopping them but I dont think its configured for it.  Any ideas any one am I being a really silly person as normal ???

Moved from SubText to WordPress

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Well subtext has fallen out of favour and no one is really updating the software side of it any more.  WordPress seems to be the latest fashionable blog software out there at the moment.

So I exported my subtext blog to blogml then used this very nice blog article to import it into wordpress.  I did what the chap says but didnt really have any problems at all.  The only thing I had a problem with was that the categories didnt keep their names, so just had to rename the categories once it was in wordpress format.

Antec Fusion Remote HTPC Case – Audio Control Doesnt Work

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Just upgraded my media center case to an Antec Fusion Remote.  Now its a very well made case and has 120mm fans in them with variable speed control which is why it took my fancy.  It has full size slots as well as my older case could only take half height cards which is always a problem finding them.  I bought the silver one, disappointment here is that only the front is silver the rest of the case is black which is fine if you stack your machine with a silver av receiver that is silver as you wont see the rest of the case but if your like me that has them side by side its a little annoying that they didnt choose to do the whole case in silver but I guess its all because of cost and to be honest its way cheaper than say a zalman htpc case so I guess thats why.

I run an asus p5e-hdmi micro-atx board in it.  It isnt one of the latest micro atx media boards because i have had it hanging around at the house for nearly a year now.  I then push the audio out via coaxial to a sony av receiver running a 5.1 tanoy speakers.

The only problem I had with it was that the remote and variable control on the front of the case didnt adjust the sound / audio.  Having researched the Antec support area, they suggested upgrading the latest driver software for the vfd (lcd panel) and your motherboard.  Both of which still didnt make it work.

Then I saw that on the Asus support site that there was a realtek driver for the audio.  I then replaced the microsoft standard driver for the audio with the Realtek one and bazaaam it all works.

The only outstanding problem I have is that Microsoft Media Center doesnt control the audio when playing a dvd, but I have had this problem on my older media center so think Media Center cant control it as the ouput just seems to off load it out the coaxial audio cable to my av receiver.

The results are outstanding just need to upgrade my lcd tv to a full HD (1080p) one now rather than a HD-Ready (720p) but that will have to wait.

Front USB Ports not working on my Shuttle running Vista x64 Ultimate

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After taking the Cypress update my front usb ports stopped working.  How did I fix it well if you go to the device manager (right click the computer icon in file explorer, click properties then click device manager [left hand side]) under Universal Serial Bus Controllers (right at the bottom) there is a device shown now called HX2LP kit (3.03.0000.2) I believe this is what causes the problem so I just uninstalled mine and rebooted.

After the reboot I get a generic USB hub appear and the front ports on my shuttle SD37P2 are now working.

Also when I run windows update again I dont see that update any more.

Getting Rsyncd, Vista and Backuppc to work

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Recently upgraded to vista and for the life of me couldnt get the vista to work with rsyncd running from cygwin.  Would always stop with a code 12 error and not alot else.  I just run rsyncd or rsync with the daemon option as I dont belive the cwrsync works as a service yet on vista. 

Now in the backuppc config options for rsyncd and rsync there is a hard link option I just removed that and it seems to work not sure why vista cant deal with that option but if you remove it, everything works as it did before on windows 2000 / XP.

DBDesigner4, Windows and MYSQL 5

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Ok thought I would have a look at DBDesigner4 as MyWorkbench seems to be taking a long time to get into beta.  DBDesigner4 looks a great product but couldnt get it to connect to mysql 5 then realised that it the designer was designed for version 3 mysql and lots of the old mysql products need to read the myql.user table for id’s etc.

Tried the old trick of using the OLD_PASSWORD function and seems to work what you need to do is this….

1. Open the mysql command prompt.

2. SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = OLD_PASSWORD('rootpassword');

UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = OLD_PASSWORD('rootpassword') WHERE Host = 'localhost' AND User = 'root';

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

all in one line – hit return. 

3. Try dbdesigner4 again and you should now be able to connect.

Vista, Palm Treo 750v and Windows Mobile Center 6.1

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Since upgrading to Vista have had a few problems syncing my Palm Treo 750v with the mobile center.  Read lots of places that upgrading to Mobile Center 6.1 helped well I dont think thats really the problem, the problem seems to be that the (or at least mine) Treo seems to have a mind of its own and gets stuck doing things ie. the bluetooth sometimes doesnt connect as the mobile is busy this seems to be the same with the syncing one minute it syncs the other it doesnt.

I normally find that once I have soft rebooted (taken battery out) the mobile it works fine whether it be mobile sync center 6.1 or 6.0

I run Vista 64 bit here as well for the record, just waiting for Birdie Sync to be compatible with vista 64bit then all will be good as I tend to run a mixture of windows and linux, prefer not to use outlook and use thunderbird instead as it has better support for IMAP.