AZIndex is just great, but the following mini-hack will make it simply perfect. By adding a simple yet necessary feature: generating an URL for the groupheaders: see http://fan-tas-tic.com/artists/ for a live demo and imagine you can’t click the author names for an example of the original plugin without this lill’ hack.

The general assumption is that the plugin is abandoned by its original author, since there hasn’t been any reaction on the official AZIndex plugin feedback page by the author. So I had to it myself. Again.

The following instructions makes sure a groupheader (tags, author or categy) has an accompanying link (when a subheader is selected).
The most recent version (0.8.1) has been used for this hack, but you should be able to implement it also in older or newer versions following the next steps:
0. Make your backups or try this on a local installation as always with hacks (although I’ve got a nasty habit myself of hacking directly on my live sites but do as I say, not as I do)
1. Get the original plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.
2a. Either unzip the plugin and edit az-index-content.php
2b. Or upload the unzipped plugin directly and open az-index-content.php via the plugin-editor
3. Apply the following changes:
a. Find around rownumber 172 the following statement:

$link = get_permalink($item['id']);

b. Add the next statements beneath this line:

//aytemir.com: start mini-hack
$groupheader='';
$groupheader=$index->head;
if ($groupheader=='author') {
  $groupheader_id=get_userdatabylogin($item['head']);
  $groupheader_url=get_bloginfo('url').'/?author='.$groupheader_id->ID;
} elseif ($groupheader=='cats') {
  $groupheader_id=get_cat_id($item['head']);
  $groupheader_url=get_bloginfo('url').'/?cat='.$groupheader_id;
} elseif ($groupheader=='tags') {
  $groupheader_id=$item['head'];
  $groupheader_url=get_bloginfo('url').'/?tag='.$groupheader_id;
}
//aytemir.com: end mini-hack

c. The code is self-explanatory, I think: just get the header you want to sort/order by, retieve the accompanying ID and generate an URL and apply URL in case of tag, category or author.
d. Find (around rownumber 203) the following statement:

$output .= '<li'.$charlink.($odd ? ' class="azalt"' : '').'><span class="head">'.$item['head'].$cont.'</span>'.$cr;

e. And replace it with the following statement:

//aytemir.com: start mini-hack
if ($groupheader=='author' || $groupheader=='cats' || $groupheader=='tags') {
  $output .= '<li'.$charlink.($odd ? ' class="azalt"' : '').'><span class="head"><a href="'.$groupheader_url.'">'.$item['head'].$cont.'</a></span>'.$cr;
} else {
  $output .= '<li'.$charlink.($odd ? ' class="azalt"' : '').'><span class="head">'.$item['head'].$cont.'</span>'.$cr;
}
//aytemir.com: end mini-hack

5. Save and test it (locally) and let me know if it works for you.

Don’t want to bother ‘hacking’ yourself? You could also download the fully zipped version with the hack already implemented:
1. Download this hacked version, which I doped 0.8.2
2. Upload, activate and test the plugin.

For usage and configuration instructions please refer to the original plugin site.

If you should run into issues regarding this specific hack, please let me know in the comments.

Eos Divine Protection

Red Sonja

Flight of the Dragon

Angel and Demons

Dungeons & Dragons: Legendary Boon

Budapest – Fantasy landscape

The God of Hellfire

Fusion

Purple Mage

Black God’s Kiss

Once you’re at fan-tas-tic.com don’t forget the rate the images you think it’s FTT!

]]> http://aytemir.com/ftt10-fan-tas-tic-images-of-2009/feed/ 1 http://aytemir.com/dont-believe-the-hype-of-gridservice/ http://aytemir.com/dont-believe-the-hype-of-gridservice/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:21:18 +0000 Tschai http://aytemir.com/?p=1074 The MediaTemple Grid-service “is a cluster-based, modern hosting service powered by hundreds of servers working in tandem to power your websites, applications and email with unrivaled power, burstability and reliability”.
Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Background story

I’ve just recently moved to MediaTemple and at this moment my following sites are hosted with (mt): aytemir.com (that would be this blog), fan-tas-tic.com and VoetbalPortaal.com.
All three sites have very humble amount of traffic to handle and are WordPress or vBulletin powered, with some standard popular plugins or mods.
Nothing fancy. Nothing special.

Because VoetbalPortaal.com grow slowy too big for the shared host I was with, I had to move (all my sites) and I believed the hype and decided to move to the ‘state of the art’ and ‘digg-proof’ grid-service of MediaTemple. You never know when you’re gonna need a ‘digg-proof’ host, I guess . And boy did I regret that! And still do regret it!

I had no reason not the believe what they claim on their site: TechCrunch is hosted with them. And a sub-devision of Sony. Although on a more expensive plan. But also a lot of (big) blogs are also with the unrivaled Grid-Service of MediaTemple.

Here comes trouble

Since I’ve moved to (mt) and settled everything all seemed fine, excepts the servers where slower than I was used to with the cheap host I used to be. Bad luck, I guess.
But from day one I got ‘Lost connection to MySQL server during query’, ‘User *** already has more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections’ and ‘Out of memory’ errors via the vBulletin backend. My site had been down for several minutes several times: Although (mt) thought that this may have been caused by ‘bad neighbours’, I never had this kind of issues with other (normal) shared hosts!

Here comes the $olution

And different employees from (mt)-support all suggested me that I should buy an additional service to make up for the initial service, which should be correctly working in the first place: I should get a MySQL Gridcontainer to make sure I wouldn’t bother by other customers on the same cluster.

Although I thought that was ridiculous and I expected to have 99,9% uptime and database-connection and I shouldn’t have to buy an additional service for a simple and humble site…I had no choice, because (mt) had me ‘by the balls’: I had already lost 50% of my monthly unique visitors during the transition* to (mt) and I could not afford to loose more!

More toruble? More $olution!

So I decide to purchase an additional MySQL Gridcontainer. Now I don’t have the ‘Lost connection to MySQL server during query’, ‘User *** already has more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections’ warnings anymore.
But I do have ‘Out of memory’ warnings and even more frequently than before. And guess what (mt) is suggesting as a possible solution? Yes, you’re right!
They suggest I should buy an additional service to make up for the initial service, which should be correctly working in the first place: I should upgrade the memory of my Gridcontainer!

The irony of al this situation is that I had no issues with any of my humble sites at all when I was at the ‘el cheapo’ host for only 30,- euro’s a year!
Now I’m having frequently database-connection error, out of memory errors and I’m not the only one as far as I can tell from the Support Forums. And (most) of us have only simple websites.

The conclusion

Long story short: don’t believe the hype of the Grid-Service (maybe this goes only for MediaTemple) and the ‘digg-proof’ claims they make; at the moment it’s very in-stable and it has problems handling a very average sites like aytemir.com, fan-tas-tic.com and VoetbalPortaal.com.
And when there are no errors, the sites are very slow compared to what I’m used to…before I’ve moved them to MediaTemple.

So just make sure you do more research than I did before moving to another host…or you may end up paying and upgrading to most advanced servers and services, just to host a humble WordPress blog or a vBulletin powered forum!

Disclaimers

PS: the (mt) support is just advising and suggesting and they’re not really ‘forcing’ me buy additional service to make up for their initial service, which does not deliver what they promise.

PS: there are testimonials of (mt) Gris-Service users which are just happy and claim their service does just what it should!

*This is not all (mt)’s fault, because I had to switched from .nl to .com for personal reasons, but constant db-connection errors made things worse.

]]> http://aytemir.com/dont-believe-the-hype-of-gridservice/feed/ 4 http://aytemir.com/fan-tas-tic-user-generated-galleries/ http://aytemir.com/fan-tas-tic-user-generated-galleries/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:23:33 +0000 Fan-tas-tic http://aytemir.com/?p=1043

It took me longer than foreseen, but after a couple of different approaches there is a final alpha version of my fan-tas-tic project. Although still in a alpha stage, I think a soft launch with this post is a logical move prior to a beta version: behold FAN-TAS-TIC! User Generated Galleries.

WTF is FTT!
FTT! is actually designed and developed as a pure personal project: a fantastic image gallery, with ‘fantastic’ covering the genres science-fiction, (heroic) fantasy/sword & sorcery, gothic, horror, anime and the quality of the art self displayed at the gallery.

So…yet another gallery?
Supervisually yes…it’s nothing more than just another gallery.

However some of the features what should make FTT! really unique compared to other galleries are:
Banner blindness prove:

• All sponsor/ad banners are blended in the design, so the users are ‘bothered’ as little as possible
• The banner spots are randomly generated to minimize the ‘blindness’ effect
• Also the single post banner is very visible, yet blended

Quality of the content:

• Advanced user submission form (to be moderated by admin for ‘quality control’)
• Only fan-tas-tic images are approved; no doodles here!
• All images are categorized, tagged and archived and are available via the statistics
• All uploads have (if available) a link to the original author and gallery and/or the source of the image

User friendly UI:

• Any image can be rated (and is automatically ranked)
• Also the less rated and low rated images are highlighted (randomly or via related posts)
• Different kind of archives are present: monthly, yearly, per category or per uploader/submitter
• Most and least rated post are relative to the current tag, category of the single post
• Simple navigation (sub)menu’s showing all submenu
• Statistics: Overview of the last rated images and the highest, lowest, most and least rated images

I’ve also left some additional features out, which were time consuming to implement…maybe they’ll make it in the next version

Still to do…
Although I need to work some details out and have to do a lot of code cleaning and optimization and the GUI is somewhat Spartan, the site is live and is ready to be (alpha-)tested.

Feedback?
Any constructive feedback for this alpha-version is welcome in the comments below…

]]> http://aytemir.com/fan-tas-tic-user-generated-galleries/feed/ 1 http://aytemir.com/tdo-mini-forms-upload-pathurl-mini-hack/ http://aytemir.com/tdo-mini-forms-upload-pathurl-mini-hack/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 14:26:34 +0000 Tschai http://aytemir.com/?p=965

The TDO Mini Forms WordPress Plugin is simply one of these plugins you’ll end up using, when you’ll be using WordPress for more than ‘just another blog’.

For my upcoming project I was looking for a fully customizable end user form and after having tried a bunch, TDO mini forms was simply the best.
I still don’t understand why it is called ‘mini’ because it has a ton of options and almost all of them very useful.

The only issue I got with it was with the file/image upload widget: It was putting the uploaded files in wp-content/uploads/subfolder where I wanted them in wp-content/uploads/year/month.

Although there are usefull hints in the support forum, they wont get you there exactly. So here is the hack to solve this issue:
In the plugins folder replace line 552 (up until the line “// store info about files on post”) in file tdomf-upload-functions.php from this

$postdir = $options['path'].DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$post_ID;

to this

$yearID=date("Y");
$monthID=date("m");

$postdir = $options['path'].$yearID.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$monthID;
$postdir2 = $options['url'].$yearID."/".$monthID;

tdomf_recursive_mkdir($postdir,TDOMF_UPLOAD_PERMS);
tdomf_recursive_mkdir($postdir2,TDOMF_UPLOAD_PERMS);
$newpath = $postdir.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$theirfiles[$i]['name'];
$newpath2 = $postdir2.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$theirfiles[$i]['name'];

if(rename($theirfiles[$i]['path'], $newpath)) {

        $newpath = realpath($newpath);
        $newpath2 = realpath($newpath2);

Note that a variable 2 is added, just after the original.
Also note, that I’ve replaced the variable DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR in $postdir2 into “/”, cause it was giving me headaches.

In line 564 in the same file add just beneath this line

add_post_meta($post_ID,TDOMF_KEY_DOWNLOAD_PATH.$i, $wpdb->escape($newpath),true);

the following

add_post_meta($post_ID,ftt_path,$postdir2,true);

Make sure you do use $postdir2 here again. Will be using ftt_path to retrieve the stored URL, so remember what name you give it here.

And now we’ll be calling the uploaded files via the URL like this

get_post_meta($post->ID, "ftt_path",true);

instead of this, which will give you only the absolute path

get_post_meta($post->ID, "_tdomf_download_name_0",true);

This way it’s not even necessary to check ‘Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders’ at your Miscellaneous Settings.

Hope this helps others out also. If you have any other issues with TDO Mini forms, please refer to the original support form.

UPGRADE warnings

Remember that automatically upgrading the plugin to the newest version will overwrite the hacks above…so make sure to actually backup before you upgrade!

Although the fan-tas-tic project is making good progress, I’m running to some issues which slows down the overall progress: This post is a short status update.

Issue 1: Internet Explorer still sucks.

Even version 7. And I have no high expectations for IE8, no matter how many tests it’ll pass.
I had to tweak a lot of CSS code just to make sure IE7 doesn’t screw up my layout, although it was fine enough in FF and Chrome.

A relief is that a bigger part (65%) of my visitors do use FF. An explanation for this is that the audience mostly consist of bloggers, designers and developers. They already know IE sucks.
However on my soccerforum IE is used by 53% of the visitors. This just confirms the theory about the audience of the sites. And because I’m expecting a mixed audience for Fan-tas-tic!, I dare not to neglect IE fully.

Issue 2: Local vs online

The ‘look and feel’ of my localhost XAMPP is not 100% the same with the Apache server of my host. So I have to now and then test it online.
Just recently I’ve found this lill’ usefull plugin: Theme Test Drive. Activating this plugin it will give you, logged in as a admin, the ability to activate another theme and see what the site actually will look like.
In the mean time the regular visitors will see the clever ‘under construction’ theme Launchpad.

Issue 3: Intense Debate is still giving me headaches

I just might have to dish it in the end after all. I’ve complained here why I chose for Intense Debate. The problem is that when ID is enabled it takes too long to count the number of comments: it has to retrieve data from the ID-server for every post.

Gotta go…and make some more fan-tas-tic progress.

As stated in my post Setting goals for 2009 I’ll try to post only about the projects I’m working on…from now on. And I have to admit it’s hard not to blog, rant or rave about anything else.
Because there is actually a lot to blog, rant and rave about. For example this blog now has reached a Pagerank of 2 in 3 months, but so did my sleeping site Uppedd.com, which never had any content at all…and this is a big mystery to me.

The first post of 2009 year is a ‘fan-tas-tic’ one. Well, actually it’s about one of my projects called ‘Fan-tas-tic’ and a although the name may suggest otherwise it’s actually a quite humble project: a ‘fan-tas-tic gallery’ powered by WordPress.

Yes, I am aware that there are already hundreds of (CSS) galleries (like these lists of examples: 36 + 74 + 115) and a lot of free WordPress themes to make your own. However they all lack some essential features for the visitors and for the administrator.
I’ll come back to these features in another post, when I’ve got the full feature list of my own gallery complete.

In the mean time you should also check out some of the galleries above for inspiration and figure out which features you think they lack and leave a comment. If I can, I might just implement it in my ‘Fan-tas-tic Gallery’ theme.

Looking back at 2008

Playtime is over! I’ve used the past period to experiment with some forms of promoting my posts and trying to get more traffic. Although the results were satisfying as you can see in the graph above, it felt more like ‘work’ than ‘hobby’ for me. Because doing this is rather time and energy consuming. And that is not a good thing…if you’re not making money from it, that is!
The above graph illustrates the short period from October until end December for this blog. And it’s no surprise that it’s possible to get a peak of visitors and views, no matter how humble your blog or post is. But to keep this visitors coming back you need to invest a lot in time and energy…but I’m gonna focus on other things instead.

Setting goals for 2009

While reading My Internet Goals for 2009 I found out writing your goals down works very therapeutic and very refreshing. Although very personal it can be interesting and inspiring for others too.

Now that the new year is getting closer it’s time for me to get my goals clear and focus on them. Maybe you should write down your own goals too?

Aytemir.com: Design, Develop…Blog!

The main goal for this blog has always been a supporting blog for the projects I’m running or planning. I’ve used the past months to experiment with some social media and I’ve learned a lot, which I hope to use in return when I’m ready to promote these projects once their ready.
I will keep the current categories and write about the progress of the projects listed below. I’m prepared for a lack of visitor peaks, but the content should be useful (for me) when starting a another/new project.
At a certain moment I think I might have to say goodbye to the Unstandard theme…

Uppedd: Ranking and Rating the Stars!

This will be my ‘Pièce de résistance’. Like the rest of the projects I’m going for the easy route and use already existing tools and plugins and try to go (private) beta in 2009!
Although the concept is rather basic, it still is a rather ambitious project and it’s potentials are very promising.
Expect to read more about this projects in the coming posts.

Fan-Tas-Tic! Science-Fiction & Fantasy Art Gallery

I was always meaning to do something with my favouriet genre: SF&F. While writing Best of 2008 for developers: 2008+ tips, tricks, scripts and sources! I came across a bunch of WordPress powered CSS galleries and got this fan-tas-tic idea: Why not do the same for fan-tas-tic SF&F art!

Fan-tas-tic.com was luckily not taken and from now on will it be not only my own personal favourite gallery, but visitors can also submit other SF&F art and vote on the submissions.
I’m aware there are already other great resources for SF&F art, but they mostly miss some of the basic features of these Web 2.0 galleries, like tags, rating and ranking or they also contain less fantastic work.

BAOA: Blogging About Oracle Applications

This niche technical blog is actually for my company and I it’s about time it got pimped. It needs an upgrade, new look and feel and a lot of more useful plugins.
The content is absolute king and therefore it needs more audience, yet only from the same technical niche, which is a great challenge.

VoetbalPortaal: Exclusive Soccer Forum

I’m considering this soccer forum project actually as finished, since there is not much more I’m gonna change about it.

Summary

Note that I’ve not set any goals regarding monetizing any of the new projects. And initially the design will be of based on a existing theme in most cases.
The focus will be on getting things finished instead.