Installing the Oracle Library for PHP

Chris Sibert wrote a good tutorial on installing the Oracle library for PHP. If you’re running SELinux, I’d recommend temporarily turning it off to get the module setup so you don’t have to worry about problems during the install, and then turn SELinux back on after you verify the module is working. Then you can […]

Domain Name Expiration and Renewal

Mike Davidson has written a good article detailing the sleazy underworld of domain name expiration and renewal.

Set Linux time using remote time server

You can use the rdate command to set the correct time on a Linux system, instead of having to manually enter it. NIST has a list of time servers. You can then use hwclock to update the hardware clock.

rdate -s nist1-ny.WiTime.net
/sbin/hwclock --systohc

Additional FTP accounts on Plesk for Linux

Before version 9 of Plesk you couldn’t add additional FTP accounts for a domain through the control panel. This KB explains how to manually add extra FTP accounts that are restricted to their home directory.

Desktop TODO List Software

For the past several years I’ve just been using a Word document with a multi-layer bulleted list to keep track of tasks, but that’s getting a little hard to manage. I started looking for something with collapsible items and filters to show certain categories, statuses, etc. There are a lot of popular web-based applications, but […]

The Design Curve

“10 Absolute ‘Nos!’ for Freelancers”

WakeUpLater.com has some good tips for freelance web designers/developers.

Passing Arguments to an Event Handler

Mark Wilton-Jones has a good overview of the most common methods passing arguments to an event handler in JavaScript. This page has a function (addevent2()) that worked for me.

mouseenter, mouseleave Events for non-IE Browsers

Stephen Stchur has written a script to mimic IE’s proprietary mouseenter and mouseleave Javascript events for non-IE browsers. This is useful when you have one element (B) laying on top of another element (A), and you want to do a mouseover/mouseout on A without the mouseout firing when you hover on B. Quirksmode has articles […]

Tree View of Folders, Including Size

TreeSize is good for getting a tree view of all the directories on a box with the size listed, so you can track down which folders are taking up too much disk space.

Home page posts missing when using Pretty Permalinks for WordPress on IIS

I’ve been working on a problem recently with the Pretty Permalinks solution for WordPress on IIS. I was migrating a working WordPress blog from one server to another and once it was on the new server the front page would come up w/ the theme, but instead of the default posts it would say “Sorry, […]

Photoshop Button Styles

Button styles for Photoshop

Copy the .asl file to the Photoshop’s \Presets\Styles directory.

Clearing a Browser’s default CSS stylesheet

Clear a browser’s default CSS stylesheet Update: After working with it for a little while I prefer using Yahoo’s Reset CSS, Base CSS and a few custom values to Meyer’s version. I think he takes it too far (almost to the point of absurdity) with things like stripping the weight from the strong tag. /* […]

Protecting Contact Forms From Spam

I’ve had several clients complain about getting spam through their contact forms. Initially, I tried checking the referrers to make sure the comments were being submitted from a browser rather than just a bot, but that didn’t help enough. Luckily, many people have created libraries for Akismet, the anti-spam service that WordPress uses. I setup […]

Targeting properties to IE6 with Valid CSS

When I’m translating a design to markup I can usually get it to look the same in all the major browsers without too much trouble, but every once in awhile there’s a problem with IE6 that I can’t figure out, or just don’t have the time/energy to deal with the right way. In the past […]

Blank Page when using IIS Permalink hack

I use Pretty WordPress Permalinks on IIS when I need to install WP on a windows server, but on one host I ran into a problem where I would get a blank page if the post didn’t exist instead of the theme’s 404 template. But for some reason it works fine if I just echo […]

Remove device from ‘Safely Remove Hardware’

My new laptop has a removable DVD drive, which is nice, but I’ll rarely–if ever–remove it and because it’s removable Windows puts the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the system tray, which is annoying to someone who is as nuerotic and anal-retentive as I am. If you search for a way to remove it most […]

Comparing E-mail Address Validating Regular Expressions

I wanted to find a regular expression to validate e-mail addresses, but when I searched I found dozens of slightly different versions of the same expression. Almost all of them had people leaving comments about how it failed to validate or invalidate some rare but completely valid/invalid address syntax. But dispite all the criticism, I […]

Ian Dunn

WordPress Developer

Author Archives: Ian Dunn

Installing the Oracle Library for PHP

Domain Name Expiration and Renewal

Set Linux time using remote time server

Additional FTP accounts on Plesk for Linux

Desktop TODO List Software

The Design Curve

“10 Absolute ‘Nos!’ for Freelancers”

Passing Arguments to an Event Handler

mouseenter, mouseleave Events for non-IE Browsers

Tree View of Folders, Including Size

Home page posts missing when using Pretty Permalinks for WordPress on IIS

Photoshop Button Styles

Clearing a Browser’s default CSS stylesheet

Protecting Contact Forms From Spam

Targeting properties to IE6 with Valid CSS

Blank Page when using IIS Permalink hack

Remove device from ‘Safely Remove Hardware’

Comparing E-mail Address Validating Regular Expressions