Lance Bledsoe » Tech Geek

How to turn off WordPress smart quotes

bledsoe — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:43:02 +0000

Smart quotes (aka curly quotes) are what most word processor programs insert into your document when you type the quote marks key. They're pretty to look at, but they cause problems if you use them in a text document that contains code intended to be read by a computer. That's normally not a problem since text editors don't create smart quotes when you type the quote key, but if you happen to find a cool chunk of code on a blog somewhere and you cut and paste it into a text file, if the blog you're copying the code from uses curly quotes, then you have a problem.

The bad news is, WordPress automatically converts all quote symbols to smart quotes, so if you post code snippets to your blog and they have quote marks in them, anyone who attempts to copy and paste that code into their own text file is going to have problems running the code. The good news is, you can turn this feature off.

There are actually a few different ways to do this, including modifying the functions.php file in your theme folder, or modifying the default-filters.php file in your wp-includes folder. But I like creating a separate php file and making it into a WordPress plugin, as described in this post by Katja Stokley. Create a text file called TurnOffSmartQuotes.php and put this in it:

/*
Plugin Name: TurnOffSmartQuotes
Plugin URI:
Description: Stops WordPress from converting your quote symbols into smartquotes. The three lines below stop the smartquote conversion in 1) your post content, 2) your comments, and 3) your post excerpts.
Version: 0.1
Author: Katja Stokley
Author URI:
*/
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('comment_text', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'wptexturize');
?>

Then just upload this file to your wp-content/plugins folder, login to your WordPress dashboard, select "Plugins," and activate your new plugin. You've just turned off smart quotes on your WordPress blog.

How to align your custom header with your navbar

bledsoe — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:31:09 +0000

If you use the Thesis theme for your WordPress blog, you might have created your own custom header image for your site (kind of like mine, above). If so, you may have noticed that your header image doesn't seem to align correctly with your navbar. To get your header image and your navbar aligned, you'll need to add a few lines of code to your Thesis custom.css file. It's a simple fix, and here's how you do it.

Click on the Thesis Custom Styling option under the Appearance menu in your dashboard sidebar. This allows you to make changes to your Thesis custom.css file. At the bottom of this file, insert the following lines of code.

/* The following lines control the alignment of your header image with your navbar. As long as these are all set to zero, your header image will be aligned with your navbar on the right and left, with no whitespace between the header image and the navbar.
*/
.custom #header {
padding-bottom: 0;
padding-top: 0;
padding-left: 0;
border-bottom: 0;
}

Save your changes, reload your blog page, and your header image and navbar will be aligned.

Removing the whitespace at the top of your Thesis blog

bledsoe — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:38:51 +0000

If you use the Thesis theme for your WordPress blog, you might have created your own custom header image for your site (kind of like mine, above). If so, you may have noticed that there's a little bit of whitespace between the top of your browser window and the top of your header image (kind of like mine, above). If you want to get rid of that whitespace, you'll need to add a few lines of code to your Thesis custom.css file. It's a simple fix, and here's how you do it.

/* The following lines control the whitespace at the very top of the page (i.e., above the header image). If you set the padding-top property value to 0 (zero), your header image will be flush with the top of the page.
*/
.custom #page {
padding-top: 0;
}

You can also set the padding-top property value to something else if you actually want some amount of space between the top of the browser window and the top of your header image.

Save your changes, reload your blog page, and the whitespace will be gone.

Vonage vs. VOIPo

bledsoe — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:00:15 +0000

A few months ago I compared my three-year experience with Vonage to my 6 month experience with Skype. After my Skype phone died, I decided to try VOIPo, the new VOIP service from HostGator, and wanted to share my experience with them.

VOIPo customer service can't be beat. Though it's not available 24/7 (only 9-7 Central, M-F), they're really good. Minimal hold times, the reps are technically competent, and they speak to you without a script, just like you're a real person. The few times I spoke with Vonage customer service, they were always trying to sell me some additional feature that I didn't want.

The prices are pretty similar. I give VOIPo a slight edge here, but only a slight one. It takes a little work to cut thru all the verbiage to get to the real price of the service, but once you do, you find the following:

VOIPo's introductory rate comes out to $11.25 a month, once you include the $36 annual taxes and fees, and assuming you buy a whole year of service at one time.
VOIPo's standard rate comes out to $19.67 a month, again including the $36/year taxes/fees and the annual contract, though according to VOIPo existing customers can always take advantage of any special promotional pricing that's being offered. So if the $11.25 a month price is available, you can always buy another year (or more) at that price.
Vonage's standard rate for its most popular plan with an annual contract (which they call Annual Prepay) is $239.99 a year (including all taxes and fees), which comes out to $20 a month, almost identical to VOIPo's standard annual price. Though Vonage publicizes this plan as costing $24.99 a month (with no annual contract), my experience with Vonage was that once taxes and fees were added in, that price was never less than $30 a month for me; if you get this plan with Vonage, I definitely recommend the Annual Prepay option.

When it comes to call quality, I found Vonage and VOIPo to be almost identical. Both provide high-quality sound, every bit as good as any standard landline. They also both have a nice online interface which you can use to check voicemail, set call forwarding, etc., though I found VOIPo's to be much simpler and easier to use.

Bottom line: I like VOIPo and plan to stick with it, though Vonage's features, quality, and prices are comparable, especially if you go with their Annual Prepay option.

I suspect at some point my wife and I will drop the landline altogether and just use our cell phones, but right now it's still handy to have a VOIP home phone line, especially since a) I work a lot from home and b) we have three teen/pre-teen sons and don't plan on getting cell phones for them.

How to change OpenOffice chart colors

bledsoe — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:48:32 +0000

As a frequent user of the OpenOffice apps, including the Calc spreadsheet (oo's version of Excel), I occasionally need to create a chart from some of my data. Typically, I'll create a pie or bar chart in Calc, then copy and paste it into Writer (oo's version of MS Word). Recently I created two pie charts from similar data and I needed the colors of the pie slices to be the same for corresponding categories in each chart; in other words, I had a Category A in Chart 1 and a Category A in Chart 2, and I wanted the pie chart slices for Category A to be the same color of blue in both Chart 1 and Chart 2.

I didn't figure this would be a huge problem, especially since when I created the charts in Calc, it gave the corresponding categories the same colors without me having to do anything. Unfortunately, when I copied and pasted the charts into Writer, Writer changed the colors! Wha?

I figured I would just manually set the proper color for each pie slice, but it's not at all obvious how to do this simple task, and the oo help documentation isn't that helpful. Here's what you do:

After pasting your chart into Writer, single-click the chart to make sure it's selected.
Double-click the chart to put it in "Editing mode."
Single-click on the pie; this will make a series of small green squares appear on your pie slices, one green square per pie slice.
Single click on one of the pie slices; this will select that one pie slice.
Double-click on this same "selected" pie slice; this will bring up the "Data Point" dialog box. Select the "Area" tab and select "Color" in the dropdown box.
Select the color you want the pie slice to have and click Save.

Repeat steps 4-6 for each pie slice and you're done. The key is to single-click and/or double-click at the right time and place; if you don't, you won't be able to get to the correct "Data Point" dialog box.

I'm not sure why Writer decided to spontaneously change my chart colors this way, but if any oo programmers happen to be reading, this might be a good thing to fix in the next release.

My Ubuntu-Windows dual boot disappeared!

bledsoe — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:04:21 +0000

I've been thoroughly pleased with Ubuntu, the open-source operating system I've been using for the past several months. I installed it on both my home and work computers, keeping my original Windows XP installations on both machines so I could easily boot into either system at startup, and the whole process has been mostly painless.

A few days ago, however, I needed to boot my work computer to Windows and was surprised to discover that the initial screen which displays the boot options no longer included Windows! I managed to fight back my initial panic, as I couldn't imagine that my entire Windows system would just spontaneously disappear; I suspected that it was still there, but for some reason I just couldn't access it from the boot screen. It turned out that this was in fact the case, and it also turned out that the fix was pretty simple.

If your PC is set up to dual boot Ubuntu and Windows, you have a file on your computer called menu.lst (that's an "L" after the dot) that generates the boot screen when you turn your computer on, displaying all of the boot options available to you. Every time you update your Ubuntu system (e.g., with security updates from the Update Manager), Ubuntu automatically adds your latest Ubuntu installation to the top of this list, leaving the others below it in case you need to boot to a previous version after an update. Your Windows boot option is the last one in the list, and sometimes it gets pushed so far down the list that it's no longer visible from the boot screen. All you have to do is comment out a few lines from your menu.lst file, thus removing a few of the older Ubuntu versions from the list, and the Windows option will move back up to where it's visible.

From within Ubuntu, open up a terminal window and type sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst, and enter your admin password. Towards the bottom of the file, you'll see a comment that says "## End Default Options ##" followed by several blocks of code that look something like this:

title       Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-15-generic
uuid        16cba197-6288-4261-8bbd-367d837e9f61
kernel       /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-15-generic root=UUID=16cba197-6288-4261-8bbd-367d837e9f61 ro quiet splash
initrd       /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-15-generic
quiet

title       Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-15-generic (recovery mode)
uuid        16cba197-6288-4261-8bbd-367d837e9f61
kernel       /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-15-generic root=UUID=16cba197-6288-4261-8bbd-367d837e9f61 ro single
initrd       /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-15-generic

title       Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-14-generic
uuid        16cba197-6288-4261-8bbd-367d837e9f61
kernel       /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-14-generic root=UUID=16cba197-6288-4261-8bbd-367d837e9f61 ro quiet splash
initrd       /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-14-generic
quiet

title       Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-14-generic (recovery mode)
uuid        16cba197-6288-4261-8bbd-367d837e9f61
kernel       /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-14-generic root=UUID=16cba197-6288-4261-8bbd-367d837e9f61 ro single
initrd       /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-14-generic

Each of these "Ubuntu blocks" displays a separate line on your boot screen that allows you to boot into a version of Ubuntu. Farther down, at the very bottom of the file, you should see something that looks like this:

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sda1
title       Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
root       (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader   +1

This "Windows block" is what displays the line on your boot screen that allows you to boot into Windows. Move back up in the file and find the last few "Ubuntu blocks." Choose several of these blocks, and in front of each line of the block, type a "#" in order to comment out that line. (Be sure not to comment out the Ubuntu block at the top of the list, as that's your most current version.) I commented out four blocks in my menu.lst file, making each block look like this:

#title       Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.27-14-generic (recovery mode)
#uuid        16cba197-6288-4261-8bbd-367d837e9f61
#kernel       /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-14-generic #root=UUID=16cba197-6288-4261-8bbd-367d837e9f61 ro single
#initrd       /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-14-generic

Then save the menu.lst file and reboot your computer. Your boot screen should once again display the Windows boot option, and you're back in business.

[For more info, check out this post and this post, both from the Ubuntu forums.]

Update (10/26/2009): It appears that this bug has been fixed in one of the recent Ubuntu updates (I'm currently running Ubuntu version 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope.) Now when my menu.lst file gets long, my boot screen allows me to scroll down to boot options that don't fit on the screen (e.g., the Windows boot option). I have two computers running Ubuntu with the dual boot option, and both now allow scrolling on the boot screen. Thanks, Ubuntu software development people!

A simple tweak for the WordPress YARPP plugin

bledsoe — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:01:24 +0000

Someone recently asked me to make a small change to the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) which she had recently added to her WordPress site. (For each of your published posts, YARPP will display a list of related posts, the idea being that if readers enjoyed the post they just read, they might want to read a related post as well.)

The desired change was simply to remove the blank line between the "Related posts" heading and the first related post. It turns out that this can be done by inserting some code in the YARPP settings page, but unless you're somewhat familiar with CSS, it's not immediately obvious what code to insert. Here's what you do:

After you install YARPP, click on the "Related Posts (YARPP)" link under the Settings heading in the left sidebar. On the YARPP settings page, scroll down to the "Display options for your website" section about halfway down and find the heading that says "Before/after related entries."

The first box next to this heading contains an opening paragraph tag (

) and you want to add some CSS code to make that tag look like this:

Click the "Update options" button at the bottom of the screen and your list of related posts will now look like this:

[If you're interested in more details on how this little bit of CSS works its magic, take a look here and here.]

Skype vs. Vonage

bledsoe — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:54:00 +0000

We used Vonage as our home phone service for about 3 years, and for the most part were pretty pleased. I initially decided to try Vonage because they offered a phone line with unlimited local and long distance calling for about half what I was paying my previous phone provider, BellSouth ($30/mo vs. $50-60/mo). While the initial setup took a little work, and transferring my existing phone number to Vonage was a bit of a hassle, the price was definitely better and Vonage had a lot of neat features included at no extra charge (voicemail, caller ID, online account access, etc.).

A few months ago, however, we dropped Vonage and switched our home phone service to Skype. (Check out this post for the basics you need to know to understand Skype.) The primary reason I switched was the price ($5.50/mo for Skype vs. $30/mo for Vonage), and up until a few days ago, when my Skype phone died, I was relatively pleased. Using Skype as your home phone service may not be for everyone, however, so here are a few things to keep in mind based on my experience:

1. Unless you want to use your computer and headset to make all of your phone calls, you need a special Skype phone. I've been using a GE 28310 that I bought used but a few days ago it suddenly stopped working. The tech support for the GE 28310 is remarkably bad (as I noted in my Amazon review) and after suggesting that I unplug and re-plug everything (which I'd already done), they simply recommended that I purchase another one. I don't think so.

2. In order to receive calls from regular phones, you have to purchase a Skype phone number. As I noted in my earlier post:

Technically, [a Skype phone number] costs $60 a year, but they give you a 50% discount if you also purchase a “subscription,” which costs $3 a month and allows you to make unlimited local and long distance calls to any phone number in the US. Without a subscription, you have to purchase Skype credit, and pay a few cents a minute for every outgoing call you make (incoming calls are free).

If you're planning to use Skype as your home phone service, I'd definitely recommend the subscription service, which also includes free voicemail. If you use the subscription service, your total yearly cost for your phone service is approximately $66 ($30 for the phone number, and $36 for unlimited "minutes"), or roughly $5.50 per month. Compared to Vonage's $30/month (that's roughly what it comes out to be when you add in the extra monthly Vonage fees), that's quite a savings.

3. Overall, the sound quality I've experienced using Skype has been good, but it seems to vary depending on exactly what type of call I'm on. Sound quality on every Skype-to-Skype call I've ever made has been fantastic. When I'm talking to a regular phone using my Skype phone, the sound quality is good, but there's sometimes a slight delay. And when I'm talking to a regular phone on my computer headset, I notice an occasional dropping of words (like, 2-3 seconds worth), either from my end or theirs. I'm not sure if this has something to do with the headset I'm using (a Logitech) or what, but I never noticed it when using the Skype phone.

4. Like Vonage, Skype is a VOIP service. This means that it's completely dependent on your high-speed internet connection. If your internet connection is slow, noisy, or prone to frequent outages, your Skype service (or any other VOIP service) will be as well. We have cable broadband thru Time-Warner Cable, and while the price is maybe a little steep, I have no complaints about the service, and we've have almost no outages.

Since my wife and I both have cell phones, and since my primary communications medium, even for work (I work from home) has become email, I've found that we use our home phone less and less. We could probably ditch it altogether and just use cell phones, but so far a VOIP solution has been cheaper.

There have been numerous stories in the news lately speculating that eBay, which owns Skype, is planning to sell it, maybe sometime in 2010, and recently there's been news about eBay (which owns Skype) having legal problems with the people who apparently still own Skype's underlying technology, none of which gives me a real warm feeling about Skype's future.

There are other VOIP providers, including HostGator, which recently began offering VOIP service at an annual plan introductory rate of $8.25/month (which works out to $11.25/month with fees) thru a company called VOIPo. HostGator has provided my web hosting services for a while, and I've been absolutely amazed at their technical support; it's hands-down the best I've ever experienced, from anyone. So after my GE Skype phone quit on me, I called VOIPo to sign up for their service. I'll write about my experience with them in a future post.

How to add clickable icons to your WordPress sidebar

bledsoe — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:31:53 +0000

You know how a lot of WordPress blogs have nifty icons in one of the sidebars, ones you can click on to go to, say, that blogger's twitter or facebook page? They're really simple to add.

It's essentially a 2-step process:

Upload the icon image(s) to your media library. You can find a ton of free icons online. Check out these sites for a few examples.
Add a "Text" widget to your sidebar and insert code similar to the following:

Then just change the URLs in the code so that they point to your icons and links (instead of mine). You may also need to adjust the width of your sidebar or the size of your icons so that they all fit.

And that's it! So find a few cool-looking icons and go nuts!

Merging WordPress blogs

bledsoe — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:00:03 +0000

Merging two or more WordPress blogs is a fairly straightforward task. The exporting and importing steps, which actually copy all of your blog posts from your source blog(s) and move them into your target blog, are handled with just a few clicks of the mouse button. The planning beforehand and the cleanup afterward take a little more effort, but the whole process is still a lot easier than you probably expect.

Before The Merge

1. Choose your permalink structure. You want to set your permalink structure before you import the posts from your source blog, because as the posts are imported they'll each be assigned a URL based on the permalink structure you set up in your target blog. I like the /%postname%/ permalink structure (which I discuss in this post), but you may prefer a different one.

2. Choose your categories. If you haven't already, now's a good time to plan and choose the categories you'll be using on your target blog. This post by Ali Hale has some good suggestions.

The Merge

3. Export your blog. This step is as simple as logging in to your WordPress admin, going to the Tools->Export section, and clicking the "Download Export File" button. (I'm assuming you want to download posts by "All Authors" but if for some reason you're only exporting posts by one author, choose that author from the dropdown menu before downloading the export file.) WordPress will download a .xml file to your computer.

4. Import your blog. Now go to the Tools->Import section, select "WordPress" (assuming you're importing a WordPress blog), browse to that file, then click the "Upload file and import" button. The next screen gives you some options for "Assigning Authors," and here's a neat tip from Mark Jaquith: create a new "temporary" user for all of your imported posts. This will simplify the Cleanup part of the merge process (see below), by allowing you to more easily selected your recently imported posts for bulk editing. Also, be sure to check the "Download and import file attachments" checkbox; this will insure that any images you included with your posts will get imported as well.

After The Merge

5. Start the cleanup process. This will likely include heavy use of the WordPress "Edit Posts" screen, particularly the Quick Edit and Bulk Edit features. If you're not familiar with these features, take a look at this excellent one-and-a-half minute video from wordpress.tv.

When updating the categories of your newly added posts in your target blog, the Bulk Edit feature is handy, but it's not perfect. In particular, as noted here, "Categories and Tags can be ADDED in bulk to a set of Posts, but it is not possible to CHANGE, or DELETE, a Category, or Tag, for those Posts." This is related to another annoying quirk: When you choose several previously Uncategorized posts in order to Bulk Edit them so they all are in the same category, WordPress also leaves them in the Uncategorized category. Since you can't do a bulk edit to delete the Uncategorized category from these posts, you'll have to edit them one-by-one using Quick Edit.

This last step will likely be the longest and most tedious of the whole process, especially if you need to change the (categories or tags) for a lot of posts. But take heart; after it's over, your new blog will likely be much better organized than the old one(s) ever were.

Once you're satisfied that your blog merge was successful, you'll probably want to forward the domain of your old blog so that it points to your new blog, and also completely delete all of the WordPress files (and the old WordPress database) from your old site. That way you won't have duplicate copies of your posts at the old site.