Author Archives: Richard

A change of name?

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

From time to time, vague thoughts cross my mind.

The latest vagueness is to ponder whether this site could do with a change of name.

It started out as a sort of joke, to counter the madness on Head Rambles, and ‘The Other Fellow’ was part of that whimsy.  However, I wonder if it could do with a change?  Could it do with it’s own identity?

I have been mulling over various names, and have set out some little rules for my mulling –

  • It would be nice to have a name starting with A?
  • It would be nice to have a name that reflected the contents of the site?
  • It would be nice to have a catchy name that people (mainly myself) could remember?
  • Something that would grab searches would be nice too?
  • It must be a name that can be registered as a domain.  That’s a hard one.

Maybe it’s just too much bother?

Maybe it could revitalise the place?

What do you think?

A website called Lazarus

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I wrote just over a week ago that this site didn’t exist as far as the world of search engines is concerned.

It transpired that it had been hacked, and a couple of lines of code inserted which redirected search engines to another site.  Naturally, I removed the hack and then had to set about undoing the damage.

It appears that my efforts have been successful.  Traffic has started to filter in from searches, as is plainly illustrated by Google Analytics –

It’s not much, but it’s a start.

At least the site is no longer being ignored!

This site does not exist

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I have been running this little site for some time.

It gets very few hits, but it never occurred to me to investigate the reason.  In the grand scheme of things, I supposed that people just weren’t interested in some rather boring musings or little technical gems that I had picked up along the way.

The other day, I did a check to see what keywords people were using to find the site.  I ran off a list for the last year.

It was empty.

No search engines are seeing the site. 

The site is search engine friendly in that it has all the recommended robots.txt and other files.  I have a plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) that generates the required sitemap files for search engines.  I also have the ‘All in one SEO pack’ installed.  All in all, it should provide a feeding frenzy for searches.

I went into my Google account to see if I could find any error messages. 

There are a few errors, including a complaint that ‘robots.txt’ is unreachable, which it isn’t.  It also complains that my ‘sitemap.xml‘ file is an HTML file, which it isn’t.

According to the stats page, the site has been crawled, on an average of 11 times per day so Google is aware of it’s existence, yet if I do a search for ‘the other fellow’ there is no sign of the site (when it should be near or at the top of the results?).

I am baffled.

Anyone any ideas?

Disabling Caps Lock

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

One of life’s little irritations is the Caps Lock key.

It is a hangover from the old days of the typewriter, where you would press the shift key right down and then press the lock to hold it down.  Of course, in the world of computers, it’s a simple toggle switch that is very easily tapped, and THE NEXT THING YOU KNOW, YOU HAVE WRITTEN EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE, which is a right pain.

I have a habit of accidentally striking the Caps Lock, and I find it really irritating.  What’s worse, there is little requirement for the key these days, especially with the style of writing I use.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could disable it?

I had a search around, and my prayers have been answered.

I found a very small, very elegant little program that sits quietly monitoring the Caps key and which toggles it back to normal instantly if it is tapped.  In effect, The Caps Lock key on my keyboard now does nothing. 

Suppose though I want to use all uppercase?  Then all I have to do is tap Alt + Caps Lock and my keyboard is back to normal.  It is simple, quick and efficient.  It also counts the number of times the Caps key is struck, and so far it has saved me eleven times.

If you suffer the same slings and arrows of the redundant key then you might like to try installing the program.

It is available here.  It is a mere 17Kb zip file, including licence and Readme.

It claims to work on all Windows systems up to XP, but you can take it from me that it works in Vista too.  I can’t speak for Windows 7, but maybe someone would like to try it and let me know?

Of course, it’s many thanks to the developers.  They are going to save me a lot of hair tearing.

Download failed. Could not create Temporary file

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Last week I posted that I was having problems upgrading or updating WordPress core and plugins.  Every attempt resulted in the message – “Download failed. Could not create Temporary file”.  The only solution at the time was to change permissions on wp-content to 0777 and then to revert to 0755 after.

I have finally found a definitive answer that does not require changing permissions or ownerships.  or does it compromise the security of the server.

The solution is quite simple.  All that is required is to add the following two lines to the wp-config.php file.

define('WP_TEMP_DIR', ini_get('upload_tmp_dir'));
putenv('TMPDIR=' . ini_get('upload_tmp_dir'));

As I said, I run several sites, so it was a matter of updating each config file.  I then attempted a core upgrade and a plugin upgrade on each.  Success!  No more meddling with directory permissions.

So, if anyone out there is having the same problem – there is the answer.