By Paul on Nov 21, 2015 at 1:52 AM

WSN has had an "add from web search" option for a while which can be very useful for filling up a directory with websites appropriate to a category. For a business directory, however, it would make things a lot easier if WSN could determine the address and phone number of the business which each search result references.

With the cooperation and forethought of the website owner, the geo.position and icbm meta tags can help. These meta tags allow a web page to specify its' latitude and longitude. As of today's 9.2.31 Beta 2 release, WSN now detects this and also does a reverse geocode to get the address.

Unfortunately, very few websites are currently using geodata in their meta tags. To get a few more addresses, I've used some regular expression page parsing to look for a couple of common USA address formats in pages. Also added USA phone number detection. Detection remains very spotty due to the infinite variety of ways that web pages represent addresses, but it's a start.

By Paul on Nov 17, 2015 at 11:26 PM

Thanks to clipboard.js, I've just added cross-platform copy-to-clipboard functionality to WSN's template editor. This replaces an archaic javascript which had only been able to select the contents without copying in most browsers. Are there any other places where cut/copy to clipboard functionality would be useful?

Another change today was a formatting change to the RSS Feed template to achieve full Atom feed support by default. WSN's rssfeed.php now outputs a feed which is valid both as RSS 2.0 and Atom.

9.2.30 also brings some fixes. These includes a fix to processing template conditionals in non-mime email headers and footers (notably the default email footer with the unsubscribe link now only shows to members, as it should). Also fixed watermarking for images and added an easier AJAXy remove watermark option.

By Paul on Nov 08, 2015 at 6:34 PM (Edited Nov 08, 2015 at 6:34 PM)

Did a lot of work on RSS feeds today. A comments url is now included in listing feeds whenever the comments switch is on and the combine details and comments switch is off. Article and topic feeds from WSN Knowledge Base and WSN Forum now include content:encoded fields to syndicate the complete article text or topic message. Any listing that has a physical address now includes the georss point field with the coordinates. On the other end, I fixed a WSN Knowledge Base bug which was affecting display of article text from feed submissions.

In the process of this work, I stumbled across the website fulltextrssfeed.com. That site will take RSS feed which only contain introductory stubs about articles and will pull in the complete article text to create a much more useful feed. Of course, you can't just do that with any feed without running into copyright issues -- but it can make the process of syndicating content between your own websites a whole lot easier.

I've demoed these changes in the WSN Knowledge Base user demo by submitting this blog as a feed: http://demo.wsnforum.com/wsnkb/blog-feed/

Let me know if you have any creative ideas for making the feed-posting system even more powerful.

By Paul on Nov 04, 2015 at 4:54 AM (Edited Nov 04, 2015 at 4:56 AM)

For many years, WSN has been using an open source flash script called OSFLV for embedding uploaded videos. This required activating the "convert videos to flv" switch and ensuring that ffmpeg was installed on your web server, which wasn't always possible in shared hosting environments and could be a pain on unmanaged dedicated servers. Also, more importantly, it meant your mobile users couldn't watch the videos because mobile devices don't usually support Flash.

Recently I found that OSFLV was no longer working correctly -- the osplayer.swf player wasn't showing up. I looked for documentation and discovered that the OSFLV script is no longer developed and the online materials for it have been taken down. Since it's dangerous to continue relying on a component that's abandoned (it could develop security holes), I set out to find a replacement video player component.

In the end, I settled on Flow Player. It has good documentation, is easy to integrate, and has the popularity and longevity to indicate that it'll stick around for years to come. It's integrated now in WSN 9.2.27.

A bonus from this change is that Flow Player isn't limited to flv videos -- any type of video can now be played. Under the hood, this uses the HTML 5 <video> tag. The upshot is that you no longer need ffmpeg (or youtube) in order to show uploaded videos with a listing. You also no longer need flash, which means if you upload a .mov, .mp4, .m4v or .avi file it can play on an ipad, iphone or other mobile devices that don't have Flash.

FFmpeg is still useful for autogenerating thumbnail images from videos, so the autoconversion switch will remain.

By Paul on Oct 23, 2015 at 2:36 AM

Sorry for the downtime on some parts of the websites this week. After selling my most server-intensive site I've been downsizing from a dedicated server to shared hosting, and the process has proved more complicated than anticipated. Everything except the demos is back up now, and I'll get to the demos shortly.

In the process I found and fixed a moving-related bug with integrated sites. The uploadpath value in the database doesn't change automatically when the config.php version of that value changes, and this results in integrated scripts failing to find the themes. Run upgrade.php to fix that.

Just as a tip for anyone else moving a website, make sure you don't copy the cache directory -- those thousands of small files take forever and aren't necessary.

By Paul on Sep 14, 2015 at 4:23 PM

Most of my clients make most of their revenue from displaying advertising. With that in mind, I've been working on a new script called WSN AdUnblocker to help increase advertising revenues.

If like many of us you use an ad blocker to browse the web, you may have noticed some sites detect that and ask you to whitelist them to allow their ads to be displayed. If you're like me, you'll give that a try and leave them whitelisted as long as their ads aren't so aggressive that they make the site hard to use.

There's no completely generic way to detect and deal with ad blocking, because every web script works a bit different. Fortunately I've been able to simplify it to the point where it's very easy for anyone using WSN's advertising system.

For any other script it'll need a way to add jquery and jquery ui if not already present, then a way to add a line to the jquery document ready function and add a div around the ad, and then a specification of what pages to expect an ad on. This is likely too complicated to expect the average webmaster to work out on their own, but it's something I can
do as an affordable service.

So far I've got options to customize the language and to choose how often to re-prompt (either every page load if you don't want to allow freeloading or every X days if you want to be gentle with an occasional prod).

By Paul on Sep 04, 2015 at 2:18 PM

The last few days have seen several releases relating to MIME HTML emails. Here's what happened.

The first discovery was that sites which had been sending MIME messages okay before started spitting out error and not sending the mail when their web servers updated to PHP 5.5.26 or later. I investigated and found that PHP version included a change to PHP's mail function restricting what can be sent in the headers field, in an attempt to stop malicious header injections. Unforunately it stopped the MIME code of WSN and many other scripts. I rewrote all the MIME code to use simpler headers and transfered much of it to the message field.

That patch worked for me, but actually created a problem on a PHP 5.4 server which was unable to parse message field headers that used windows-style line breaks. I converted to the PHP_EOL constant and that made all PHP versions work at the same time, finally.

If you have any website which is sending MIME emails by default, please be aware that it either already has or soon will stop sending emails (when you reach PHP 5.5.26) until you update to the latest release of one of the active WSN series: 8.0, 9.0, 9.1 or 9.2.

By Paul on Aug 26, 2015 at 3:58 PM

Went to a developers meetup last night that covered RethinkDB and Grunt.

RethinkDB is a NoSQL database with a query syntax that reminds me of jQuery, lots of chained selectors. The primary application seems to be highly reponsive real-time apps, where its push notifications provide a simpler and more scalable alternative to having to poll the database every few seconds. It might be useful for a future project but I won't be using it for WSN because of the impracticality of helping everyone to install it on their servers. Really the only components where it'd be notably better than MySQL are the chat and IM systems.

Grunt looks much more useful for my development process. It's a task automation tool with 5000 different task plugins, especially useful for the build and release process. I've already built a suite of custom automation and release tools for WSN, but I'll be incorproating Grunt into those in the future to leverage all the plugins.

By Paul on Aug 19, 2015 at 4:31 PM

Cool discovery of the day: SQL Fiddle. Should help with quick tests.

I've been working hard on smoothing more rough edges of the bootstrap theme. That includes collapsing the menu panel at mobile sizes, styling quoted posts, and fixing up a bunch of templates. Almost ready to roll out bootstrap as a default option during setup with a choice of bootswatch color schemes. Hopefully this will prove helpful to people who don't have time to mess with the stylesheet.

By Paul on Aug 16, 2015 at 11:14 PM

Gravatars are centrally-stored avatars used by wordpress and many other scripts. The latest WSN release ads an "autoload gravitars" switch, which finds the gravatar for anyone who doesn't upload their own avatar when registering.

If you have a lot of current avatarless members, you may want to go back and load gravatars for them to make your site and especially the comments threads a bit more colorful/personalized. To do that, copy this script to a text file and save it as loadgravatars.php:

<?php
 require 'start.php';
 if (!$start) $start = 0;
 if (!$perpage) $perpage = 50;
 $q = $db->select('all', 'memberstable', "1=1", "ORDER BY id DESC", "LIMIT $start,$perpage");
 $n = $db->numrows($q);
 for($x=0;$x<$n;$x++)
 {
  $m = new member('row', $db->row($q));
  if ($m->avatarname == '' && $m->email != '')
  {
    $filename = md5(strtolower(trim($m->email))).'.png';
    $gravatarurl = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/".$filename;
    $checkurl = $gravatarurl.'?d=404';
    $test = urlheaders($checkurl);
    $exists = true;
    foreach($test as $t) { if (strstr($t, '404 Not Found')) $exists = false; }
    if ($exists)
    {
     $m->avatarname = uploadurl($gravatarurl, $filename, false, 'avatars');
     $m->update('avatarname');    
     $msg .= 'Added gravatar for '.$m->profileurl().'...';
    }
  }
 }
 $start += $perpage;
 if ($n) indirectredirect($msg." Continuing to next batch...", "loadgravatars.php?start=$start");
 else die("Done!");
 require 'end.php';
 ?>

Upload that to your WSN installation's main directory and visit it in your web browser to start loading gravatars.