Next to installing broken custom mod_security rules, the second most annoying thing web hosts do is set rediculously low maximum file upload sizes. Often they'll have upload limits of 2 MB, which isn't even enough to upload a photo taken from a phone. Confusingly, sometimes they have a large limit set for max_upload_filesize but then a small limit for max_post_size which also indirectly acts as a limit on the uploaded file size.
Last night was openlayers (Open Street Map) headache night. Spent many hours pouring through contradictory documentation from the bazillion different versions of openlayers, and eventually discovered that there's a fundamental bug in it (or at least the version of it I'm using) where WebGL browser animations on the map cause the moveend and dragend events to fire about 50 times in a row. Eventually, the really ugly hack I came up with to be able to dynamically load more map pins on moveend/dragend was a timer which only adds more pins if it's been at least 5 seconds since last time.
When you upload a video to WSN and then play it on the listing details page, it plays through a javascript player interface called Flowplayer. Flowplayer is not actually included with the files of WSN, though. Instead, the javascript and CSS is referenced directly from flowplayer.org into your site. Partly this is because WSN is huge enough already, but mostly it's because Flowplayer is licensed under the GPLv3 and it's unclear what the legal implications would be if I distributed it (and I don't have money for a lawyer to find out).
Here's something everybody can use. Grab a free copy of the latest WSN Links 10.3.15, use the new bookmarks importer tool at Admin -> Links -> Add Links, and viola: you've got your personal favorite web directory with all the searching and sorting features you could want. You can let WSN automatically prune dead links or convert them to wayback machine versions during import. Link descriptions (meta description), tags (meta keywords) and associated RSS feeds can be imported automatically. The category structure, of course, will mirror the structure of your bookmarks folders.
Turns out Geocodio only supports USA and Canada, and for some reason they don't bother to mention that anywhere prominent. So I had to quickly do more research and found that OpenCage appears the best worldwide geocoding option, with a permissive TOS. OpenCage's data is 'interpolated' rather than 'rooftop' level accuracy, meaning the pin should be close enough to see your destination but not necessarily exactly precise, so Geocodio is better for USA/Canada addresses.
Discovered today that thumbshots.com died on November 10th. Obituary at www.thumbshots.com/Support/...3/EntryID/47/Default.aspxa Odd spammy text at the bottom of the page makes it look like they've either gone insane or been hacked too. Some of you have been using thumbshots.com thumbshots in WSN. It used to be the default, but for the past few years pagepeeker has been the default with thumbshots.com available via the thumbshotskey tweak. With today's WSN releases, I've retired the thumbshotskey tweak and switched all sites to pagepeeker.
Structured data markup is basically another way of helping search engines understand your site. It describes pages in terms of objects or concepts and how they relate to each other. For a news article for example, it tells what the headline is, the description, the images, and the author details. A couple years ago, I spent a lot of time marking up the WSN templates with schema.org structured data markup. It made a bit of a mess out of the HTML and was easy to end up with an incomplete version of, but it conveyed the basic info.
A few months ago, Google Maps drastically lowered their free use allowance. The vast majority of us are, alas, still in no danger of having any websites popular enough to hit the limit. For a customer who was hitting the limit, I added a 'click to load map' option in WSN to reduce their number of maps impressions. That, of course, is a far from ideal solution. What we really need is an alterative mapping service. I thought about Bing, but they have limits of their own and may put a tighter squeeze on people at any time.
In WSN 10.2, I spent a lot of time on WordPress integration. Perfected the theme integration, and made a WordPress plugin for each WSN script that installs and integrates and manages it and provides access to the WSN admin from WordPress. While starting work on 10.3, I realized WSN was actually integrating more fully with WordPress than with other WSNs. Time to fix that. The first step was to take the previously hacky template integration and turn it into something standard and reliable.
Thought I'd revive this blog to go into more detail about developments in the WSN 10.3 series so far. Let's start with an entry about the bootstrap-related developments, which have been numerous. To free things up a bit from the non-bootstrap legacy, WSN now has two different base styles. When using a legacy (non-bootstrap) theme, the schemas/base.css gets called in as before -- but for bootstrap themes, WSN now calls schemas/bootstrapbase.css instead. I've been trimming some legacy cruft out of bootstrapbase.css and trying to let as much of bootstrap's own rules take precedence as possible.