I added the UsersOnline plugin, which was a fairly complicated install by WordPress standards, and it required a little tweaking to get it to work with my setup. I’ve already modified the code that the author suggested to insert in the theme template files to invoke the function, wrote to him, and he said he would put the new code in his instructions.

Just as I was writing this post, I realized why the usersonline only works in the root page – it’s because I’m using the Permalinks option. Should be a fairly easy fix, and I’ll have to send it in to the author.

It’s cool seeing someone else online while I’m working here, but having just an IP address makes it a little mysterious. Who did I catch looking at my blog?

Posted by Greg as My Website at 08:03 PST

1 Comment »

I couldn’t figure out why my parse_google function wasn’t working (which is the root code of my GFame plugin) and went back a few steps and put in some debugging code to see exactly what Google was returning when I called file_get_contents. And this is it:

Error

We’re sorry…

… but we can’t process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

So I did some checking and found the Google Terms of Service, which specifically prohibit what my GFame plugin was trying to do. The only authorized automated requests are through the Google API, which is what I started with, but rejected because the results came out so differently than what you get if you type the same terms into a regular Google interface. I suppose I might have read something about this when I first started playing with the API, but forgot it by the time I decided to try parsing the search results instead. I was never intentionally trying to violate the TOS.

So I guess my little project is going to die. Bummer. I was learning a lot. I’ll have to come up with a new one.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Programming at 15:05 PST

No Comments »

Probably the biggest problem I have with computers is that I try to learn how to do everything. For example, here’s a list (I’ll try to keep it short) of the things that have been plaguing me recently.

• Coding my WordPress plugin that, to any non-coder, would appear to be a frivolous exercise in vanity.
• Learning the PHP, MySQL, HTML, XHTML, and the WordPress functions necessary to write the damn code (which is really the whole point of writing the plugin.)
• Getting SMTP working on my Mozilla mail with SSL (got the POP already.)
• Getting a signing and encryption certification from a CA to use with my website mail. Ok, yes, I got one already, but since I never trusted Mozilla to store my passwords, I never bothered to set a Master Password, and during one of my upgrades, Mozilla forgot that hadn’t (known issue), and locked me out. The only way to get back in was to reset the master password, which wipe my certificate. I’m trying to figure out how to get Thwate to resend it to me.
• Trying to get trackbacks working in WordPress.

Oh crap, this isn’t going to work – I could just go on and on, trying to figure out where to draw the line as to what constitutes “recently”. Ok, here’s what I did today:

• Posted comments on other people’s blogs.
• Posted on my own blog and read other people’s comments.
• Ran searches on the IP addresses of the people who commented on my blog, and, by the way, registered at whois.sc because it looked like they had some nifty tools there.
• Searched for and found Brni’s blog.
• Figured out how to add a LiveJournal RSS feed to my Bloglines account, added Brni’s, and for good measure, added my daughter’s, which she has never offered to share with me.
• Discovered OpenID and registered on their open server.
• Added the OpenID code in a couple of places in my website files and FTPed them up.
• Searched the Schneier website for an evaluation of OpenID and didn’t find one.
• Wrote an email to him about it, and had to search for his public key, found it, added it to my keyring.
• Took some family pictures off my website at the request of a family member.
• Searched slashdot for info on OpenID, read the posts and skimmed all the comments.
• Signed up for a LiveJournal account, set up a template, loaded my PGP public key, wrote a post telling people to come here.
• Noticed I wasn’t able to cut and paste the public key I have posted on this website to the LiveJournal entry page. I checked it the raw html for each and saw that they were different. Searched through both the LiveJournal and WordPress support and FAQs until I pinned it down to WordPress autoformat, which not only inserted break tags at the end of each line in the key, it substituted HTML coded characters within the key. Learned about the pre tag. Learned how to hack the autoformat off, but saw it would turn it off for everything. Saw some plugins that said they would take care of the problem but decided to leave that issue for later.
• Checked Technorati to see if my LiveJournal blog showed up as pointing to this one (it did.)
• Managed to squeeze in a quick look at the PHP code that I put into my trial plugin last night to see if there was any obvious reason why it didn’t work

I know I’m forgetting stuff, but then it’s way after bedtime. Just keep in mind that I’m not a computer professional. I had to go to work today, too.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Posts About Me at 00:37 PST

No Comments »

I was able to log into LiveJournal by presenting my OpenID. Apparently, it just needed a little time to kick in. I’m dying to hear back from Bruce Schneier, though.

Posted by Greg as My Website at 12:42 PST

No Comments »

While trying to interact with Brni’s LiveJournal blog, it seemed that I wasn’t getting full access (I was looking for a mailto link), and suspected that it was because I wasn’t logged in. I ran into the same problem in Yahoo 360° and had to beg an invite and create an account there just to comment on Web’s blog. It all seems silly, but I guess it’s a way for the big portals to boost their membership and drive their advertising revenues.

But when I looked at LiveJournal’s log in, they had a mysterious option to instead use OpenID. It’s a distributed identity verification system, and looks extremely interesting.

The concept sounded good, but it’s not fleshed out. In order for me to use my own blog as my identity, I would have to host an OpenID server. They don’t have this function prebuilt for WordPress yet, and the links that I followed to some developers’ PHP scripts looked more complicated than could be absorbed in a quick read. OpenID offers its own sign in, public use server that apparently links to your website and I signed up. I got a two-digit user number, which might be really cool later on, but worried me as to how feasible the whole idea is. I had to insert some header information in my blog, which I did, but it didn’t work. It looked like the system expected you to have a subdomain.domain.tld format, so I put the same headers in my root index, but that didn’t work either. Hrmph!

I searched Bruce Schneier’s blog for anything about it and got no hits, so I’m writing him an email to see what he thinks. As far as I’m concerned, Bruce is the man on security issues. Strangely, he doesn’t post his public key, at least in his “Contact Me” area, so I had to email the MIT PGP keyserver to get it (damn work firewall!)

The whole thing looks really new – I’ve stumbled across it at a very early stage. So I thought maybe I could get the scoop into Slashdot, but nothing doing. They have posts July 5th and May 9th already. As soon as I’m done finishing this post, writing Bruce, and closing out my website page mods, I’m off to read them. Oh yeah – I still need to find Brni’s email. Maybe the one I have in my address book is still good.

Posted by Greg as My Website at 11:02 PST

1 Comment »

Here’s Brni Mojzes’ blog, and here’s a page with some possibly interesting links. I couldn’t figure out how to add Brni to Bloglines, which has by default turned into my RSS feed reader, but Googling “livejournal rss” gave me an answer. Here’s Brni’s RSS feed.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends at 09:14 PST

1 Comment »