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WordPress command line interface

Drush is an amazing tool to manage Drupal installation from the command line. The other day I was once more annoyed at the lack of such tool for dealing with WordPress, more specifically keeping a WordPress site up-to-date. I started coding and quickly I had a couple of useful commands. But then I stumbled upon WP-CLI

Upgraded guaka.org to Drupal 7, moneyless

It was about time. I finally managed to upgrade guaka.org to Drupal 7. It was actually very easy once I had my Aegir setup fixed. I just needed to migrate the site to the Drupal 7 platform. Like often with technology, Aegir can be quite nice when things work smoothly.

Next I have to clean up the site a little bit and customize the Bootstrap theme that I chose as a base theme.

And then last weekend I was at a very special event.

meteor-phonegap and Radio Meteor

Soma FM is probably the best internet radio station around. Actually, the best collection of radio stations, as there are quite a few different channels they broadcast. Unfortunately their website is not so great for quickly listening to one of the soma streams. Until a month ago I usually ended up using some command-line wizardry to listen to groovesalad or dronezone.

Rest in peace, Taylor

UPDATE: You could send flowers to family's address: 6989 Owen Rd, Lantzville B.C. V0R2H0 Canada. (if you have to enter a name, the family name is Booth) - or plant a nut or fruit tree somewhere in Taylor's memory.

Been very sad today. I woke up this morning hoping it was just a dream. But it wasn't.

Taylor flying

Wikitravel was freed and everyone moved on to Wikivoyage

Good news for freedom loving travelers. The Wikitravel community and its content has been freed. The website was bought by a company for more than million dollars a couple of years ago and this year the community revolted and moved everything to the Wikimedia Foundation - a 501(c)(3) non profit that is extremely unlikely to ever sell out.

Some linguistic origins of hospitality

Yesterday I met up with Paxus and we had a chat about many things. Naturally CouchSurfing and its B C corporatization was one of them. It reminded me I had to post something about the origins of hospitality.

It's just a game?

Memrise is an addictive game to learn languages and more. I've been playing it for a while now. You can score points in several ways, mostly by answering correctly.

Javascript everwhere: PhoneGap and Node.js (and no Eclipse)

Got into PhoneGapApache Cordova a little while back. First I got into Titanium Appcelerator, thanks to my friend Silvio. But Titanium was all Eclipsy and then when I wanted to do some coding in the train I found out that I needed to be online to code in Titanium. I do have Ben Internet in the Netherlands and Mobile Vikings in Belgium but it's not always working amazingly in a moving train and this restriction was a tad bit too much.

Back to blog: more posts coming up

It's due time to write some more blog posts on this site. I've started tons of websites all over the place but I think it's probably better to spend some more effort here. This site will be more interesting and it will also be easier to actually score in Google for a wider range of terms. Since that's my main occupation these days: playing the Google game, for fun and profit.

So I'm going to move some stuff back here, starting with some pages from another site, such as this list of websites and domains I have in English.

Watch out for Autoblogging!

I’ve been looking around at flippa.com, an online marketplace for websites and I’ve come across quite a few funky, dodgy and murky things. This is a short post just to tell you not get involved in this one thing: autoblogging, which doesn’t have much to do with blogging but more so with automatically copying other people’s blog posts.

Spyrestudios wrote a good post about why autoblogging sucks, main reasons are that it’s not nice to those who have the original, and it’s also won’t lead to a healthy SEO situation. Google doesn’t like copycats.

Slicehost DNS API Python code

I'm setting up quite a few domains these days. The interface of the company is far from great and it doesn't allow bulk updates for DNS records. Fortunately I still have a Slicehost account. At the moment I don't have any VPS running there but they still allow their customers to use their DNS services. I think that's a smart way of retaining clients - and getting new ones.

Remove all blocks from a Drupal theme

Very useful when moving towards Features:

DELETE FROM blocks WHERE theme = 'your_theme_name';

From drush sql-cli, of course.

This is especially useful when building a subsite, for which I'm now mostly convinced by Sections.

(mdb to) csv to MySQL

Quick and dirty PHP script to turn a CSV file into a table in a MySQL database. Used for a Drupal project, so I ran it with drush php-script. Couldn't find anything better online. Feel free to use it.

If I need it again some time I will probably make it a bit nicer (I might also make it nicer if you ask me nicely and/or pay me to do it).

In the project I'm using it, I first converted an .mdb file to .csv with mdbtools.

<

pre>
<?php

$handle = fopen("/tmp/test.csv", "r");
$headers = fgetcsv($handle);

Rewrite Rules (not) - Lowercase URLs, but only for some specific paths

This took me enough time to get right to post a little blog post about it:

        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteMap lc int:tolower
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (shared|Shared|download|Download)/[A-Z]
        RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]

Note that this doesn't work in .htaccess - you have to put it higher up in the Apache configuration.

Recursively create lowercase symlinks to filenames with uppercase letters - in Python

I'm working on a project to convert a big ASP website into Drupal. On Windows OSes there is not really a distinction between upper and lower case characters in filenames. At first I thought to just leave the capitals, but on web pages links were sometimes with capitals and sometimes lowercase. So I added some stuff to the Apache configuration, usually inside the VirtualHost directive (this does not work in .htaccess):

<

pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap lc int:tolower
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]

Support for Dutch sites in Drupal Service Links

For my little project site about swimming pool construction I decided I needed some way to spread links better over Dutch sites. So I hacked around a little bit in Drupal's Service Links module and I just uploaded some files to support nujij en eKudos. I want to add some more Dutch sites, but there ain't that many it seems.

memcache doesn't necessarily speed up your Drupal sites

Sites that show up quickly on a user's screen tend to keep the user's attention for longer and also rank better in Google. So when listening to the excellent Lullabot Podcast 80: Top 40 Drupal Modules Revisited I was caught by Drupal experts stating that Memcache would even speed up your site if it's not a high traffic site. It could off-load the database. I decided to give it a try on a relatively low traffic site of one of my clients.

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