Lost!

I was reading over Slashdot awhile back and came across the whole thing about how keyword advertising in Utah is banned. This got me thinking - I run Adsense on my site (although I make almost nothing from it) - what would happen if I used keywords to advertise my site? Would the profit from the Adsense outweigh the cost of the AdWords account? You bet it worked! Continue reading…

After watching CNN yesterday morning, they covered Google as the top place to work in the US. Now, the things they listed where lifestyle changes that most of us are not use to in a corporate environment. We’re talking free food, “goof off time”, free internet, multitudes of space to roam, etc.

Now, how come we have businesses crying about how their employees are not happy and they can’t make money because of it when all Google has done is create a work environment where employees feel free? If I where to work at Google, I would be able to work anywhere I wanted - including sitting on the kitchen sink, if I so desired.

I’ve worked in many types of environments myself and I’ll tell you, from personal experience, employees do so much better when they feel like they’re not being watched every moment of their work day.

The best job I had allowed me as many breaks as I needed throughout the day. They gave bonuses for going above and beyond, barely tracked your production, etc - and the company was profitable, customers where happy, etc. Now, when said company was bought out by one with a completely opposite management style, it took them laying off ALL their call centers and doing away with nearly all their US based workers. In case you’re wondering what monstrosity of a company would lay off approximately 6,000 Americans in favor for saving money - Earthlink.

Now, had Earthlink came in and started embracing the MindSpring way, things would have been much different.

For some reason, companies just do not get that if their employees are tracked, put in their place and controlled in nearly every way, they’ll make money. Sure, there are times when there is too much freedom, but you mix freedom with people that actually work and will work hard for you - you’ll make money. It’s no secret that Google likes to “weed the lawn” a little to purge poor performing employees, businesses need to do the same thing. Keep the good, throw back the bad.

Almost a month after the originally quoted release date, WordPress 2.2 has made it to a public release. Depending on how you look at it, this can be good or bad. While those that have a default installation may not need must customization, if any, some people will need to heavily modify the code to fit their current situations - myself included. Plugin authors have mostly gotten the kinks out over the last release, but the WordPress team has done something different this time. They’ve included a “Disable All Plugins” link from a recomendation of a user and have included a plugin functionality check. Basically, if a plugin isn’t going to work, you can’t activate it since WordPress will throw an error message stating: “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”

New User features in 2.2 include:
Atom 1.o feeds
Embedded Widget Support
Plugin compatibility checking
“Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.”

Developers face other issues with the following features: (Taken directly from the WP Blog)

• A new set of WordPress-specific XML-RPC APIs that allow for editing pages, setting categories, and much more.
• We now use jQuery for a number of internal functions, and hope to transition all of our JS to use it. (We still need volunteers for this.)
• Comment feeds now support multiple formats, including Atom.
• Our internal mail functions now use phpMailer, which allows for things like SMTP support.
• You can now set database collation and character set in your config file.
• You can also hardcode your site and WP URL in the config file, overriding the values in the DB.
• Finally we’ve increased the inline documentation of a number of functions inside of WP, which should help you navigate those parts of the code.

Unfortunately, I pulled a “young and stupid” mistake by not checking the release schedule before messing around with code. I am about to release a new blogging site (Post explaining it coming soon) and was just getting done with a lot of customizations when I find that WP 2.2 is now out. At least I didn’t release it only to find out that I would need to redo the whole thing when I upgraded.

I will openly admit that the upgrade went better than I had planned with no hiccups caused any frustration. The only main issue I had where that the core files got updated and I had to go through and update code, yet again.

This article has been migrated to protocol16.com. To add or read additional comments, click here.

It seems the SharePoint community has been hit with an incompatibility bug with SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS).

After one of our SharePoint admins starting having weird problems this wee we started tracking down the issue. This is technically all over the internet, but I wanted to help get the word out.

Basically, it doesn’t matter which version of SharePoint, Windows, or Internet Explorer you have installed. If you click on a document inside SharePoint and IE crashes, you’ve probably got Office 2003 and 2007 mixed in some fashion.

In our case, our admin had 2 Office 2007 apps installed and a full blown install of Office 2003. Uninstalling the 2007 components fixed this issue immediately. It seems Microsoft has accidentally (things that make you go hmmm) introduced a compatibility bug between the Office Versions.

In our situation, we uninstalled Project 2007 (InfoPath 2007 still installed) and ran the update below and it worked for us.

Go to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12”
· Delete “OWSSUPP.DLL”
· “Start” -> “All Programs” -> “Microsoft Office” -> “Microsoft Office Tools” -> “Microsoft Office Diagnostics”
· Run the diagnostics and it should fix 1 issue in its last step.

The Ultimate Fix: uninstall one Office version (ie: All Office 2003 or All Office 2007), restart your beloved computer and have at it again.

The WordPress Support Forums have been up in arms over a bug that causes blank pages to show up all over the place. After installing the newest version of WP on a second website, I ran into the same bug. Unfortunately, the support forums where of no help, other than a lot of frustrated people. So, I spent about 3 hours (ok, so I goofed off a bit) working on a solution.

Webserver
My own Linux based Virtual Server
PHP 4.x
No caching plugins
no default plugins

Computer
Vista Home Premium (brand new laptop)
IE7 (don’t really use, but this won’t even show the Admin - Login page)
Newest Firefox

What I tried
Re-uploading files
Restarting VPC to clear any cache
Reset the .htaccess to:
order allow,deny
deny from xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Spammer that wouldn't leave me alone.)
allow from all
php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off
php_flag magic_quotes_runtime off
# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress


The Fix
Its a plugin causing the problem - plain and simple. Don’t believe me? Rename your plugins folder on the server to something else and try your page again… Renaming the plugins folder back, you’ll see what’ll happen.

In my case, it was a plugin called “Digg That”, which is an upgrade from “Digg This”. Basically the plugin is not compatible with WP 2.1.x

If you can log in (some people have luck hitting “Edit this page”), deactivate your plugins one by one and try your blank page issue in another window each time. It may take a few clicks, but you’ll find it. You may also notice that your pages won’t redirect back to the plugins page, you have to hit back all the time. Refresh between doing this and once you deactivate one and it redirects, you’ve hit pay-dirt.

If you can’t log in, I would suggest that you rename your plugins on the server (maybe change pluginname.php to pluginname.bak) one by one and try it out.

After disabling my crazy plugin, IE works, Firefox now returns redirects properly, etc. Basically, the framework has changed just enough over the last few builds that it’s causing all sorts of problems for people.