Chris Wiegman

We finally made some headway today in our redesign of http://www.aviation.siu.edu. In a meeting with the departmental executive committee it was finally agreed upon that we must take the actual content of the site seriously. This is a big move as for the last 10 years I have almost never received any feedback on any change I made. In addition, there was a general agreement that the site has become a virtual pack-rat with features and content that have long outlived their usefulness.

Although these may sound like trivial items to many groups, unfortunately the powers that be where I work have not, until recently, been convinced of the power of online marketing and started to take it seriously. Now in many ways this shift does make my work a little harder with added oversight and more pressure, but it is a challenge I have looked forward to for years.

It has been a good day!

So I’m perplexed. Every time I startup Firefox 3.6 on my mac I lose the last folder in the bookmarks toolbar. Moving it out of the toolbar and back in fixes it until the next time I start the browser. Anyone else seen this? How have you fixed it?

Take note of the "Web Dev" folder in the toolbar on the left. Notice it doesn't actually show up in the toolbar.

I’ve been with Bluehost for over a year now, but it might be time to move some of my sites away. The CPU throttling is simply becoming too excessive (up to 600 seconds some hours) and, in my opinion, unwarranted for a few sites that collectively receive very little traffic. Anyone have any suggestions on someplace else to look at?

So after getting tired of not being able to use the external link selection in the built-in Wordpress TinyMCE I decided to do something about it. Here’s a little Wordpress Plugin that will scan the text of your site and replace any instance of target=”_blank” with class=”target_blank”. It then uses a small jquery script to open the link in a new window or tab as the author intended.

You can download the plugin here replace-target.zip

For the latest download, please check out my project page at http://www.chriswiegman.com/wordpress-replace-target-plugin/

Wordpress MU is a great system, but as with all systems their are drawbacks. One such drawback I’ve had problems with is the lack of available customizations for the sign-up/registration page. Whether you just want to change the style, or change the very text itself there really isn’t anything you can do with it without hacking the Wordpress MU core which can be a nightmare come upgrade time.

My solution to this problem has been to use my own wp-signup.php page within my sign-up theme. Here’s how it’s done:

Before you start, make sure your server supports Apache mod-rewrite. An easy way to do this is to simply go to a post on one of your blogs. If you don’t see ?= anywhere in the address you should be OK. If not, go to http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php and see if permalinks are available on your server. If they are not you will need to get this enabled by your server administrator before going any further.

Next, the most important part, open up the .htaccess file in the root of your Wordpress MU installation in your text editor. You may need to create the file if you haven’t been using any redirects previously.

Find the line:

RewriteBase /

Right below it (before anything else) add the line

RewriteRule ^wp-signup\.php(.*)$ wp-content/themes/[your theme name]/wp-signup.php$1

Save the file.

Finally, copy (don’t move) wp-signup.php from the root of your Wordpress MU installation to your theme directory (usually wp-content/themes/default). Make sure you leave the original file in place. Moving the file alters the Wordpress MU core installation which is never a good practice.

Now you may edit the wp-signup.php file to your heart’s content. Redirects to the new file should be seamless to your users.

If you would like to see how I’ve used this take a look at http://blogs.aviation.siuc.edu/wp-signup.php. Now my needs were simple, we just wanted to clarify some of the text to reduce confusion for our users. There is a lot more that can be done to make this form yours.

* edited Feb 27th, 2010: added a couple of important lines *
Never write on a deadline when you don’t have to. I forgot to change 2 important line.

In your new wp-signup.php page (the one in your themes folder) find the following 2 lines:

require( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-load.php’ );
require( ‘wp-blog-header.php’ );

and replace them with the following:

require( ‘../../../wp-load.php’ );
require( ‘../../../wp-blog-header.php’ );

This will ensure that Wordpress MU can find the files it needs to process your data.