Yet another blog (hopefully a useful one though)
Archive for November, 2009
Top 10 Starfish Facts!
Nov 14th
Is a starfish a fish?
No of course it isn’t! But here are 10 true facts about starfish (or more scientifically named sea stars):
1 ) Sea stars are echinoderms, and are close relatives to the sea cucumber and sea urchins.
2 ) There are over 2000 species of Sea Star.
3 ) Sea stars do not always have the standard 5 arms; the sun star (a fairly redundant name) has up to 40 arms!!
4 ) A sea star can regenerate one of its arms! some sea stars drop off their arms as a distraction to predators. not the best idea but it must work to some extent.
5 ) A severed arm can grow into another sea star, as the majority of their organs are placed within the arm.
6 ) The majority of sea stars have a hard protective layer on the top of them. these is made of calcium carbonate which is a common substance found in rock. This protects them from their prey which are birds, large carnivorous fish and sea otters.
7 ) There isn’t a drop of blood within a sea star, they use a ater vascular system. they pull water in through a sieve plate. They also use this to move as they propel water to tips of their arms pushing them around.
8 ) Sea Stars digest their food on the outside of their body. This is incredible. It latches on to a clam or muscle, prises it open, slides its stomach outside its mouth and into the gap in the shell and digests what’s inside. This allows the sea star to eat a larger organism than what could fit into its mouth on its underside. Once the stomach is retracted back into its body, it transfers from the one stomach (cardiac) to another internal stomach (Pyloric) to fully digest.
9 ) Sea stars have eyes at the end of each arm, they do not have great vision but they are used.
10 ) the largest (widest diameter) discovered starfish found was erasterias echinisoma which was measured at over a meter long. thromidia catalai is the world record breaker for the heaviest weighing over 6kg 
How to fix PushIt WordPress plugin wp-admin 500 Error
Nov 14th
We had a client with a mysterious plugin related server error when they tried to access thair admin dashboard with output:
/*pushit_user_row_phone_variable_define_start*/ $phone = isset($user_object->phone_number) ? get_user_mobile($user_object) : “not set”; /*pushit_user_row_phone_variable_define_stop*//*pushit_user_row_phone_variable_insert_start*/break; case ‘phone’: $r .= “$phone”;/*pushit_user_row_phone_variable_insert_stop*/
They said that the problem had happened immediately after installing the PushIt plugin. So, we took the usual action and went into the database and ran:
SELECT *
FROM wp_options
WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’
and removed the content to disable all plugins.
Still no admin!
So, we removed the wp-content/plugins/pushit/ folder via ftp.
STILL NO ADMIN!!
So we scanned the code for instances of “pushit” and fount three.
- In /wp-admin/user-edit.php
- In /wp-admin/user-new.php
- In /wp-admin/includes/template.php
These files first of all lacked PHP open and close tags hence the server error but all looked rather small.
So we downloaded the latest WordPress version and opened these files. It looks like the idiot (yes I know it’s a strong word but who ever they are they are IDIOTS) had code replacing rather than inserting into these files. We hastilly overwrote these three files and Voila! no problems.
In quick summary: Do not ever install PushIt!! Tell everybody you know not to install PushIt!! If you know the person that wrote PushIt – give them a swift kick in the *^”^%£*^s.
We got Sitelinks!
Nov 14th
Go to Google and stick in “msinternet” and you will see this:
SitelinksWe have miraculously acquired sitelinks after our result. This is an indication that Google sees our site as being unambiguously the most relevent page for the phrase “msinternet”. The funny thing is that we beat Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 hands down. These links take traffic to the most used sections of our site to help people find their way around our very important site.
Another new change is that if you type our name into the Firefox address bar you alse get sent straight to our site instead of the default search provider. I tried to find out whether their is a link to Google site links but I couldn’t find anything. If anyone out there knows whether there is a link I would be interested to know but it is a wierd coincidence if not.
We won an Outstanding Achievement Interactive Media Award (Whoop Whoop)!
Nov 14th
We are now the proud owners of an Interactive Media Award. The award was for the Trident Housing Association website at www.trident-ha.org.uk . Judged on an international standard we achieved 478 out of a possible 500 points which I think is pretty darn good!
Utility PHP Email Detection Script
Nov 14th
I wrote a little function to check the formatting of an email so I thought I would share it with the world:
<?php function is_email($email) { if(eregi("^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$", $email)){ return 1; } else { return 0; } } ?>
Ajax filled form field errors in firefox and some IE wierdness too
Nov 14th
I spent ages looking for the answer to this one and it ended up really simple so I thought I would share it.
We had a web form where a select field was chosen. Then a second select was populated by ajax depending on the value of the first select. All pretty standard except that in firefox the second select just disappeared! After a whole bunch of wild theories about form encoding and other crazy stuff it turned out that the problem was in the validation. In order for a form to be valid XHTML the <form> tags have to lie OUTSIDE the <table> tags. When this is done wrong firefox, being pernickety, decides that as the code is not valid and the page was built dynamically it cannot cope so ignores the second <select> completely. All very stupid!
As for IE, we found out today that if you AJAX in only the <option> tags the second select will not work. However if you AJAX in the whole <select> it does! Crazy!