Thesis 1.8.4 Upgrade – style.css

I was recently upgrading a Thesis-based site from Thesis 1.8 to 1.8.4 and noticed that every time I activated the theme, the site’s style was completely wrong. I checked the HTML generated by both versions, and 1.8 was requesting the Thesis style.css but 1.8.4 was not. Upon looking at the code, I found that in 1.8.4 when the design options are saved, Thesis copies the contents of style.css...

Converting DOS to UNIX newlines

Annoying as it may be, Windows and some FTP clients insert “carriage return” characters into text files. This is commonly referred to as “DOS” mode – you’ll know you’re editing a DOS mode file if your editor tells you so, or (like I found this morning) git tells you. I downloaded a bunch of files I had passed to a client, and git told me they had all been...

Google Instant with FireWatir

I’ve been playing around with FireWatir, which allows you to write ruby scripts that control a Firefox web browser. This has obvious white hat uses, such as automated testing for sites that use JavaScript. It also has black hat uses for things like automated account creation and article directory submitters. The most basic example is searching Google for something, and the code looks like...

WordPress Twitter API Plugins Not Authenticating

A friend asked me to investigate why he was unable to use any Twitter plugins with his blog, but only on a specific server. After Googling around a little, I saw solutions that ranged from disabling PHP’s oauth module, to updating server time. It turns out that none of these fixed the problem – the issue was lack of SSL support for Curl. His server is running cPanel, and although Curl...

symfony caching – cross-application cache clearing

I’m writing a webapp that has an api application, and a frontend application. The frontend supports caching, since it’s providing RSS feeds that might be read quite frequently, and don’t change often. The currently timeout is set to 12 hours. The API allows the user to change aspects of the RSS feeds that will change the contents of the feed so much that it could be totally...