Got Wills

Well, I just finished redesigning and updating Holbrook Youth Football’s Web site. It took a little longer than I thought it would, but I think it looks 100 times better.

All of the image editing was done in GIMP and I used JetBrains’ new Web IDE to develop the whole site. It worked great, my only annoyance was that it creates xhtml files with .xhtml as the extension. Testing it in Internet Explorer with that extension got me a download, rather than a rendered page. It was probably a problem with IE (and may only be because I was accessing local files), but with most of today’s users still using IE, I need it to work.

I’ll be taking over the development of Northeastern Arizona Youth Football League’s Web site, as well. I’ll probably start the redesign on it in a few days. As of right now, it doesn’t even come up in Google when you search for the name of the organization… I’ll have to try to remedy that.

Let me know what you think and a big thanks to all of the sponsors and volunteers for helping Holbrook’s youth.

Well, I finally figured it out. It appears that the OpenID plugin is not compatible with the Contact Form ][ plugin I was using.

It's always worked great with registration and stuff, but never worked for me to use it as my OpenID server. I had figured it had something to do with me not having curl support built into PHP.

I just figured I'd check the error log today, right after I tried it again, and saw a lot of errors with various plugins. Well, I don't know if I can live without all those plugins, but let's deactivate them and see if it works. Wow, it worked...

After activating them again one at a time, I found it was Contact Form ][ that was causing the problems. Great, I went and found a different contact form plugin, Contact Form 7, and it is working great, as is OpenID.

I was just reading through the April issue of Website Magazine and found an article about Dofollow Blogs. I wasn’t aware of it, but most blogs add a rel="nofollow" attribute to links inside comments. I checked this blog, and lo and behold, it did the same thing. I didn’t like that at all, link love is one of the few benefits you get for reading and commenting on blogs. So, I immediately went to work to fix this.

The first solution I found was a plugin (more like 10 of them). I was scanning through them to find one that would definitely work with WordPress 7.1 and stumbled across an article on Perishable Press that explained how to do it without a plugin.

So I SSH into my server and find that the file mentioned in the article doesn’t exist in this version. Hmm, this article was written in 2007, I imagine WordPress has changed some since then. So, I take a guess at which file might hide the functions with the offending nofollow… and what do you know? I found it my first try.

So anyway, here’s the good stuff you’ve been waiting for. To make your WordPress 2.7.1 blog DoFollow just edit the file wp-includes/comment-template.php line 148:

From:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' class='url'>$author</a>";

To:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external' class='url'>$author</a>";

Basically, take out the nofollow and preceding space.

To future commenters (and past commenters), you now get some link love. Thank you for reading and taking the time to comment.

Well, a couple of months ago, I made Navajo County’s Parcel Search start getting data from the new Assessor’s database. They have moved from the Arizona Department of Revenue’s CCIS to Colorado Customware Inc’s RealWare product, affectionately known as CCI. All things said and done, it wasn’t too bad of a process.

Obstacle 1

Where is the data located?

With a lot of help from Mohave County’s Systems & Database Admin, Gary Waters, this step wasn’t too bad. I realized what I needed was the DataMart schema… but I didn’t quite understand how I was supposed to populate it. Gary kept telling me about this job they have that populates it nightly, but I couldn’t even find (in Oracle Enterprise) where Oracle keeps it’s jobs. I eventually found a query that would list them for me, but we had no such job.

The next day, or thereabouts, Jeff, one of the other Navajo County programmers, noted that he had found a DataMart application and had populated the schema. As he was explaining how to install it (it’s included in the advanced RealWare install), I realized I had seen it there when I was installing RealWare on my machine, duh. Oh well, all in a day’s work, I guess.

With the help of the SQL scripts that Gary sent along, I started to piece together how the data was arranged in the database. On to… (continue reading…)