From the award-winning documentary, "Playing For Change: Peace Through Music", comes the first of many "songs around the world" being released independently. Featured is a cover of the Ben E. King classic by musicians around the world adding their part to the song as it travelled the globe.

Isn’t it too unnecessary to say more?!

You probably didn’t hear of Don.Jezzy ever before, but he’s my beloved little brother. Ever since I gave him my Canon Rebel XSi camera as a gift, he has amazed me with his talent in creative digital photography and design. The subjects of the photographs he makes and/or creates vary from occasional shots to sudden or long thought ideas. In this post I will only show two of the recent ones he published in his photostream and I’m sure this is just the beginning of his journey, although he’s been on the scene for quite some time now. Hope you enjoy what you’re about to see.

Caught by neon ribbons!

Do you see anything now?!

Your comments and evaluations are of course well valued from me and from him. If you like what you just see here I encourage you to check out his Flickr Profile and don’t hesitate to drop off a comment, let that be appreciation or criticism. We’re open-minded and accept both.

Eleven months ago I had an idea about a WordPress feature which gives a user the opportunity to put blog into maintenance mode, or turning it On/Off in special occasions to be more exact. I didn’t hesitate to suggest it to the public WP community. For eleven months, except good willing WP users, nobody from WordPress team has ever commented or said anything about possibly implementing that in any of the upcoming versions. Indeed, that can be achieved by developing a custom plug-in, but most bloggers (me for sure) tend to avoid activating too many plug-ins because it plods blog performance.

What about self-pinging?

Right! I’m sure you should already be aware of what does the term ping stand for in blogging. According to this WikiPedia article ping is:

In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated.^[1] An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.

Now there’s this very requested feature (No-Self-Ping) that has been discussed a lot around the interwebs lately, but at the time of writing it is only available as a plug-in. Honestly, pinging your own blog posts is sometimes very annoying, however, some bloggers don’t mind that but some others really do. Hence, thankfully to No-Self-Ping by Michael Adams, the annoyance is long gone and forgotten. I just had to play around with WP Core files and have modified some of them to add this option in WP-Admin –> Settings –> Discussion Settings for the only reason of not being a fan of too-many-activated-plugins at once.

Wouldn’t you really appraise a neat feature like that, an optional setting that can be turned on and off based of each of us personal taste.

Now as for No-Self-Ping, it isn’t really a big deal though because it is the smallest plug-in I have ever come across until today, so it wouldn’t really decrease your blog’s performance much. Only seven lines of code for a very useful option.

< ?php
function no_self_ping( &amp;amp;$links ) {
$home = get_option( 'home' );
foreach ( $links as $l =>$link )
if ( 0 === strpos( $link, $home ) )
unset($links[$l]);
}
add_action( 'pre_ping', 'no_self_ping' );
?> 

Seriously I would like to see this feature in the upcoming version WordPress 2.8, it will save our time and it’s nice to just have it there.

Where do you stand in this? Do you like pinging your own blog posts, or rather have that thing turned off?

As the title indicates, I am going to share with you what I had to do just yesterday after installing WAMP Server on my laptop where I run Windows 7 Beta Operating System. Honestly I never experienced this kind of trouble ever before but strange things happen regularly as we face technology on our day-to-day basis.

A little story first. I had WAMP services all running smooth and sound, however, whenever I typed http://localhost on any browser in my system, it returned a Page Not Found result. I was still able to access my local web server using 127.0.0.1, but then when it came to loading WordPress locally, no stylesheet was loaded and the page layout was totally naked. I may just assume that could also be tweaked by altering WordPress address (URL) in Admin –> Settings –> General page, but I preferred the standard approach so I had to dig deeper. If you ever happen to encounter the same issue then keep following me till the end of this explanation.

In every Windows OS there are two files, one called lmhosts.sam and the other hosts, lying deep inside C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc folder. Of course that differs for Windows NT editions, simply replace C:\Windows with C:\WINNT. Now lets get back to our task. I needed to tell Windows to consider localhost as I’d have entered 127.0.0.1 on the address bar. Hence I went and opened the hosts file in Notepad (you can use any text editor for this). All you have to do to fix the problem is go to the end of hosts content and make sure whether there is a line like this

127.0.0.1               localhost

If false, then type that in, just be sure to leave a space between the 127.0.0.1 address an localhost.

For some particularly strange reasons, after I did that WAMP still hesitated to work. So I pasted that into lmhosts.sam file too and the spell was gone.

Note: Keep in mind that normally these two files should already be configured by default once you install Windows, but this case is specific to Windows 7 Beta, therefore it’s not that strange to not be that way.

Did you experience such a problem? Were you able to fix it? Tell me your story, I’d be glad to read it.

WampServer is an open source WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL and PHP) web server, free to use with a GPL license. With other words it’s a must-have web development suite for web developers running any Windows Operating System version.

Yesterday an update was released, so I thought it’d be good to spread the announcement. The change log shows the latest occurrences to its core:

2.0-g -- 03/08/2009
now using PHP 5.2.9
now using MySQL 5.1.32
now using PHPMyAdmin 3.1.3
corrected a menu bug with apache 2.2.11
corrected notices generated by refresh.php

I even recommend it above all other possible alternatives though. Might be simply because I’m used to it, but it definitely is easy to use and configure. Well, actually it comes pre-configured but still you can’t say anything if you haven’t tried it yet.

There’s a new addition to the scene of WAMPs, a new web server called PAMPA-J an acronym for Portable Apache, MySQL, PHP Application plus Jaxer. Just downloaded it and maybe tomorrow I’ll give it a try if time promises.

Additional notes: check out this comparison of WAMPs (WikiPedia.org Article). Seems like most of them are outdated but it’s worth doing a little research until you settle your butt with the best among them.

Now that’s not a speculation. It’s a sad fact. As a matter of fact it’s disgusting. It’s something that should have been accomplished long time ago. It’s kinda absurd to try and think of what are they waiting for. WordPress Theme Editor sucks, always have. Despite that themes are easy to activate and customize, but it’s a pain in the ass to edit one within WP. Why, why, why?! (yelling out loud!).

Love me or hate me but I take no justification for this. I’m sure you don’t either. WordPress as the most popular blogging platform has a lame Theme Editor. The same applies to Plugin Editor too, for it’s no better than the alike. This situation would raise many curious questions but I honestly don’t want to go into all that. I think it’s really not worth discussing about it, or maybe it is. Well actually it is something to discuss about, and that of a high importance.

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