There’s a cool plugin for Wordpress which allows you to add picasa uploaded pics on your wordpress blog, that too in a nice-n-neat lightbox popup.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/picasa-lightbox/

you’ll also need the lightbox2 plugin for the above plugin to work.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightbox-2-wordpress-plugin/

~Nac

Last year, all of a sudden on the occasion of valentine’s day, I ran up to an ISP and got my site registered. Before that, I was happily running a server on my IP, so the start took off within hours. Since then, the website has seen quite a few good things, one of which.. is, this blog.

Blog helped my learning a log during this period. A LOT with HTML and CSS and a bit with PHP as well. It gave me a nice interface to ramble about noob things and kittens ^_^. The homepage though, didnot see much change. Apart from the “Visible” part, the site helped me understand the various factors in Web Hosting, Domain Names, Nameservers, Mail servers, databases, subversion and MUCH MUCH More…..

Currently site hosts a pretty web server running a blog in PHP, a nameserver receiving mails for me, it’s very own nameserver to manage subdomains and a decent database server to satisfy all the data needs. Apart from that, i happen to use the server for my ‘project versioning’ and ‘PHP hesting’ needs (or whatever interesting web thing that comes accross).

IT’s been fun to have a server for the past year and I expect this pleasure for all the years yet to come Thanks to all viewers and commenters for all those views and comments, which gave me a feeling of satisfaction and comfort about my website.

~JaguarNac~
(Meow Meow)

The link below talks about URL routing in PHP. It’s a three part series which tells about a basic .htaccess file that facilitates the URL routing and gives some php codes and classes to interpret the URLs and have them handled by appropriate controllers.

http://www.phpaddiction.com/tags/category/url-routing/

Now, here comes some interesting information to make the same thing work for “Aliases” in apache. I’m using apache on windows XP so, things here will talk only about apache on window. Same may work for other systems, but, I am not sure about that. (you may want to browse for documentations/help files/tutorials to enable and use mod_alias and mod_rewrite. I wont be writing much about them frankly because I don’t know much about them…)

Alias

By default, apache processes and serves the files from it’s documentRoot directory. It’s like a default directory for the web files to be served by the server.

So, when a URL is like www.somesite.com/meow/meow1.php, and my documentRoot is D:/apache/htdocs , Apache will serve D:/apache/htdocs/meow/meow1.php file by default.

However, when our meow directory does not fall under the documentRoot, that’s when we need to use aliases. Using aliases, we can have apache serve files from location other than documentRoot.

Suppose, my “meow” directory is located at “l:\apps” and i want to serve files from that directory for all “/meow” links to my site, i can add a line n httpd.conf to get this done.

Alias /meow l:/apps/meow

This creates an alias for /meow. Now, instead of documentroot, apache comes to l:/apps/meow for all www.somesite.com/meow links.

now apache also needs a <Directory > directive to define various options and access policies for “l:/apps/meow” directory.

<Directory “l:/apps/meow”>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

This block allows access to “l:/apps/meow” and also facilitates .htaccess file in the directory to manipulate all available settings for the directory. You need to place the .htaccess from “URL Routing with PHP” part one in that directory.

Options +FollowSymLinks
IndexIgnore */*
# Turn on the RewriteEngine
RewriteEngine On
# Rules
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php

Now, when you try out the first part here, everything does not work perfect…. Apache says “Bad Request” (400)

“The Problem”

Everything till here goes file, except for one thing.
The .htaccess would have worked perfect if your meow was in documentroot.

When a request like www.somesite.com/meow/abc/pqr/xyz is handled, the .htaccess in “l:/apps/meow” comes into action.

Alias takes the request to l:/meow/abc/pqr/xyz .
Provided that none of the directories in url exist beyond /meow, Apache rewrites the URL .
it takes the /abc/pqr/xyz part out and puts index.php in the place. So, request goes to l:/meow/index.php

But… that is not what we exactly want.

when, instead of alias, the meow exists under document root, (say d:/apache/htdocs), the similar request gets processed in a slightly different manner.

The request is taken to d:/apache/htdocs/meow/abc/pqr/zyx
it takes the /abc/pqr/xyz part out and puts index.php in the place. So, request goes to d:/apache/htdocs/meow/index.php
now, as d:/apache/htdocs is documentRoot, apache reduces the url to /meow/index.php only.

In case of aliases, the last step does not occur.

The Solution

In order to take the request to /meow/index.php instead of l:/apps/meow/index.php, we need to add “rewriteBase /meow” to our .htaccess file (without quotes”. This directive tells apache about the base URL from which, relative URLs can be constructed. So, the new .htaccess looks like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
IndexIgnore */*
# Turn on the RewriteEngine
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /meow
# Rules
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php

Once the rewriteBase is in place, URL www.somesite.com/meow/abc/pqr/xyz gets properly routed to www.somesite.com/meow/index.php. Thus, making us feel Happy ^^

That’s it for the aliases, apache and htaccess. It took some browsing, log tracking and afternoon hours to get things right with aliases. I’m not sure about complete correctness of the above process, this is how it worked for me. If you find any flaw or wish to make any addition/suggestion, please do so, It’s most welcome

~JaguarNac

Its kinda shy and scared of people. It does not let anybody come too close and simply backs off on slightest sign of danger. Its small and cute ^^ . Good thing is… my Granny and Mom both are quite fine with this ‘couple-o-hour’ visitor for now.

~Nac~

I’m beginning to like my new blog layout. Its not yet complete though… The layout is only plaintext. Images are used only as part of the blog post and nowhere in the layout.

Another interesting thing which I’m slightly feeling proud of is, I was able to get right colors without using any graphical programs or tools. I’m getting a general idea of combining the hexadecimals to get a desired colour. Which I must say, is fun !!

I’m satisfied with the sidebar appearance and will now concentrate on the “post” look and feel followed by the “Comments” page look and feel.

BTW, name the meow in the previous post and the image above is “Goldy”. It’s furry, cute and soft.

Concluding this post…

~JaguarNac~
(Happy indeed)

It says that it can manage manage images in the blog automatically. Lets see…

OK… now the post is saved, and I’m editing it further.
Initially, the picture thingy gave some trouble uploading merely because of insufficient rights on FTP server. But a simple change made things to work find, and ultimately made possible for u all to see the cute meow above.

After making second publish and running around the house for a while, here I state the procedure to make posts to WordPress from microsoft word.

1. Select New -> New Blog Post
2. (Here I assume that you have not set up any blog before this.) Word asks you to set up a blog account and asks for Blog Provider.
3. Select Wordpress.
4. Next, it asks for blog post URL. Heep the “http://” and ” /xmlrpc.php” as is and put in your blog url in between (in my case, it was www.jaguarnac.com/blog).
5. Put in your username and password for the blog.
6. IF you want winword to upload pictures automatically on FTP, click Image Options
7. On the menu that appears, put in the FTP URL of directory where you’d want your images to be placed and it’s respective web URL.
8. That should successfully configure your blog account.
9. Now, in the new post that u’ve created, change the title, add some and hit “Publish”.
10. If u’ve configured image options as well, word will automatically upload the images in ur post to the FTP server specified and place the respective image URL in the post.
11. Your post will get published on the blog !!

That’s it…

Blogger can be configured in similar manner. However I only know about FTP image options and have no idea about how to make it work with other image service providers.

That’s it for now…

~ Have Funn ~

JaguarNac

looks fresher…

the blue linkholder band has vanished from the top, replaced by a theme-default image
I’ll soon replace this thingy with a few meows and me owns
however… all has not been good…..

due to some unusual error, my database crashed today
leaving me no whatsoever choice than to reinstall…
no backup had been taken since last month

thus, yes… i have lost a few really precious posts.
and a few hard-to come comments…….

for now, i’m glad that its back online.
will take up the pace again and fillup the lost data with even better enthusiasm.

For I was, am and will always be…
~JaguarNac~