Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
When you set up your own web server or use a private server (virtual or physical), you will find that web servers run using the www-data account. That means that website files need to be accessible to that system account if not owned by it. The latter is mandatory if you you want WordPress to be able to update itself with needing FTP details.
It also means that you probably need scheduled jobs to be executed using the privileges possess by the www-data account. For instance, I use WP-CLI to automate spam removal and updates to plugins, themes and WordPress itself. Spam removal can be done without the www-data account but the updates need file access and cannot be completed without this. Therefore, I got interested in setting up cron jobs to run under that account and the following command helps to address this:
sudo -u www-data crontab -e
For that to work, your own account needs to be listed in /etc/sudoers or be assigned to the sudo group in /etc/group. If it is either of those, then entering your own password will open the cron file for www-data and it can be edited as for any other account. Closing and saving the session will update cron with the new job details.
In fact, the same approach can be taken for a variety of commands where files only can be access using www-data. This includes copying, pasting and deleting files as well as executing WP-CLI commands. The latter issues a striking message if you run a command using the root account, a pervasive temptation given what it allows. Any alternative to the latter has to be better from a security standpoint.
Having moved beyond the slow response and larger memory footprint of Firefox ESR, I am using Firefox Developer Edition in its place even if it means living without a status bar at the bottom of the window. Hopefully, someone will create an equivalent of the old add-on bar extensions that worked before the release of Firefox Quantum.
Firefox Developer Edition may be pre-release software with some extras for web developers like being able to to drill into an HTML element and see its properties but I am finding it stable enough for everyday use. It is speedy too, which helps, and it has its own profile so it can co-exist on the same machine as regular releases of Firefox like its ESR and Quantum variants.
Installation takes a little added effort though and there are various options available. My chosen method involved Ubuntu Make. Installing this involves setting up a new PPA as the first step and the following commands added the software to my system:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-desktop/ubuntu-make
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-make
With the above completed, it was simple to install Firefox Developer edition using the following command:
umake web firefox-dev
Where things got a bit more complicated was getting entries added to the Cinnamon Menu and Docky. The former was sorted using the cinnamon-menu-editor command but the latter needed some tinkering with my firefox-developer.desktop file found in .local/share/applications/ within my user area to get the right icon shown. Discovering this took me into .gconf/apps/docky-2/Docky/Interface/DockPreferences/%gconf.xml where I found the location of the firefox-developer.desktop that needed changing. Once this was completed, there was nothing else to do from the operating system side.
Within Firefox itself, I opted to turn off warnings about password logins on non-https websites by going to about:config using the address bar, then looking for security.insecure_field_warning.contextual.enabled and changing its value from True to False. Some may decry this but there are some local websites on my machine that need attention at times. Otherwise, Firefox is installed with user access so I can update it as if it were a Windows or MacOS application and that is useful given that there are frequent new releases. All is going as I want it so far.
My web hosting provider offers SSH access that I often use for such things as updating Matomo and Drupal together with more intensive file moving than an FTP session can support. However, I have found in recent months that I no longer can exit cleanly from such sessions using the exit command.
Because this produces a locked terminal session, I was keen to find an alternative to shutting down the terminal application before starting it again. Handily, there is a keyboard shortcut that does just what I need.
It varies a little according to the keyboard that you have. Essentially, it combines the carriage return key with ones for the tilde (~) and period (.) characters. The tilde may need to be produced by the combining the shift and backtick keys on some keyboard layouts but that is not needed on mine. So far, I have found that the <CR>+~+. combination does what I need until SSH sessions start exiting as expected.
On here, I have posts with example commands that include double hyphens and they have been displayed merged together, something that has resulted in a comment posted by a visitor to this part of the web. All the while, I have been blaming the fonts that I have been using only for it to be the fault of WordPress itself.
Changing multiple dashes to something else has been a feature of Word autocorrect but I never expected to see WordPress aping that behaviour and it has been doing so for a few years now. The culprit is wptexturize and that cannot be disabled for it does many other useful things.
What happens is that the wptexturize filter changes ‘---‘ (double hyphens) to ‘–’ (– in web entity encoding) and ‘---‘ (triple hyphens) to ‘—’ (— in web entity encoding). The solution is to add another filter to the content that changes these back to the way they were and the following code does this:
add_filter( ‘the_content’ , ‘mh_un_en_dash’ , 50 );
function mh_un_en_dash( $content ) {
$content = str_replace( ‘–’ , ‘--‘ , $content );
$content = str_replace( ‘—’ , ‘---‘ , $content );
return $content;
}
The first line of the segment adds in the new filter that uses the function defined below it. The third and fourth lines above do the required substitution before the function returns the post content for display in the web page. The whole code block can be used to create a plugin or placed the theme’s functions.php file. Either way, things appear without the substitution confusing your readers. It makes me wonder if a bug report has been created for this because the behaviour looks odd to me.
A new feature came with Firefox 44 that only recently started to come to my notice with Yahoo Mail offering to set up browser notifications for every time when a new email arrives there. This is something that I did not need and yet I did not get the option to switch it off permanently for that website so I was being nagged every time I when to check on things for that email address, an unneeded irritation. Other websites offered to set up similar push notifications but you could switch these off permanently so it is a site by site function unless you take another approach.
That is to open a new browser tab and enter about:config in the address bar before hitting the return key. If you have not done this before, a warning message will appear but you can dismiss this permanently. Once beyond that, you are presented with a searchable list of options and the ones that you need are dom.webnotifications.enabled and dom.webnotifications.serviceworker.enabled. By default, the corresponding entries in the Value column will be true. Double-clicking on each one will set it to false and you should not see any more offers of push notifications that allow you get alerts from web services like Yahoo Mail so your web browsing should suffer less of these intrusions.
One thing that I notice with Firefox installations in both Ubuntu and Linux Mint is that a dialogue box appears when closing down the web browser asking whether to save the open session or if you want to have a fresh session the next time that you start it up. Initially, I was always in the latter camp but there are times when I took advantage of that session saving feature for retaining any extra tabs containing websites to which I want to return or editor sessions for any blog posts that I still am writing; sometimes, composing the latter can take a while.
To see where this setting is located, you need to open a new tab and type about:config in the browser’s address bar. This leads to advanced browser settings so you need click OK in answer to a warning message before proceeding. Then, start looking for browser.showQuitWarning using the Search bar; it acts like a dynamic filter on screen entries until you get what you need. On Ubuntu and Linux Mint, the value is set to true but false is the default elsewhere; unlike Opera, Firefox generally does not save sessions by fault unless you tell it to that (at least, that has been my experience anyway). Setting true to false or vice versa will control the appearance or non-appearance of the dialogue box at browser session closure time.
On one of my websites, I use Textpattern with CKEditor for editing of articles on there. This was working well until I upgraded CKEditor to a version with a number of 4.1 or newer because it started to change the HTML in my articles when I did not want it to do so, especially when it broke the appearance of the things. A search on Google revealed an unhelpful forum exchange that produced no solution to the issue so I decided to share one on here when I found it.
What I needed to do was switch off what is known as Advanced Content Filtering. It can be tuned but I felt that would take too much time so I implemented something like what you see below in the config.js with the ckeditor folder:
CKEDITOR.editorConfig = function( config ) {
config.allowedContent = true;
};
All settings go with the outer function wrapper and setting the config.allowedContent property to true within there sorted my problem as I wanted. Now, any HTML remains untouched and I am happy with the outcome. It might be better for features like Advanced Content Filtering to be switched off by default and turned on by those with the time and need for it, much like the one of the principles adopted by the WordPress project. Still, having any off switch is better than none at all.
It was an article in a magazine that revealed these legal BitTorrent download sites to me, so I thought that I’d keep them on file for future reference while also sharing them with others who might need them. As far as I am aware, they are all legal in that no copyrighted material is on there. If that changes, I am happy to know and make amendments as needed.
My own interest in torrents arises from their being a convenient way to download installation disk images for Linux distributions, and at least one of the entries is devoted to just that. However, the distribution also lends itself to movies along with music and books, so that is reflected below too. With regard to downloading actual multimedia content, there is so much illegal downloading that a list like this is needed and has blackened the reputation of BitTorrent too because it only ever was conceived as a means for distributing large files in a peer-to-peer manner without the use of a single server. Of course, any use can be found for a technology, and it never has to be legal or morally acceptable either.
Though I keep a little eye on WordPress development, it is no way near as rigorous as when I submitted a patch that got me a mention on the contributor list of a main WordPress release. That may explain how the full editor setting, which is turned on by default passed by on me without my taking much in the way of notice of it.
WordPress has become so mature now that I almost do not expect major revisions like the overhauls received by the administration back-end in 2008. The second interface was got so right that it still is with us and there were concerns in my mind at the time as to how usable it would be. Sometimes, those initial suspicions can come to nothing.
However, WordPress 4.0 brought a major change to the editor and I unfortunately am not sure that it is successful. A full height editor sounds a good idea in principle but I found some rough edges to its present implementation that leave me wondering if any UX person got to reviewing it. The first reason is that scrolling becomes odd with the editor’s toolbar becoming fixed when you scroll down far enough on an editor screen. The sidebar scrolling then is out of sync with the editor box, which creates a very odd sensation. Having keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+HOME and CTRL+END not working as they should only convinced me that the new arrangement was not for me and I wanted to turn it off.
A search with Google turned up nothing of note so I took to the WordPress.org forum to see if I could get any joy. That revealed that I should have thought of looking in the screen options dropdown box for an option called “Expand the editor to match the window height” so I could clear that tickbox. Because of the appearance of a Visual Editor control on there, I looked on the user profile screen and found nothing so the logic of how things are set up is sub-optimal. Maybe, the latter option needs to be a screen option now too. Thankfully, the window height editor option only needs setting once for both posts and pages so you are covered for all eventualities at once.
With a distraction-free editing option, I am not sure why someone went for the full height editor too. If WordPress wanted to stick with this, it does need more refinement so it behaves more conventionally. Personally, I would not build a website with that kind of ill-synchronised scrolling effect so it is something needs work as does the location of the Visual Editor setting. It could be that both settings need to be at the user level and not with one being above that level while another is at it. Until I got the actual solution, I was faced with using distraction-free mode all the time and also installed the WP Editor plugin too. That remains due to its code highlighting even if dropping into code view always triggers the need to create a new revision. Despite that, all is better in the end.
The default PHP version on my outdoors, travel and photography website is 5.2.17 and that is getting on a bit now since it is no longer supported by the PHP project and has not been thus since 2011. One obvious impact was Piwik, which I used for web analytics and needs at least 5.3.2. WordPress 4.0 even needs 5.2.24 so that upgrade became implausible so I contacted Webfusion’s support team and they showed me how to get to at least 5.3.3 and even as far as 5.5.9. The trick is the addition of a line of code to the .htaccess file (near the top was my choice) like one of the following:
PHP 5.3.x
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php
PHP 5.5.x
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php55 .php
When I got one of these in place, things started to look promising but for a locked database due to my not watching how big it had got. Replacing it with two additional databases addressed the problem of losing write access though there was a little upheaval caused by this. Using PHP 5.5.9 meant that I spotted messages regarding the deprecation of the mysql_connect function so that needed fixing too (prefixing it with @ might be a temporary fix but a more permanent one always is better so that is what I did in the form of piggybacking off what WordPress uses; MySQLi and PDO_MySQL are other options). Sorting the database issue meant that I saw the upgrade message for WordPress as well as a mix of plugins and themes so all looked better and I need worry less about losing security updates. Also, I am up to the latest version of Piwik too and that’s an even better way to be.