Category Archives: Guides

Tips, tricks, and guides around pitfalls of technology.

Using Schema.org’s Breadcrumb Microdata with Breadcrumb NavXT

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Note, that Schema.org breadcrumb has been replaced by the newer BreadcrumbList. Please see the How to Implement Schema.org BreadcrumbList with Breadcrumb NavXT article for more information.

Unlike Google’s Breadcrumb micodata format, Schema.org’s microdata format for breadcrumbs is very easy to implement. There is no need for nested tags, or overly verbose and redundant tags. Instead, there is just two modifications from the standard Breadcrumb NavXT setup.

Breadcrumbs are a property of the Schema.org WebPage CreativeWork type. The first thing you must do to use the Schema.org microdata is declare the body of the (x)HTML page to be of type WebPage. You’ll need to modify your current WordPress theme so that the opening body tag is:

<body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage">

Once we’ve declared our body to be of type WebPage, all we have to do is include itemprop=”breadcrumb” in the div wrapping around the breadcrumb trail. For example, we’d use:

<div itemprop="breadcrumb" class="breadcrumbs">
    <?php if(function_exists('bcn_display')) { bcn_display(); }?>
</div>

That’s it! Note that this does not work with the included widget in 4.0.1, and is something that will be changed for the next release.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Ceton InfiniTV Tips

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Back on Black Friday, Newegg had the Ceton InfiniTV for $260, with free shipping. For a quad tuner card that’s a pretty good deal, considering it originally retailed for $400. On that Saturday the price dropped to $220 (still at that price), which is an absolute steal. Having the card for most of December, I just got it working fully (decryption all the channels we pay for) last Thursday. Here are some tips I learned from the experience.

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Use an Icon/Image for the Home Breadcrumb

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This is a really easy one. However, as I’ve been asked about it several times in the past few weeks, I’m going to post about it.

One way of using an image rather than just text for the home breadcrumb was covered in the Vista-Like Breadcrumbs for WordPress article back in 2009. However, that guide is more or less an advanced topic, and directly accesses the bcn_breadcrumb_trail class, something that is currently not recommended.

Since at least Breadcrumb NavXT 3.0, the settings page allows you to use valid HTML in some fields. In the future this will be more obvious due to settings page tweaks as it is not exactly obvious that this is possible. There are really only three steps to changing from text to an image for the home breadcrumb:

  1. Go to the Breadcrumb NavXT settings page (under Settings > Breadcrumb NavXT).
  2. On the “General” tab, look for the “Home Template” option.
  3. Replace the text value of the “Home Template” option with the valid HTML for your image. e.g.
    <img src="http://YOUR_URL/YOUR_HOME_IMAGE" alt="Home"/> where YOUR_URL is the URL for your website, and YOUR_HOME_IMAGE is the name of the image, including file extension.

That’s it, and it also works for the “Blog Breadcrumb” and “Mainsite Breadcrumb” in setups that have these breadcrumb types.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Make Teamspeak 3 Use Your QT libs

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After upgrading some core files this past week on my laptop, I noticed that Teamspeak 3 no longer would open. I have a desktop icon that calls the script that starts Teamspeak. When I opened up a terminal and tried to run the script, I recieved this error:

ts3client_linux_amd64: error while loading shared libraries: libpng12.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Well, I have libpng 1.4.3 on my laptop, and I’d prefer to not have multiple versions installed. Luckily, the cause of this issue is the QT4 library files that ship with Teamspeak 3. If you have KDE4, like I do, then all you have to do is move these QT files out of the Teamspeak 3 install directory. A quick way to do this is to use the following once you are in the directory where Teamspeak 3’s files are located:

mkdir backup
mv libQt* ./backup/

Now Teamspeak 3 will use your already installed system QT4 library files, and Teamspeak 3 should now work with modern versions of libpng.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]