Window 7 Media Center Weather Alerts

Posted by in General

The past few days have been quite rainy for the Twin Cities, around four inches of rain have fell in the past 48 hours. Tonight, a storm popped up north of Lake Minnetonka which produced a few tornadoes as it has made it’s way east. Before one actually knew a weather event was going on in the area, the cable internet dropped out. However, Windows Media Center was able to get a National Weather Service Tornado Warning message, and display it over playing video.WMC warning system

When in this “Warning Overlay” mode Windows Media Center will not record live TV, or allow the guide to show up with the arrow keys. Once the warning expires, Windows Media Center removes the overlay and restores normal functionality. It is not clear if this is the intended behavior or not. The apparent intent is to keep the user at the current channel. However, this does hinder the ability of the user to tune to a channel with more weather information if not already on one.

-John Havlik

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Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

Holy consolidated plugins Batman! With Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0, only one plugin is shipped, the old and separate “core” and “administrative interface” plugins have been superseded with just one Breadcrumb NavXT plugin. Direct access to the bcn_breadcrumb and bcn_breadcrumb_trail classes is still possible for those who need more flexibility than the administrative interface offers. Under the hood, the bcn_breadcrumb class has expanded to include some code that should have been in it rather than bcn_breadcrumb_trail. At the same time the code in the bcn_breadcrumb_trail class has been refactored to reduce duplicate code and reduce execution time.

Minor changes were made to the XML importer/exporter so that the XML output is well formed XML. With Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0, two new translation sets have been added, Swedish and Russian thanks to Patrik Spathon and Yuri Gribov. There are now five up to date translations distributed with Breadcrumb NavXT along with the default English strings. These are:

  • Spanish by Karin Sequen
  • German by Tom Klingenberg
  • Dutch by Stan Lenssen
  • Russian by Yuri Gribov
  • Swedish by Patrik Spathon

Again, the French translation has not been updated for this release since the former translator did not respond to the release notice a week ago. If you know French and can update the translation, please leave a comment to this post. Also, if you do not see your language in the list and wish to provide a translation, please leave a comment to this post stating so.

You can grab the latest version of Breadcrumb NavXT from the Breadcrumb NavXT page.

-John Havlik

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Prepairing for Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

Next week, Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0 will be released. This release contains several under-the-hood changes, and a few general changes that will affect everyone.

First off, there will only be one plugin distributed with Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0. The core plugin was removed, and the administrative interface plugin was renamed to just “Breadcrumb NavXT”. For most users, this change will only require that the user verifies the WordPress plugin updater reactivates the correct plugin. For those manually accessing the bcn_breadcrumb_trail class, you may continue to do so, just keep in mind that you just activate the “Breadcrumb NavXT” plugin rather than the core plugin. The other notable change that affects everyone is the “Breadcrumb Max Title Length” setting now affects the length of all breadcrumb titles, not just the current post’s title.

Those who are manually accessing the bcn_breadcrumb_trail class there are several changes to the bcn_breadcrumb_trail and bcn_breadcrumb classes. These changes are part of a code refactoring effort that reduced much of the duplicate code within the plugin and standardize the code style within the plugin. Previously, the core classes did not explicitly need PHP5, however, beginning with Breadcrumb NavXT 3.3.0 they require PHP5.

In the next week, the documentation for Breadcrumb NavXT will be updated to reflect the changes in 3.3.0, and a new set of tutorials will be written during August.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Quick and Easy Apple.com Style Breadcrumb Trail for WordPress

Posted by in Guides

Almost a year ago, Janko Jovanovic posted a guide on how a little xHTML and CSS can duplicate the Apple.com store breadcrumb trail. Today, I’m going to show you how to apply Janko’s code to WordPress using Breadcrumb NavXT.

Ok, now with the requirements. You’ll need a WordPress blog (everyone should be running 2.8.1 by now), and Breadcrumb NavXT 3.2.1 (or newer).

First up, the xHTML. We are going to use the function bcn_display_list(), which was introduced in Breadcrumb NavXT 3.2.0. This will output a breadcrumb trail in list form. It is worth noting that bcn_display_list() does not output a <ul> or <ol> tag, those must be added around the calling function. We want to wrap the code with <ul> tags.

<ul class="breadcrumb_trail"> <?php if(function_exists('bcn_display_list')) { bcn_display_list(); } ?> </ul>

Place this code where you want the breadcrumb trail to show up, I recommend placing it in your theme’s header.php file. That is all the xHTML work that we need to do. Now, on to the CSS. Open up your theme’s style.css file. We’ll start with styling the <ul>.

.breadcrumb_trail { font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; background: url('images/bc_bg.png') repeat-x; height:30px; line-height:30px; color:#9b9b9b; border:solid 1px #cacaca; width:100%; overflow:hidden; margin:0px; padding:0px; }

Line by line this is setting the font to the Arial/Helvetica family at the 11px size for the breadcrumb trail. Then, we set the background to an image and will repeat it horizontally across the screen. We set the height to 30 pixels for the unordered list and all text within it. This is because the background image is 30 pixels high, and the second will allow the text to be centered vertically without extra work. We set the text color to a shade of grey, this ends up being just the color of the current item breadcrumb text. We set the boarder to be 1 pixel high and a dark shade of grey in color. Next, the width of the unordered list element is set to be 100% of its containing element. We don’t want the trail to ever go outside of the preallocated area for the list, so we tell the browser to hide any overflowing content. Finally, we zero out the margin and padding.

Next we should get rid of those ugly bullet points next to each breadcrumb. Add the following code in below the code we just placed in the style.css file.

.breadcrumb_trail li { list-style:none; float:left; padding-left:10px; }

This code will remove the bullet points next to each breadcrumb, cause the breadcrumbs to line in order from left to right and to keep 10 pixels of padding between each of them. Next, let’s style up those anchors (links).

.breadcrumb_trail a { height:30px; display:block; background:url('images/bc_separator.png') right no-repeat; padding-right: 15px; text-decoration: none; color:#454545; }

Line by line this code will set the anchor height to 30 pixels. The anchors will be treated as block elements rather than inline elements. A background image will be used as our breadcrumb separator, we’ll set it to show up to the right of the anchor. We’ll allow 15 pixels to the right of each anchor so that the separator image displays properly. The normal anchor underline is removed, and finally we set the text color to a darkish gray.

Now we have a few, very short blocks of CSS styling for the hover condition on the anchor and the home breadcrumb icon.

.breadcrumb_trail a:hover { color:#0088ff; }

When the anchors are hovered over this code will set the color of the anchor to a color similar to teal.

.breadcrumb_trail .home img { border: none; margin: 9px 0px; }

This centers the home icon vertically within the home breadcrumb. Now, save your style.css file.

Time to change a few settings in the Breadcrumb NavXT page. If Breadcrumb NavXT is not already activated, activate it at this time. The next step is different depending on the version of Breadcrumb NavXT you are using.

  • For Breadcrumb NavXT versions prior to 4.0: Under the General tab in the Breadcrumb NavXT settings page, change the Home Title from “Home” to <img src="YOUR_BLOG_URL/wp-content/themes/YOUR_ACTIVE_THEME/images/home.png" alt="Home" />.
  • For Breadcrumb NavXT 4.x: Under the General tab in the Breadcrumb NavXT settings page, change the Home Template to <a class="%type%" title="Go to %title%." href="%link%"><img src="YOUR_BLOG_URL/wp-content/themes/YOUR_ACTIVE_THEME/images/home.png" alt="%title%" /></a> and the Home Template (Unlinked) to <img src="YOUR_BLOG_URL/wp-content/themes/YOUR_ACTIVE_THEME/images/home.png" alt="%title%" />.

Remember to replace YOUR_BLOG_URL with the URL for your blog, and YOUR_ACTIVE_THEME with the folder name for your currently active theme. Save the settings. Note: this will have to be changed every time you change themes. If you feel adventurous, you can directly access the bcn_breadcrumb_trail class, which will allow you to assign a dynamic Home Title.

Finally, download this archive with the three images, home.png, bc_seperator.png, and bc_bg.png (The home.png was replaced from Janko’s originals as I didn’t like it). Upload it to your current theme’s images directory. If this directory does not exist, make one and place the images in it. Now, you should have a breadcrumb trail that looks like that on Apple.com.

-John Havlik

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Weblogs.us Plagiarism Policy

Posted by in Weblogs.us

This week Weblogs.us encountered a sad first. It involves violations of the TOS, and subsequent suspension of the accounts in question. We had an influx of ‘UK’ based blogger request accounts so they could blog on the topics of ‘health’, ‘beauty’, and ‘sexual health’. The email requests all appeared to be from a template, awkwardly warm greeting, fake pseudonym, referred to our service as our “blogging platform”, and they all wanted to talk about ‘health’, ‘beauty’, and ‘sexual health’.

JD had granted a few of them blogs, all of which have now been suspended. What tipped us off to issues was one of the spam bloggers complained that they could not make any posts. Before looking at the error logs, I knew it was a mod_security rule that had been tripped. Sure enough, upon inspection it was. However, what tripped mod_security was interesting. Instead of the common anti-injection attack filters, it was the anti-spam filters. The logs revealed another interesting tidbit, the user behind one of the blogs was behind another newly hosted blog by Weblogs.us.

After looking at the exact content that they attempted to post, I did a quick Google search, and found they had just copied and pasted an article by someone else, and claimed it as their own. I immediately suspended their account for plagiarism. The funny thing is the user contacted us wondering why his/her blog was suspended. Apparently, he/she agreed to our TOS without reading it.

Plagiarism, as with copyright infringement in general, is prohibited on Weblogs.us. Depending on the extent of the violation, the blog may be suspended immediately, and without notice. This particularly applies to verbatim copying of content from other sources without citation of the source.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]