I’m a dork.  I hate when some words are overused.  Right now i feel like the most overused word on the internet is “epic.”  I also dislike when people use the word “hubby” instead of “husband.”  I imagine you might have your own pet peeves.  Maybe you wish people would write “haha” instead of “lol” or something else.  Well, there is an easily cusomized Greasemonkey script that will do that for you.

Here is a headline from Yahoo’s homepage today:

Yes, their trek may have been epic – but just like the TV show Alias used “insane” in almost every single episode (and 24 seems to come quite close) i feel the need to thin it down.  Here it is after i installed and customized the Replace Text On Webpages script.

Ahhhh… much better!  I was only concerned that it might change words that have “epic” in the middle such as “depict” but a check on the very neat morewords.com list for epic has a blank line where the words should be and all the other words that contain it are unchanged.

By changing the end of the url of the morewords link you can find all kinds of neat stuff.  Like words that contain fun.  Which gives birth to sentences like “i put the fun in antifungal” or “he puts the rape in cameraperson” – you get the picture.

I have pretty much left Myspace because it became an ugly glitter-graphic factory. I’m interested in social websites to keep up with friends – not to have a ugly St. Patrick’s Day graphic splashed on my page. The way that people would set their backgrounds and add images, slideshows, blast music… I just didn’t like it.

I liked Facebook’s approach – you got a feed of your friend’s new status, uploaded photos… simple and elegant. And then all sorts of applications started clogging my feed. I started using the “hide” feature to block them. Some manage to give me notifications too. Ooohhh… how exciting. I got to wondering how many applications i had blocked from my friend feed. Here’s how to find out…

1. Log into your Facebook page
2. On the left side of the home page click on “more” below the “News Feed” list.
3. Click on the name of one of the applications in the list.
4. Click on “edit options.”
5. Select “Applications.”
6. Use your mouse to highlight all of the applications in the list.
7. Copy the selection with a keyboard shortcut or right click for the menu.
8. Open up Word or another robust text editor.
9. Paste the selection in. This may take a while. Mine made 137 pages!
10. Use the “replace” tool to replace the words “add to news feed” with something like “holy cow!”
11. When the tool finishes it should tell you how many instances were replaced…

12. Find a Greasemonkey script to take care of all the work for me… Here!

I don’t want to say too much and get banned in anihC (that’s backwards) but it is SUPER easy to get around government, corporate or school filters that prevent visiting websites with banned material.

Pepper can’t access any Blogger sites, nor Wikipedia, CNN, Facebook… While i was over there i set up an account on my web host, installed software on my netbook, changed settings in Firefox… It took me an hour to get all set up and learn it and then i spent two hours trying to get her Mac set to do the same.

This time around i did the right search. (Which is easier when most of the good results are not blocked!) I found this script called Glype. It is free. Just download it, extract the files, make a directory on your website (maybe called “proxy” – hint, HINT!) and upload the contents of the “upload” folder from the extracted files. After finding the php script while in bed on my netbook, i dashed down to my desk, downloaded, extracted, uploaded and tested the service in under 5 minutes.

I should set them up on other sites i host…

(In order to get Facebook to allow a login i had to use lite.facebook.com)

Here is how I managed to add blog posts of a certain tag or category to a feed that is then added to Google’s Merchant (Shopping) service.  See my items here.

1. Add the Feed Wrangler plugin to your WordPress installation.
2. Activate the plugin and add a feed called “itemsforsale”
3. Go to http://www.yourblognamehere.com/?feed=itemsforsale It should be a blank document – not missing, just blank.  You may need to edit an old blog post and resave it to update the cache.
4. Save this file to your computer but change the file from .txt to .php and open it for editing.
5. If you want to use a tag or category other than “itemsforsale” on your blog posts change that on line 35.
   
6. Among the last dozen or so lines of code (lines 52-56 below) are some of the specific attributes that Google uses.  Using the same format as those lines (image_link, price, condition, weight, and quantity) add any other attributes you may need to use from this list.
   
7. Use your FTP program to copy the file to your theme directory… /wp-content/themes/your_theme/
8. Make a test post in your blog.  Name your item and a brief description in the title.  Add more details in the post area.  Tag the post “itemsforsale” or whatever you set in step 5.  Then expand the “Custom Fields” section below your blog post editor.  Make custom fields for condition, price,  imagelink, etc.  Match the text you used after $key in step six above for the name of the custom field.  For this test item set values for the five attributes included in my template (except for weight they are all required by Google).  For future posts you do not need to recreate the custom field, just pick the field from the dropdown and enter the value.  Do only one item for now to make sure everything works.  Publish your item.
   
9. Go to http://www.yourblognamehere.com/?feed=itemsforsale again.  This time your test post should show up.  Save the page to your computer and make sure it is saved as an .xml file.
10. Become a Google Merchant.
11. Make a new feed in Google Merchant.  Data feed type is googlebase.  Data feed filename should be feed-itemsforsale.xml.  Save Changes.
12. Do a manual upload of your file that was saved in step 9 above.
13. Wait for a little while for the file to process.  After it has completed click on the data feed name to check for errors.
14. Be familiar with the Program Policies.  They stipulate things like “All item pages must be able to accept electronic payments and process transactions securely online (SSL-protected).” You might want to consider setting up Google Checkout as a merchant.
15. If you get it working please consider making a donation to me or at the very least a nice comment here!
    
    
    

I need to face the facts. I look at a computer screen more than i look at the sky. Sometimes i wish i would remember to at least check the Aurora Forecast page at least daily just in case there is a good chance of a strong display. But i don’t. And believe it or not, they don’t have an rss feed to show the forecast on your newsreader. So i made one.

I used the Feed43 service to scrape content from the site – the day, level and image of the forecast. So if you have a newsreader and just want the rss feed you can grab it here.

I am not savvy enough to have my iGoogle page display the image with the feed so i used Widgetbox to make a widget and did some tweaking of the settings to get the image to load.

Just click on “Get Widget” at the bottom to easily add this bit of information to all kinds of sources.

If there is interest I can easily make a widget that shows the forecast from a less Alaska-centric perspective. This one covers North America nicely…

In fact… that perspective is so nice I think i’ll whip it up right now…

And here’s the rss feed for that one.

Years ago i spent hours collecting odd holidays and putting them into a script that would display the date and the day’s holiday (serious and silly) on my site.  After years without it on my blog i decided to resurrect the script and add it to zieak.com once again.  It is surprisingly easy to do with WordPress widgets.

1. Log into the administration area of your blog at something like  www.myblogaddress.com/wp-admin/
2. On the left hand column part way down select “Widgets” under Appearance.
   
   

   Select "Widgets"

3. In the center area of the Widget page click on “Add” next to Text.
   
   

   Add text widget

4. On the right side of the screen a new blue bar should appear with the label “Text” at the bottom of the list of Current Widgets.
   
   

   New text widget

5. Click on “Edit” and label the widget “Today is…” or something similar.
   
   

   Name of the widget

6. Open my holiday script and copy all of the text.  Then paste it into the next field.  Then click on “Done.”
   
   

   Paste holiday script into widget

7. Drag the blue bar to the spot you would like the widget to appear in the sidebar of your blog.
   
   

   Drag the widget

8. Click on “Save Changes” at the bottom of the right column of widgets.
   
   

   Save changes

9. Republish your blog and you should now have a widget that displays the current date and at least one holiday for the day.
   
   

   Holiday and date displayed

If you would like to have any holidays added to the script you can do it yourself by adding to the right line of the code (note that January is month zero so the rest are offset by one) or you can let me know and i’ll add it to the script for an updated version.

There is some new crap on the “home” page on myspace. More “cool new videos” and featured filmmaker, comedy, music and books. I don’t like any of that stuff. So use Firefox, install Greasemonkey and this script. Or if you have the script already installed just add these lines by clicking on tools, greasemonkey, manage user scripts, A re modified user homepage, edit and then save.

var b = document.getElementById("home_coolNewVideos");
if (b) {b.parentNode.removeChild(b);}

var b = document.getElementById(“home_featured_filmmaker”);
if (b) {b.parentNode.removeChild(b);}

var b = document.getElementById(“home_featured_comedy”);
if (b) {b.parentNode.removeChild(b);}

var b = document.getElementById(“home_featured_music”);
if (b) {b.parentNode.removeChild(b);}

var b = document.getElementById(“home_featured_books”);
if (b) {b.parentNode.removeChild(b);}

I try my best to keep this site up to web standards. Since i’m always tweaking it i have to check the W3C validation service every now and then to check the pages. Silktide’s Sitescore currently looks at the validator for compliance (although they promise an update to their service this month). The Share This plugin that allows readers to submit the content to bookmarking or social websites or to email your post to others is a great plugin. It does not pass validation though. Make these changes to the code of share_this.php which should be in the share-this folder of your plugins directory of your WordPress installation. On lines 476 and 477 replace “onClick” with “onclick” and from lines 45 through 120 after every “&” put “amp;” and your page should validate. There should be 23 instances of “&” that you need to replace in version 1.4 of the plugin. Thanks to Alex King for the excellent plugin.

I’ve been using Google Webmaster tools to keep an eye on a few of my site statistics. It shows 404 errors, robots.txt problems, and other things that Google comes across that users might be hitting also. I have been using my .htaccess file to repair some of the problems. Unfortunately part of the Registerfly/Enom issues seems to have created a dynamic problem. While the site was down a placeholder page was shown and somehow Google is being directed to pages on zieak.com that do not exist as a result.

What i think is happening is that the placeholder pages for “expired” domains redirect to each other to try and increase page rank for items that consumers look for online. Eventually they point to a site that the registrar makes money off of. Fortunately zieak.com is no longer part of that network but for some reason Google is finding links to these ghost pages.

I had manually entered permanent redirect instructions on my .htaccess file like for each page that was showing as not found.

Redirect 301 /get/christening/favor/gifts/gifts.htm http://www.zieak.com

Unfortunately, my site currently has almost 100 of these www.zieak.com/get/bla/bla/bla.htm pages in the list of pages not found. Copying and pasting them in was becoming tedious. I finally found the solution to my problem in this thread about using a wildcard for a redirect in your .htaccess file. So now i can redirect Google (or any other bot or human) to my main page instead of a file not found notice.

RedirectMatch 301 ^/get/ http://www.zieak.com

It seems that all of the problems coming in are for /get/ and /buy/ directories on my site. I’ll just be sure to never structure my directories to use those folders.

I was just trying to send a message to a friend on Myspace and noticed that the person’s entire profile area was trying to redirect me to login-sm.info via google. That page is down but it probably went to a “You must be logged in to do that” page that looked like it was Myspace – luring more people into the spiral.

Looking at the source of their page it looks like their “Who I’d like to meet:” section was compromised which is floating a transparent gif over part of their page. It is a pretty brilliant way to dupe someone into clicking out of myspace and into the world of “mystery” bulletins that the victim “didn’t post” and spammy comments posted to friend’s pages.



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If you fall victim just log in, change your password, and remove anything in your “Who I’d like to meet:” section.

Posted 31 Jan, 2007 | No Comments
Categories: Scripts