A web development/programming blog providing info, tips, and tricks on programming languages, scripting, Linux, MySQL and more
Development
Our first WordPress Plugin: WordPress Woot Watcher
Feb 17th
In conjunction with Lee Thompson of MySQLHow2.com, we have released our first WordPress Plugin:
WordPress Woot Watcher
WordPress Woot Watcher, will monitor and check woot, shirt.woot, kids.woot, wine.woot and sellout.woot for new products every 10 hours. When a woot-off is launched, the widget will update the woot product every 30 seconds. WordPress Woot Watcher is a sidebar widget that enables select the woot sites you want to monitor in the administration section. The default installation selects woot.com only.
For all the details, installation, and more, visit the WordPress Woot Watcher page.
How to append values to an array in bash
Feb 4th
Last week I was working on a bash script for a project at work. The script parsed through a log file with server load and disk usage statistics at regular intervals. The script was calculating the average CPU idle time, disk utilization, and disk usage for servers. After calculating the averages for each of these three metrics, I then proceeded to loop through all the lines in the file and create an array of all the times when the CPU idle time was below average, or the disk utilization or usage was above average.
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Avoid WordPress StatPress plugin like the plague!
Dec 2nd
The WordPress plugin StatPress is an absolutely horrid plugin to use. Yes, I said it…horrid! After seeing many people praising this plugin on their sites, this is a bold statement.
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New website launch: OneWordSurveys.com
Oct 19th
Desert Web Designs is pleased to announce the launch of our latest site:
OneWordSurveys.com
The Site
OneWordSurveys.com is a site as simple as it’s concept: Simple (one word) answers to simple questions. The site poses simple questions to users, all with one word answers. Questions like “Soda or Pop?”, “Coke or Pepsi?”, “Biscuits or Muffins?”, and much, much more. The site also provides a means for users to submit their own surveys as well.
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Lots of Upcoming Projects
Jul 13th
So all of my dedicated readers out there (both of you) who may be wondering where the posts have been, you can rest easy easier. I have been working on a number of pretty big projects lately that have been taking up most of my time and just started another one. I’ll try to continue posting as often as I can during this development time, but as you can see, they have slipped a bit. I’m excited about all the projects I have and will post them here, of course, once completed, and maybe even some progress updates.
How to Post to Twitter from a Linux Shell
Jun 18th
I had a little downtime today and work and decided to write a shell script that I could use to tweet from the shell of my Linux server. The reason is that Twitter is one of many social networking sites that is blocked at my workplace. However, I do have access to my server and found a great one-liner on commandlinefu.com to update twitter via curl. I decided to expand on this a bit and wrote a shell script that offers a bit more than merely posting a tweet. Check out my shell script to post to Twitter here.
New GreaseMonkey Script: Highlight your Domain in Search Results
Jun 17th
I completed my first GreaseMonkey script for public release tonight. For those who don’t use it, or have not heard of it, GreaseMonkey is a Firefox Add-on that allows users to write or install custom javascripts to alter the way a website functions. It is one of Firefox’s most popular add-ons with over 20 million downloads. Literally thousands of GreaseMonkey scripts are available at userscripts.org and new scripts are added constantly.
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How to Insert Google Ads into the Content of your WordPress Post
Jun 15th
Have you ever wondered how to get your Google Ads inside your post content like I have below? A couple of days ago, I was trying to figure out how to insert Google Adsense Ads directly into my post content without pasting the whole Adsense code. I came across an article that detailed exactly what I was looking for: Insert Google Adsense Code Anywhere In Your Wordpress Article.
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How to fix a broken WordPress RSS feed
Jun 9th
Looking over my analytics for my blog the last couple days, I’ve noticed I have got a couple of referral visits from my web design company website. I added a FeedBurner widget to the front of that site highlighting my 5 most recent blog posts. Out of curiosity, I was browsing on that website and notice the Widget stated “Watch this space for future items!” Well that was just weird to me since I post every day. Upon further research, FeedBurner was showing an error “There is an issue that must be addressed with your source feed for the feed”. When I went to my actual feed URL, I got the following error:
XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
Location: http://www.poundbangwhack.com/feed/
Line Number 2, Column 1:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
^
27 Free Social Networking/Social Bookmarking Icons
May 24th
Here is the first set of social networking badges I have designed. It includes badges for delicious, facebook, google, technorati, stubmleupon, and more. These badges were inspired by a few of the badges have on my site under the social heading below right. I decided to develop a full set of “bar shaped” badges for sharing. Download the zip file below and use these on your website or blog to link to your social networking
