I was messing with the RSS feed generator, and it turns out that feedburner.com/colourfulthreads is someone else’s blog. I typed that in and let it run, rather than using the one I generated feedburner.com/jenniferscolourfulthreads.

So the RSS feed got blasted with a big bunch of someone else’s blog posts.

Oops.

A “cookie” is a little bit of text that a website can store in your browser. For example, an ad company can store a bit of text saying where you saw an ad and when. When you see another web page with an ad by the same company, they can read the cookie they left and say “Hmm, this person likes news websites.”

Regularly clearing your cookies is always a useful practice.

However, there’s a new kid in town.

FLASH COOKIES are exactly the same, except they are not stored by your browser, they are part of Flash (a program that helps you see movies and other animated content on the web). The DO NOT GET CLEARED when you clear cookies in your browser. They are NEVER cleared. Some companies use Flash cookies to rebuild a normal cookie, even if you clear them. This can be bad.

This website is the control panel for clearing your flash cookies. Look at the huge list of flash cookies that are likely already on your PC, even if you are paranoid about cookies and cache and all of that stuff. Scary, innit? You can clear them using that web page.

Now, let’s be fair. Cookies can be useful. Staying logged in so that whenever you open your browser, GMail is there and you don’t have to enter your name and password? That’s a good use of cookies. Cookies can be used for good things.

I just like having control over what’s stored about me, and I like knowing that it’s there.

If you run WordPress MultiUser (WPMU), like I do here on Wonderfulpages.com, then you’ve no doubt found the plugin trap.

Many plugins you used to use on WordPress don’t work, and to get the most obvious plugins for WPMU you need to pay wpmudev lots of money or essentially handcode them yourself. The hostage plugins include a Sitewide RSS feed, Most Recent Posts, Most Recent Comments and a few others. They’re obviously critical to a good WPMU install (who wants a main site front page without those?) , but you have to pay $79 US to get the real versions and the free versions are crappy, out of production or not much better than handcoding yourself.

I wanted a sitewide RSS feed for posts and comments so that I could use the RSS feed to populate a Most Recent Posts and Most Recent Comments area on our front page. I would end up killing three birds with one stone. I’d have my fron page data, and I’d also have a unified sitewide RSS feed for users.

Sitewide RSS Plugins: IT Damager’s plugin has disappeared from the internet. The ADA SiteWide Feed plugin had some serious bugs that prevented me from doing anything (see the comments on that page). The WPMU Dev version is $79.

So, how could I do this for free? The answer lies with feedburner and Yahoo Pipes.

You can use Yahoo Pipes to merge many RSS feeds into one. For our purposes, just add each of your sites individual post feeds (http://mysite.com/feed) or comment feeds (http://mysite.com/comments/feed) into the “Fetch Feed” module in Yahoo Pipes and sort by PubDate, descending.

Take the output of the Pipe, and create a feedburner feed for it, so you can track it and gain all the benefits of feedburner.

Upsides:

• Free
• Simple
• Uses big name providers, not likely to die soon
• Get sitewide stats and individual stats (if you create feedburner feeds for your individual sites too)

Downsides:

• You need a Yahoo and a Google account
• You need to add sites on your WPMU install manually to the feed

Next post on listing the RSS feeds on your main page coming soon.

We just dropped A LOT of money on a program called Rosetta Stone to help teach french to the kids. We bought the Homeschool Edition, with Levels 1,2 and 3 French, and the Audio Companion CDs in a bundle. (And it was a bundle, let me tell you.)

I looked around on their website, and there is a tonne of information on how to use the Homeschool Edition on a network with “SMS”, their management program. It allows you to track users and lesson progress, and allows users to log on on and use the software from any machine on the network. The explanations and instructions are very clear, and are updated as of a few weeks ago. Yay! We have a home network and a number of machines around the place, this will be great!

Rosetta Stone French comes in the mail. I open the box. I take the CDs downstairs to install on the server. I look in the box again because there is no SMS disk.

I call tech support. I wait 10 minutes. They tell me that it’s all built in now, I don’t need a separate SMS install.

I try again. I beat my head on the desk. All of this beautiful documentation and none of it seems to match what’s on my screen or in the box.

I contact tech support via email. Their submit form is VERY broken, so it won’t allow “return” characters in the explanation of your question. I have URLs and references and multiple questions, and it takes me literally 10 minutes to figure out why this form won’t take my request. The error message I get cunningly neglects to mention that CR’s aren’t allowed. Grrr.

The response I get is this:

Hi [MrPages],

Rosetta Stone Version 3 Homeschool edition is not network-able. I apologize for the inconvenience. You may install the software on two computers.

Let us know if you have further questions.

Um. Hang on a sec.

I reply with a list of articles that seems to contradict this directly.

Hi [MrPages],

Those articles are for the Version 2 product. You have the Version 3, the newest Homeschool product. Version 2 is no longer available for the language you are studying as a homeschool version. The Version 3 Homeschool product is not compatible with home networks. I apologize for the inconvenience.

If you would like to return your product, please contact Customer Care.

I reply again, pointing to documentation that specifically mentions version 3, pointing to the fact that none of the documentation is labelled as version specific, and indicating my displeasure at the removal of functionality without any documentation of such, and in fact, with documentation out there that contradicts the removal.

Then I get this wonderfully concise summary of the issue:

There are two versions of the SMS, Version 2 and Version 3. There are two versions of homeschool products, Version 2 and Version 3. The Version 2 homeschool product works with both versions of the SMS. The SMS and Version 3 do NOT work together. The Version 3 product is an entirely different setup, and is not capable of networking.

So. You’ve used the same version numbers for two separate products that used to be bundled. Now they aren’t bundled, the old version of one works with the new version of the other, but the new version of the same one won’t work with the new version of the other.

Thanks. That’s brilliantly clear. Wonderful marketing, guys.

And, like suckers, we kept the program because it’s still the best way to learn a language. It’s so frustrating to be stuck in a position like this, trapped by incompetent documentation and marketingspeak into accepting less that we ordered. And just smiling and taking it.

Rosetta Stone, you have a good product, but you suck at customer service.

If you don’t understand it, don’t worry about it, I just need to vent.

Let’s get this out of the way first: I am *not* a programmer. I kick around in code, but the concepts of pointers and object orientation make my head spin. I want to get the basics of a language, get some libraries and code snippets and put them all together into a simple database app.

I wrote a gift list registry program for our family to use, and some other people have asked about using it. It’s not set up for multiple families, so I thought I’d try writing a new version. The first thing I thought was that I’d try something new like Ruby On Rails.

I got the latest version of Ruby and Rails and got started. Well, it turns out that 99% of the books, tutorials and sample code is written for version 1.x. I stupidly listened to the guys on the Ruby site when they said to download version 2.x. 2.x has been out for over a year and there is very little in the way of practical help. The geek-manuals (which are deliberately written so that only people who already know what they’re talking about can understand them) were useless to me (see paragraph 2). Version 2.x is incompatible with version 1.x, but only subtly so. I spent 90% of my time trying to figure out how to translate the basic “hello world” type examples from one version to the other, and trying to figure out what the error message on my screen means when (I am serious here) there are TWO google hits for this message, and both of them are to the source code for Rails. So, do I develop a site in a deprecated language and just wait for the mandatory rewrite?

Just like my multiple aborted Linux installs, I just gave up.

Fast forward six months. I want to get this program going so I decide I’ll stick with PHP. I have a passing knowledge of PHP. The original gift thing is written in PHP4, so I thought this would be the easy way to go. A bit more labour intensive perhaps, but stick with what I know.

Well. PHP5 is out, and of course you’d have to be a slobbering neanderthal to use PHP4 (at least that’s what the developers seem to imply). I try to upgrade my web host to PHP5. After all, it’s backward compatible, right?

It took 2 days to get the move from PHP4 to PHP5 to not break my existing website installs (sorry Lyndon).

That got sorted out, and now I had a shiny new piece of paper to scribble on. I started out by going to look for libraries to help me do some of the heavy lifting: user management and data presentation. I looked at bunches of user authentication scripts (sidenote: SourceForge really needs to clear out the “haven’t been developed in over 7 years” projects).

It took forever to get one to work on my shared-hosting server, because I don’t have access to the PHP directories, so I had to figure out how to manually install the package, getting all the pathing right, in a subdirectory of my site root and then get the environment to find it.

I started looking for a data presentation library, and PEAR::DataGrid seems to be an obvious choice. There are two ways to access a mysql database in PEAR, PEAR::DB or PEAR:MDB2. DB is deprecated. There are dire warnings everywhere about how it isn’t developed anymore and it has been superceded my MDB2. No one, however, has told the rest of the internet about this.

In a situation that exactly mirrors the Ruby on Rails upgrade fiasco, there are next to no practical tutorials on how to use MDB2. All of the sample code uses DB. All of the downloadable libraries and source code are for DB.

After another couple of days of whacking away at it, I actually managed to get MDB2 and PEAR::DataGrid to work together. I saw my data in a nice table. YAY!

Then I decided to try using PEAR::Pager to split it into pages.

In another wonderful example of communication, the developers are the only ones who seem to care that DB is deprecated. Try to find a good example on the net of using ONLY MDB2 to display an entire database table in PEAR::Structures_Datagrid using PEAR:Pager. (Don’t be a smartypants and post links. Yes, I know there are one or two, I found them, and they stink.)

I did get it to work. I actually got this whole silly table in a web page with 10 records per page, sortable headers and pagination links. YAY!

Then I tried to add in the authentication libraries.

Whoops. They use DB. All of them. So, I can mix and match a deprecated connection library with the “correct” one all through my app, or I can rebuild the whole app using just the deprecated connection library despite the doom and gloom warnings of the PHP developers, or I can just put a gun in my mouth and save myself the effort.

I honestly don’t think I have ever felt this completely helpless. This should be a total no-brainer application. 15 years ago I would have had it running in FoxPro in 3 hours. Now I feel like I’m fighting the tools the whole way and the tools are winning.

Bah.