+1 for WordPress Now Available
Earlier this year Google announced Google +1. +1 is Google’s social initiative where you can give an item a thumbs up that your friends will see when using Google’s search engine. The service was originally only avaiable on Google’s search engine.
This week Google made the +1 button available for anyone to put on their site. Displaying a +1 button on your site enables people to +1 it directly from the site. Previously they’d have to search Google and +1 you from search results.
That brings us to +1 for WordPress. +1 for WordPress is a simple plugin that adds a Google +1 button to the posts on your WordPress blog. Check out the +1 for WordPress page for more details.
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Displaying Backslashes (And Other Non-Displayable Characters) in WordPress
The other day I ran into a problem while writing a post to one of my WordPress blogs. I needed to use a backslash character (\) but it wouldn’t appear when I viewed the post. Though this character is saved in the database and displayed on the backend when editing the post it is not displayed on the front end when viewing the post.
It turns out that the backslash character is one of many characters that shows this behavior. I’m not quite sure why but one of the web pages I came across when researching the issue suggested it’s a security issue.
But I found a solution. Instead of using the actual backslash character use the HTML escape character & #92; (with no space after the &, I added the space for display purposes) instead. There’s an HTML escape character for any character you may use in a blog post so if your blog post is missing characters just try to replace that character with it’s equivalent escape character. For a complete list of HTML escape characters go here.
Caveat: this needs to be done in the HTML editor. It will not work properly in the visual editor. Switching between the HTML and visual editors without saving the post or saving from the visual editor could overwrite the escape character in the database and render the fix useless.
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Clearing VLC’s Album Art Cache
VLC is a free, open source, cross-platform multimedia player that can play almost any multimedia file you throw at it. It’s become my multimedia player of choice because it free, light weight and versatile. But it’s not without it’s quirks.
One problem I’ve had with it is that sometimes it will show incorrect album art. This happens when it’s album art cache is corrupted. The solution is to delete the cache as follows:
- Run the following command from the Run field in the Windows start menu: %appdata%\VLC\art. This will open an Explorer window with the contents of the cache folder.
- Close VLC.
- Delete everything in this folder.
- Close the window and restart VLC.
Now you’ve got a clear cache.
I have simplified this a little bit by creating a batch file that I keep on my desktop. The contents of the batch file are as follows:
cd %appdata%\VLC\
RD art /s/q
md art
Every time I need to clear VLC’s album art cache I simply double click on the batch file and I’m done.
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Turning Off Extraneous Emails from Twitter
Twitter introduced new email options this week that send emails every time you are mentioned (or replied to) and when your tweets are retweeted or marked as a favorite. I can see where newcomers to Twitter would find these settings useful but many veterans are already getting these notifications elsewhere. Many Twitter clients (I use TweetDeck) offer similar notifications within their software. Here’s how to turn these options off:
- Log into your Twitter account via Twitter’s web page.
- Go to your settings by selecting the Settings choice from the menu that drops down when you click your username on the top right of the page.
- Click the Notifications tab.
- In the Messages section of the page uncheck “I’m sent a reply or mentioned”.
- In the Activity section uncheck “My Tweets are marked as favorites” and “My Tweets are retweeted”.
- Click the Save button.
Nice and easy. While you’re doing this you may want to check your other notifications too. If you don’t want to get an email ever time you get a new followed or direct message this is where you’d change that.
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The NY Times in the NY Post
It’s always funny to see one New York newspaper appear in one of the others. In this case The New York Times appears in an ad in the New York Post.
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