HTMList.com, A Web Development Blog by Synapse Studios

The development for open source software is strong and growing. Open source software is software in which the source code is publicly available for examination or contribution. If you talk to a typical person or business, you’ll usually find that their computers are all running Windows and have Microsoft Office installed. Some may even have more expensive software installed like the Adobe Creative Suite applications. By buying and using such high-priced software, it is easy to shell out two or three times as much money on software than on the computer itself. With many capable alternatives, there is a lot of money to be saved by utilizing free and open source software.

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Tagged with: eclipse, extension, firefox, gmail, google, mozilla, open source, projects, software

Posted in: Cool Stuff, How To

Ever since we made the switch from hosting our own mail servers to using Google Apps for Domain, one of the Firefox extensions that I use on a daily basis is Gmail Manager. It allows me to easily view the inboxes for various email accounts that I monitor and gives me the ability to quickly launch any of those accounts into a new tab. The only problem is that the extension author hasn’t made any updates to it since 2007. While this wouldn’t normally be too big of a problem, Google in their infinite wisdom has decided to rename the username and password login inputs.

The result of the name change by Google caused the extension to stop retrieving email and auto-logging me in to the accounts. It wasn’t until I got suspicious of the fact that it didn’t appear that anyone was emailing me for a few hours that I decided to manually log in and investigate. Once I determined that the extension had broken, I went to work trying to track down an updated version or a quick fix to get it back in action. What I found was a forum for the extension with over 100 pages of messages in it.

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Tagged with: extension, firefox, gmail, gmanager, javascript, news

Posted in: Rants

Recently we upgraded our blog to WordPress 2.5.1 and have been battling a horrible bug ever since. When we save or edit a post most of our content is sometimes lost. Unfortunately, it isn’t occurring with enough frequency for us to track down the specific cause of the problem and we have enough projects lined up over here to keep us from digging through the WordPress code ourselves to solve it in any reasonable time. So we’ve opened up a ticket in WordPress’ bug tracker that outlines the problem in more detail and continue to wait for a response from someone on the dev team to let us know what might be the culprit.

In the meantime, the fear of not knowing if your post would be lost when saved forced us to saving the content to notepad before publishing. This is a less than useful solution to the problem because even doing this it seems that once a post starts truncating itself upon saving, it continues to do it every time. The only solution is to delete it and start anew. [We're noticing the problem crops up most often when another user edits an entry not their own. It truncates the post arbitrarily and then proceeds to reject contributions to that post past the truncated length. Needless to say, the frequency and creativity of expletives uttered in the office has spiked dramatically.—Ed]

So today, I took some time to hunt down remote posting solutions that allowed us to save our posts without needing to log in to WordPress directly. ScribeFire was the first solution I tried and has turned out to be an incredibly useful tool. ScribeFire is a FireFox extension that allows us to create posts directly in FireFox and saves them to our blog via the WordPress API.

There is still some functionality lacking: the ability to change post author, adding excerpts and making use of some of the plugins that modified our post entry page to name a few. But we see their release schedule to be rather efficient and hope to request some features that make it into the next release (or until WordPress identifies the problem that forced us to this solution in the first place). [It should also be noted that the extension on the whole is rather impressive considering that it's blog-engine agnostic and works for many different providers.—Ed]

Tagged with: bugs, extension, firefox, projects, wordpress

Posted in: Rants