scriptygoddess

How to blog by email
Blogging by email is built into WP, but if you wanted your hand held to set it up, consider it held. This tutorial will walk you through how to do it.

[link via Blogging Pro]

I’m kind of surprised I didn’t post this already (maybe I did and I just can’t find it) - but on another blog, I have drop down comments set so it only does this for the first ‘x’ number of posts with comments. (Otherwise download times can get a little bogged down if there’s a lot of posts with comments on the page…) To do that I have this at the top of my page:

<?php
$showcommentmax = 3;
$currentshowcomment = 0;
?>

Then I have this code around the drop down comments call:

<?php
if ($showcommentmax > $currentshowcomment) {
include(ABSPATH . ‘wp-dropdown-comments.php’);
if (get_comments_count() > 0) {
$currentshowcomment++;
// only counting show comment if it there are comments to show
}
}
?>

Spotted on Weblog Tools Collection (All of these are for WordPress 1.3+)

Mass Spam Delete
Easily delete all comments matching criteria you determine… As posted by Chris: “Mass Spam Delete is a system that allows you to delete all comments in the database by IP, Name, URI or email. ”

Matt’s Asides for 1.3

While we’re on the subject of IE funkiness - I ended up on Toothpaste Addict tonight and noticed this little trick. (Actually, something weird happend when I copied and pasted the code from Toothpaste. Must have something to do with the text formatting there. But I found this page - which actually shows the same code, but copying/pasting that one worked)

<!–[if IE]>
IE 5.0 - 6.0 will be the only browsers to see this line.
<![endif]–>

Ran into a problem today that I really should have forseen: as usual I coded a site so it all lines up perfectly in IE, flip over to Mozilla and it’s all out of whack. I realized the reason right away: in terms of calculating widths, IE measures from border to border; Mozilla uses content. This apparently is only a problem in Windows IE less than version 6.0.

I did a search and to my surprize found that you can tell the broswer how to calculate it. I am used to IE’s way, so I like border-to-border widths. Stick this in your stylesheet to force Mozilla to do it that way:

div {
-moz-box-sizing:border-box;
box-sizing:border-box;
}

(Found on this board)

This of course makes all div tags calculate this way, but you can stick it in any specific div tag if you want.

For a better explanation of the box-sizing property, I found an article on WebFX.

Stop comments and Take down blog plugins
Will let you temporarily take down comments on all posts by activating the plugin (I’m guessing you deactivate the plugin when you want to bring commenting back online). Good for battling a comment flood. Take down blog plugin will display a simple page asking readers to come back again soon.

[saw this yesterday on wordlog.com but reading it just now on Weblog Tools Collection gave a little more insight]

It’s a good thing I have no shame in admitting when I was doing something stupid. Otherwise I’d have no posts for this category.

Just to explain a little about what I was working with - it was essentially an email form (emailform.php) - but before sending the email, it brought you to a page where you could preview your email. From the preview page (preview.php) you needed to have the option to go back and edit your message (back to the first form: emailform.php), or to send the email (sendemail.php). (Obviously when you go back to emailform.php - I needed to have it “remember” what you originally wrote there)

I won’t even tell you how I was handling this before - because it was stupid, I know it stupid, but it worked, almost. But I knew there was a better way. Today with some time on my hands I found this page with EXACTLY what I needed.

So now the form tag on my preview.php just calls itself and looks something like this:

<form action=”preview.php” method=”post”>

And my submit buttons simply look like:

<input type=”submit” name=”Goback” value=”Go back and edit”>
<input type=”submit” name=”Sendemail” value=”Send Email”>

Then, at the very beginning of preview.php (before the first HTML tag) I have:

if (isset($_POST["Goback"])) {
header(”Location: emailform.php”);
} else if (isset($_POST["Sendemail"])) {
header(”Location: sendemail.php”);
}
/*
I’m setting the session variables AFTER the above because otherwise those “submit” buttons become persistent when preview.php submits the current page to itself. This way - only the data being sent to this page from the ORIGINAL form (emailform.php) become persistent in session cookies.
*/
foreach($_POST as $k=>$v) {
$_SESSION[$k]=$v;
}

On the both the emailform.php page, and the sendemail.php page, wherever I looked for values in $_POST - I change to now look for the same in $_SESSION.

This way - if you click the back button from the preview page, the data is not forgotten.

(I know this probably won’t make a whole lot of sense to many people - and those it does make sense will just wonder why/how I just figured this out NOW.)

This isn’t really script related, but I searched everywhere online and while I saw the question asked many times, I never saw an answer posted.

The problem is that I wanted to extract a list of email addresses from a distribution list that I had created in Outlook. In the 2003 version, you can apparently just click a little button to expand the list (and then you could just copy out the list of email addresses, I would assume)

This doesn’t help me, because I don’t have the 2003 version.

However, I WAS able to get the addresses into an excel file by doing the following:

1) Click on contacts
2) double click on the distribution list to “edit/view” it.
3) Go to File -> Save As
4) Save it as a .txt file

Then open that .txt file in Excel, (default import text file settings should work fine) and you’re all set!

So easy - and yet so bizarre that I couldn’t find that ANYWHERE!