Tech Otaku

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Using Blogger’s Read More Links with Outbrain’s Rating Widget

Steve
Blogging
3-minute read
U

As you’ve no doubt noticed I use post snippets or read more links on my blog using Blogger’s jump-links code. I’ve also recently added the Outbrain Rating Widget (ORW). Unfortunately, the two don’t play well together as the ORW is always displayed above the read more link and I’d rather it appeared below, or failing that, not at all.

While searching for a solution I found this post on the Outbrain support forum regarding this, but sadly no answer. After several unsuccessful attempts at trying to fix this, including positioning the ORW with CSS and some JavaScript, I came up with a workaround which, while not perfect, is appropriate for my situation.

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Vertical, Horizontal & Diagonal Spry Sliding Panels

Steve
Web Development
4-minute read
V

I was recently looking to give my photo gallery an overhaul. I’m quite a fan of Adobe’s Spry framework, so I thought I’d give the Sliding Panels widget a try. There are several examples on Adobe’s site showing panels sliding vertically, horizontally and in any direction. The direction is controlled by some CSS and after successfully playing around with vertical and horizontal sliding I couldn’t figure out from the examples how to get the panels to slide in any direction. That is until I realised how the panels are laid out and the importance of one particular CSS declaration.

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Installing PEAR Mail Package on MAMP and XAMPP

Steve
Local Server
3-minute read
I

If you want your visitors to be able to send you an email from your site there are several options including mailto, sendmail or Postfix. There are also numerous sites offering contact forms for free. For a while I was using the excellent swiftmailer which performed perfectly on both my local and remote servers for a while, but subsequently ceased working on my remote server (presumably because of some configuration change by my hosting provider which I never did get to the bottom of).

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Starting XAMPP’s Apache Server at System Startup on Mac OS X

Steve
Mac
5-minute read
S

Until I recently switched to XAMPP I had been using MAMP to provide a local server environment on my Mac. A small but none the less important feature of MAMP is an option to have the Apache and MySQL servers started when you open the application. So, by checking this option and including MAMP as a Login Item my MAMP servers were up-and-running when I logged in. Unfortunately, XAMPP has no such option. Including XAMPP as a Login Item merely opens the XAMPP Control.app and I have to start the servers manually. An extra step I’d rather not have to do.

So, how can I have my XAMPP servers running whenever I login? The answer, by using a daemon.

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eMobile and Snow Leopard Fix. Hoorah!

Steve
Mobile Internet
3-minute read
e

After successfully performing a clean install of Snow Leopard on my MacBook I fell at the first hurdle: eMobile. My D12HW USB Modem simply didn’t want to connect under SL.

A quick call to eMobile and I was told to simply re-install the eMobile HW Utility and use it to configure the modem. No luck. SL kept reporting an AutoOpen error whenever I tried to open the utility. A second call to eMobile. Now I’m told that the eMobile HW Utility is not compatible with SL and they have no idea when it will be. Sigh.

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Configuring Virtual Hosts in XAMPP on Mac OS X

Steve
Local Server
5-minute read
C

A while back I posted about configuring virtual hosts in MAMP. More recently I noticed that MAMP hadn’t been updated in nearly a year and their support forum resembled a wilderness. Thinking that maybe the writing was on the wall for MAMP I started looking for an alternative and came across XAMPP.

XAMPP provides a similar local server environment to MAMP, but configuring virtual hosts is a little different. Unlike the Pro version of MAMP , XAMPP doesn’t have a nice GUI to allow virtual hosts to be configured easily. So, there is no alternative but to do it manually.

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Configuring Virtual Hosts in MAMP on a Mac

Steve
Local Server
10-minute read
C

If you need to easily set-up and maintain a local server environment on your Mac then look no further than MAMP. MAMP comes with Apache, MySQL and PHP and provides a local server environment independent of that installed as default on macOS. And it’s free.

However, out-of-the-box you’re limited to a single local host. This can prove inconvenient when developing multiple sites each requiring their own local host. The most convenient and cost effective way to overcome this limitation is to use virtual hosts.

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