Tips and Tricks @ Poremsky.com - Favorite tips and tricks for Windows, Blackberry, Web design

Out of the blue, not one, but two, computers lost the RDP file association and clicking on the saved RDP files, opened the Open with… dialog, not the remote computer. I have no idea what caused the problems, but it was likely either a Windows update (whatever was installed on 2/7/2012) or a top secret application I installed on both computers the 6th. The fix: Open control panel, Default Programs applet and click on the link for ‘Associate a file or protocol with a specific program’. After it loads, locate .rdp and double click on it. Select the Remote Desktop entry and click OK. Now you can double click on the saved rdp file and connect to the remote computer.

Repair Remote Desktop (RDP) File Association

Tips and Tricks @ Poremsky.com - Favorite tips and tricks for Windows, Blackberry, Web design

For the last two weeks I’ve been trying to figure out why pages on Slipstick.com (and to a lesser extent, on Outlook-tips.net) kept reloading. I first realized there was a problem when the 48 hour stats tracker (from Jetpack) showed a large jump in a period. Checking the page view lists usually showed a page (or several) in the top 10 that normally receives that many views in a month. I could not repro it. I tried various other stats trackers and they did not show any pages reloading (because, as I figured out later, the pages reloaded from browser cache.) Finally, a visitor emailed me and said she was using IE7 and a page kept reloading. At last, a repro. Solving the problem was more difficult as only some pages were affected. Then a break: due to issues with the shared server, I disabled some plugins and decided to reduce the load in the Redirection plugin by using VBScript redirection on many of the old *.asp pages. The problem was better – the pages I used to repro stopped reloading. Then I did two things: I moved some pages into sub-categories, which meant the URL in the VBScript was [...]

Redirected Pages Keep Reloading in IE7 (Solved!)

Tips and Tricks @ Poremsky.com - Favorite tips and tricks for Windows, Blackberry, Web design

Update: I broke down and installed iTunes on my laptop. Install went smoothly, both for iTunes and iOS5. To a new-ish iPad owner, whole backup and restore process was confusing though. Was restore going to restore iOS4 or just the apps? It seems to have included everything except the photos that synced from the desktop, where itunes won’t install. I’m sorry Apple fanboys, but Apple has nothing over Microsoft when it comes to installing software. The problems are just as bad, if not worse. I got an iPad a few weeks ago and for the first time ever, installed iTunes, QuickTime and all the Apple crap… because Apple made me sync with iTunes before I could install anything on the iPad. (I also needed iTunes to move photos to the iPad (and to delete the photos!)). It seemed to work fine… then I tried to upgrade the iPad to iOS5. Of course, the perfectly working iTunes needed to be upgraded. Automatic upgrades failed after apparently completely downloading the files. So I tried using my MiniMac. It has iTunes 9. When I opened it, it said I should upgrade to 10.5. Ok. But software updates says there are no updates available. [...]

Why my (almost brand new) iPad will probably never see iOS5…

Tips and Tricks @ Poremsky.com - Favorite tips and tricks for Windows, Blackberry, Web design

Although Windows 7 (and Vista) make it easier to find folders, thanks to the Favorites and Libraries, some applications use the older Open/Save common dialog. And yes, it still supports Places Bar. You can add up to 5 places to it, replacing the five that are on it by default. You can add your own places one of two ways: using the Group Policy Editor or by editing the registry directly. Group Policy Editor To use the Group Policy Editor, type group policy in the Start menu’s search field and open the group policy editor (“Edit Group Policy”) when it’s found. Browse to User Configuration, Administrator Templates, Windows Components, Windows Explorer, Common Open File Dialog. On the right side of the policy editor, double click on Items displayed in the Places Bar. Enable the policy (#1, at the top) and enter up to five places in the fields provided (#2). These replace the five default places as seen in the first screenshot. Edit the Registry Open the registry editor by typing regedit in the Start search field and open it when found. Browse to this path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies Create the following keys if they do not exist: comdlg32 Placesbar When finished, the path [...]

Places Bar in Windows 7

Tips and Tricks @ Poremsky.com - Favorite tips and tricks for Windows, Blackberry, Web design

There is no nice way to say it: WordPress sucks for VBA code samples. The way it handles HTML coding isn’t so hot either. WordPress was designed so people don’t need to know anything about HTML. I’ve worked with HTML for 15 years. I understand HTML and I want near-total control over the HTML on my websites. But I also want the ease of updating the content on my sites. I really, really wanted an easy way to find and fix broken links. To generate a list of related pages, a list of new pages, and a lot more site management features that WordPress and its plugins are really, really good at. In a discussion over whether a friend with a small technical website, one person said the friend should definitely move to WordPress. I said “not so fast”. The site is small, it has a lot of code and static content. A good template system and includes can be easy to manage if the site is small and content not added frequently. This gives you total control over the output and you can change the theme easily (all the popular templates use a blog-style layout). Menus and side content [...]

Going Nuts… WordPress and VBA Code Samples

Tips and Tricks @ Poremsky.com - Favorite tips and tricks for Windows, Blackberry, Web design

While I was working on the index, I decided I wanted to include a short excerpt instead of just making a list of hyperlinks. We’re using a custom excerpt that was too long and while the RSS excerpt worked ok, I wanted shorter and control over the “more” indicator. I could have solved this problem by adding short excerpts to every page, but that would take forever. :) With a little more searching, I found instructions for creating filters and custom excerpt functions (added to the functions.php file). This line goes into your template file:

Part 3: Custom Excerpts

Tips and Tricks @ Poremsky.com - Favorite tips and tricks for Windows, Blackberry, Web design

In Create a list of pages in a specific category, I showed how I created index pages for my WordPress site. It works great except with two categories. These two categories are parent categories and the code includes the child categories too. Because the number of pages in each category is high, this is not workable. I found more code samples that used an array to limit the posts to the parent category but I still needed to sort and control the number of posts per page. This code works great:

Create a list of pages in a parent category

Tips and Tricks @ Poremsky.com - Favorite tips and tricks for Windows, Blackberry, Web design

I moved slipstick.com into WordPress as a CMS and wanted a list of articles in each category, on separate “index pages”. On my old site, I used a fairly simple asp script to read one folder and list the files in the that directory. Each folder had its own directory.asp page. The guys I hired didn’t seem to understand how to do this in WordPress… (Tell me again why I hired someone to do this for me when I seem to be doing most of it on my own. ***) I also wanted the home page to list posts of my choosing, and the guys finally came up with a page that displays posts in a specific category (used only for this purpose). The code they put in a page template (named “page-nn.php, where nn is the page id number) is below. I did a little Binging (the quality of google searches are going downhill fast) and discovered a very simple way to do what I wanted, along with some code samples, but I also wanted to list all posts within the category on one page, not 10 per page (my posts per page/feed setting in WordPress). I found samples [...]

Create a list of pages in a specific category