The American Internet Should Remain Free

Do you think the internet is important?

It has given me much over the last several years. I have made new friends, educated myself, found fun things to do and share, and been amazed at just how crazy/sad/caring our society can be. My future career and the very livelihood of millions of people depends on the infrastructure, technology, and freedom of the internet.

I don’t generally jump on bandwagons and I’m rarely vocal about causes. For this I will make an exception.

There are some crazy ideas being tossed about in Congress and the Senate right now. These have a huge potential to be poorly interpreted, cripple freedom of speech on the internet, and set our society back in time. While I understand the desire for large corporations to “protect” their “intellectual property,” I value individual freedom more.

What can you do?

First, watch this video.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Next, take a few minutes to contact your legislators and express your view about the laws being considered.

Let’s keep the internet free.

Mechanics Beats Theory

My friend was frustrated on the other end of the phone.

“I just don’t understand how my WordPress (.com) blog can be a website,” she said.

I briefly explained the difference between posts and pages, and the way different themes worked to display information. Throughout my monologue she mumbled sounds of a vague and unconvincing understanding. My brilliance wasn’t cutting through her fog.

“It actually really easy to do. You just don’t know the mechanics of the process,” I concluded.

“You hit it on the head!” she said. “I don’t get what steps to take.”

Something clicked for me in that conversation. My friend helped me understand that many people need practical, concrete examples before they can grasp the systems and information flow that many WordPress developers take for granted.

I look forward to playing with new approaches to teaching people learning and teaching styles.

How to Paste from Microsoft Word

During the “21 Tips From the Organizers” segment at WordCamp Detroit, my buddy Anthony talked about pasting from MS Word the “right way.” Someone I met at the conference asked if I knew how to do this.

Sure do!

The Background

When you copy text from Microsoft Word (or a webpage), the clipboard also grabs hidden formatting instructions. This allows you to bring the formatting along with the text when you paste it.

Sometimes (but not always^*) these invisible instructions confuse WordPress’ TinyMCE editor and your post “looks funny.” Yes, that’s the technical term.

When it happens, you the HTML view will show extra markup.  If you know HTML it’s frustrating and you can clean it up. If you don’t, it’s just frustrating.

So, how do you prevent this problem?

Option 1. Use the “Paste from Word” tool (easier)

1. Copy the text from MS Word.
2. If your toolbar appears as one row, you need to click the circled icon to expand the “kitchen sink.”
   
3. Click the “Paste from Word” icon in the second row.
   
   A box will pop up.
4. Click in the box and paste your text there.
   
5. Click “Insert”
6. You’re done.

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^*I think this was more likely to happen with MS Word 2003 and older versions of WordPress.

What to do if “WordPress can’t create an .htdocs file on my Mac”

One of the first things I wanted to do when I first got my MacBook was to install WordPress locally to use it as a development sandbox.

Even after following the tutorial at WP Candy I couldn’t get WordPress to work perfectly on the Mac. I uninstalled MAMP and tried using XAMPP, which I had used successfully on my PC. I had the same problem with both. First, you are not alone. (I was prompted to write this post when an EXPERIENCED developer friend had problems configuring WordPress properly on his brand new MacBook Air.)

After several futile Google searches and digging through the forums (http://wordpress.org/support/) I came up with this solution.

Symptoms

• WordPress asks for an FTP password when trying to update a plugin. It wouldn’t take my login password, so I reverted to doing a manual update. It worked, but it’s not what we want.
  

• If you try to update your permalinks, WordPress chokes while trying tocreate an .htdocs file. It complains about not having permissions to write to the file:
  

Solution

Here is how I fixed the problem. I used the terminal to do this (I worked as a Unix Sysadmin for several years). (If there is enough feedback I might do a follow-up on doing it using the GUI an a mouse.)

1. Find the directory where the problem lives:

$ cd /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles

 

2. Check the permissions and ownership on the  htdocs folder:

$ ls -l

3. Find the username that your Mac knows you as. In my case it’s icet. I’ll use myuser for this example. Change the user and group of the folder. One command will do it; you will probably need to use sudo.

$ whoami

$ sudo chown -R myuser:staff htdocs

We’re getting closer but Apache still can’t write to the htdocs folder. We need to tell XAMPP to run Apache as someone else

5. Change to the directory where the configuration file lives:

$ cd /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/etc/

6. Make a backup of the configuration file, then change permissions of the configuration file so you can edit it:

$ sudo cp httpd.conf httpd.conf.bak

$ sudo chmod 777 httpd.conf

7. Edit the User and Group lines in the httpd.conf file. I use vim because I’m already at the command line. The Mac’s built-in TextEdit application will work too.

$ sudo vi httpd.conf

7.1. Find the User and Group lines

#
# User/Group: The name (or #number) of the user/group to run httpd as.
# It is usually good practice to create a dedicated user and group for
# running httpd, as with most system services.
#
User daemon
Group daemon

7.2 and change them so it looks like this (replace icet with your username from step 3):

#
# User/Group: The name (or #number) of the user/group to run httpd as.
# It is usually good practice to create a dedicated user and group for
# running httpd, as with most system services.
#
# User daemon
# Group daemon
User myuser
Group staff

8. Stop and restart XAMPP

That should do it. You have given Apache the ability to write into the WordPress directory. It has worked fine for me for months.

Don’t do this on a production server! It probably introduces several security holes. Find a qualified server expert.

WordCamp Chicago 2011

I was lucky enough to share the stage with some cool people at WordCamp Chicago in July 2011. The slides from my presentation are available for download at http://maxim650.com/wcchi-2011. If/when the video from the presentation becomes available this will be updated with a link.

The before and after sites from the presentation are also available.