Baku

I’ve not been able to get online properly at all the past week as I’ve been over in Baku (Azerbaijan) due to work, although I’ve got access to a pretty decent connection line now I’m staying at a co-workers”s place. Got another week to do before I fly back to the UK.

Baku is an interesting city to say the least, it’s helped a lot having a few co-workers who have been living here for the past few months and have shown me about the place. Although I’ve already been struck down with what the expats call Baku Belly!

Better start sorting through last week’s e-mail and feeds now, may try to upload some of the photos I’ve taken this weekend.

• MWUG – Meeting 18th August. Recently found this WordPress user group. Can’t make this meeting but I need to make time to get to some of these events including PHPNW meetings. (0) #

WordPress plugin development links

While developing Basic-SEO I’ve found the following sites very useful for reference purposes:

WordPress Plugin Repository – http://wp-plugins.org

You can’t beat learning by example, here you can browse the source code of all the plugins WordPress.org hosts.

WordPress PHP Documentation – http://phpdoc.wordpress.org/

All the comments from the WordPress source code extracted in HTML format and correctly linked, very useful for looking up functions.

WordPress Hooks Database – http://adambrown.info/p/wp_hooks

Database of all the action & filter hooks that have ever been available in any WordPress release and where it occurs in the source code.

WordPress Codex – http://codex.wordpress.org/

The official documentation for WordPress, has a very useful developer documentation section.

• Journalism Warning Labels (via) - bloody brilliant! I love the “Journalist does not understand the subject they are writing about” label. My eyes were opened to this kind of thing when the national media got a story about someone I know horribly wrong. (0) #

• The Pac-Man Dossier. (via) Excellent study of the classic game, even if your not a big fan of it it’s an interesting read. (0) #

• Initial Thoughts on Oracle vs Google Patent Lawsuit – Miguel de Icaza. Includes some interesting background information. I do hope this gets resolved quickly as I’m a big fan of both Java and Android. (0) #

WordPress plugin: Basic-SEO

It’s time to unveil my first WordPress plugin: Basic-SEO. It’s a very, very simple plugin really, it applies a pre-defined set of search engine optimisations to your active theme. It has no configuration options at all at the moment it just achieves the goal I had in mind for it. I thought I’d release it as it is now in case anyone else finds it useful. I’ve already got a list of features I’d like to add to it but my next step is to get it listed on WordPress Plugins.

If you find the plugin useful or have an feedback then please let me know.

First WordPress plugin

As I’ve recently changed the theme I use in WordPress I’ve lost all the basic SEO tweaks I’d made. Rather than make the tweaks again to this theme I’ve decided to convert them into a simple WordPress plugin, should allow me to get my hands dirty with the inner workings of WordPress and plugins as well as save a bit of time in the long run. I’m also planning on documenting the development of the plugin here.

While Java is my preferred language of choice I’m sure it won’t hurt to stay involved in PHP.

How to generate stats for IIS log files using Webalizer

While sorting through some of my many backups of old machines I came across a whole load of IIS log files for an old site of mine so I thought I’d process them and generate some statistics. I’ve used Webalizer quite a few times before for generating stats on Apache log files and as v2.01 is available via Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu I thought I’d use this.

Unfortunately v2.01 doesn’t support support the W3C format that IIS uses, looks like it does now in v2.20 though. However IIS includes a utility called ‘convlog‘ for converting it’s logs files to the NCSA common log file format that Webalizer does support. So I fired up my old Windows XP box, installed IIS and used the following command to convert the log files:

convlog -ie ex*.log

Once that had processed all the log files (by default it creates a copy of each log file) I copied them back to my Ubuntu laptop and used ‘cat‘ to combine all the files into one big log file:

cat ex*.nsca > master.log

All that was left to do was create a config file to tell Webalizer what it should do, so I copied the default config file and customised the options to my needs. Then ran ‘webalizer‘ using the customised config file:

./webalizer -c master.conf

Once it’s performed it’s magic you should have a bunch of detailed reports in the location you specified in the config file!

Changing Tack

I’m going to start posting more technical content on this blog from now on. Ranging from details on any personal development projects I happen to be working on, links to various technologies and frameworks I find interesting to guides on setting up or configuring various systems etc.

I’m hoping this change of tack will help me blog more often here.