bugfox blog

I got a request for Sean Hickey’s original aLinks code.

Here it is

Download

…but be warned that it has some serious bugs. However it includes features that are not in my fixed version.

Go here for my fixed version, which omits some broken features that I never got around to fixing (because I don’t use them.)

Typealyzer asks you the enter the URL of a blog, and attempts to determine the personality of the author according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. (via Megan McArdle.)

Naturally I immediately put in the URL of this blog and was told I am an “INTJ”, which it describes as a nerdy scientist type. Then I put in the URL of my other blog, where I write about “fun” stuff. This time it said I was an “ESTP”, which it describes as “active and playful.”

Of course these blogs have very different tones. Nevertheless the term “personality” as used by psychologists (including Meyers and Briggs) is something that applies to people, not blogs, and it is not supposed to change depending on what you are writing about. If Typealyzer gives different results for two blogs written by the same person, then it is not a reliable measurement technique.

Typealyzer also displays a chart purporting to show which areas of the brain were used in writing the blog. I’m not an expert in this field but I suspect this is pure hokum.

I had been happily using the “aLinks” WordPress plugin by Sean Hickey for quite a while. The plugin automatically generates links for keywords that you specify. Version 1 did everything that I wanted, but it broke when I upgraded to WordPress 2.6. I found that Sean had written a completely new aLinks 2.0, so I installed it and found that it mostly worked, though with some minor problems.

Then Sean seemed to vanish from the face of the Internet. His web server went off line, making it impossible to even send him an email, and has been that way for several months.

So I had no choice but to go into the source code and fix the bugs that were bothering me. Since the code is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) I am making the revised plugin available to anyone who is interested.

Download

Bugs Fixed

1. aLinks failed to respect word boundaries when identifying keyphrases, causing links to be inserted in the middle of words.
2. aLinks was ignoring the “classes” setting which allows you to assign one or more CSS classes to the links.

Warning

If you are upgrading from aLinks 1.x you must first export your keyphrases to a file, then import them back in after you have installed version 2.0. Otherwise you will lose your keyphrases.

Other Notes

To install, unzip and copy the entire alinks directory to your wp-content/plugins directory.

The documentation is included as a PDF file in the alinks/includes directory.

Just add the following to the web.config file for the application:

<system.net>
 <defaultProxy>
  <proxy proxyaddress="http://127.0.0.1:8888" />
 </defaultProxy>
</system.net>


Thanks to Rick Strahl.

Get Fiddler here.

After testing the site with Safari for the first time I ended up making some massive, long-overdue changes to the stylesheet, which hopefully will allow things to display better in more browsers and screen resolutions.

In particular I eliminated the use of pixel metrics, replacing it with logical sizes (inches and points.) I also reduced the dependence on bitmap images for formatting and fixed some malformed relative URLs, which Firefox and IE handled correctly but Safari didn’t like.

If the site now looks WORSE in your browser, let me know what your configuration is and I’ll see what I can do.

If you try to debug a web application and get the message

You are not authorized to view this page
HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden

It probably just means that you forgot to set a startup page. Earlier versions of Visual Studio gave a more helpful error message.

I recently ran into some frustrating problems doing something that ought to be really simple: setting up a directory on IIS so that the files could be downloaded with a HTTP GET. Some files would work fine; others would get a 404 error (NOT FOUND).

Here’s a checklist of possible configuration problems:

• Right-click on the top IIS Manager node, select Properties and press the MIME Types button. Make sure a MIME type is defined for the file extension.
• Click the Web Service Extensions node and make sure there is no web service extension defined for that particular file type. If there is IIS will try to pass the file to it rather than download the file.
• If the file is executable (.dll, .exe, etc.) bring up Properties for the web application, select the Home Directory tab and make sure Execute Permissions is set to “Scripts only”. (NOT to “Scripts and Executables”.)

If you have started developing web services with Windows Communication Framework (WCF) you will no doubt have noticed that it is cleaner and more powerful than the old ASP.NET framework. However there are some hidden pitfalls. In particular WCF is a lot more finicky about how the web server is configured. If you aren’t careful this can cause code

that works in your test environment to mysteriously fail when moved to production. Here are some pointers on how to avoid these problems.
(more…)

Useful tips from John Manoogian III: (The Only) Ten Things To Know About CSS. But why does the page look so ugly in IE?

David Megginson offers a funny but insightful summary of the most important ideas in REST: The Quick Pitch:

The elevator pitch

With REST, every piece of information has its own URL.

If you just do that and nothing else, you’ve got 90%+ of REST’s benefits right off the bat. You can cache, bookmark, index, and link your information into a giant, well, web. It works you’re reading this, after all, aren’t you? Betcha got here by following a link somewhere, not by parsing a WSDL to find what ports and services were available.