Category: Programming (Page 5 of 6)

When I set up my blog, I configured it to use the ‘numeric’ permalinks that look something like https://www.brandonchecketts.com/archives/61

Of course, that is pretty straightforward, but it isn’t very readable, and we can probably get a few extra SEO points by putting the post’s title in the URL. However, just changing the permalink format is a bad idea since I have a bunch (okay, a few) incoming links that I don’t necessarily want to break.

So, I wrote a quick WordPress Plugin that redirects these old numeric links to my new format. Simply create a file named ‘numeric_permalink_redirect.php’ in your wp-content/plugins directory with this content:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: BC Rewriter
Plugin URI: https://www.brandonchecketts.com/
Description: Redirect old requests to new permalink format
Author: Brandon Checketts
Version: 1.5
Author URI: https://www.brandonchecketts.com/
*/

// redirect old "numeric" type archives to our current permalin structure
function check_numeric_permalink()
{
  if(preg_match("/^/archives/([0-9]+)/", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], $matches)) {
  $post_id = $matches[1];
  $url = get_permalink($post_id);
  header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
  header("Location: $url");
  exit;
}

add_action('init', 'check_numeric_permalink');

?>

That will now do a 301 Permanent redirect to the new URL so that you shouldn’t lose anybody, and the search engines should change their incoming links.

I’ve been experimenting on multi-threading in perl for a new project, and am impressed with how straightforward it is. Before digging into it, I never really considered doing anything with it because it was always kindof ‘mysterious’ to me. Now, I’m seeing how useful it is to have multiple threads that are able to share variables.

In the application I’m rewriting, I used to have one script that listened for network data, then saved that out to a file. I had another script that read through the output files, and then inserted the data into a database. Now, with a multi-threaded program, I just have one thread that listens, and another thread (or multiple threads) that parse the data and manipulate it however I want. In this case, that saves a lot of disk activity, and makes the program a lot more efficient, and straight-forward.
I’m also able to use the Thread::Queue module to create a queue that the listener process can add to, and then have ‘worker’ threads that can go through the data and format/summarize/whatever I’m going to do with it.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this all works out.  I’m impressed so far.

I spent about an hour debugging a dumb behavior of Internet Explorer.  The problem site is one that stored some session data in PHP’s $_SESSION variable for display later.  The form would use parameters from the GET request to populate some data in the users $_SESSION.  Upon trying to retrieve the data in a subsequent page though, it was missing or incorrect.. but only in Internet Explorer.

The failure of PHP Sessions is typically a server-side problem, so it didn’t make sense that the browser was causing a problem. I spent a while verifying that the sessions were, in fact, working properly in all different browsers, but that still didn’t explain the problem.

The odd behavior comes, though, when the page had an image tag with a blank “src” parameter. This causes most browsers to try and fetch the current page. But Internet Explorer tries to fetch the parent directory.

For example, if your page is a https://www.somesite.com/somedirectory/somepage.php, most browsers will try and fetch that URL for images with a blank src parameter. Internet Explorer, though will try to fetch https://www.somesite.com/somedirectory/

Either case is really not what one would expect. I would think that without a destination, it wouldn’t try to fetch anything. Attempting to fetch the page that called it (obviously not a graphic) or the parent directory (why would it do that) doesn’t really make any sense.

In this case, fetching the parent directory hit my problem script since it was the DirectoryIndex (index.php). Calling the script without any parameters erased the saved variable that I was looking for, so the subsequent page that I hit was missing this variable.

I guess the moral of the story is to not leave images with a blank src parameter, because it will do weird things.

I’ve spent the past few days working on a new website at ldssd.org. The site has most of the LDS Scriptures available online, and can generate them in an RSS Feed that will deliver one chapter to you each day. The site still has a couple of small issues that should be fixed soon, but I wanted to make sure that it was ‘officially’ launched today in time for people (me) to keep their New Years Resolutions to read the scriptures each day.