This comes in handy if you don’t want a big empty hole where a graphic or photo should be. Comes in handy when someone forgets to upload an image.
Category: WordPress
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I had a client ask me today if I could set up a secure directory she could use for uploading via FTP some large files needed by another organization. Normally this is a very easy thing to do in cPanel – she’d done it before, years ago – but she couldn’t get it to work now. There’s been a major change since the last time she did it: their site runs in WordPress now. She’s using WP’s ‘pretty permalinks’ feature, which added a few lines to her site’s htaccess file. Those lines were the culprit I was looking for. It’s a pretty easy thing to work around, but it took a bit of google-fu to find the fix:
Credit for the htaccess tweak goes to this guy.
There’s one slightly cool feature built into Genesis that’s always bothered me a bit because it’s so jarring: the Return to Top of Page link in the footer just slams the browser window back to top. I happened across a pretty lightweight way to make that slicker – a little bit of JavaScript:
And a touch of PHP to the functions file:
Since this has tripped me up twice – with no excuse for the second time since Flowshield support had given me the friggin’ answer two months prior – I figured I’d post this here so I can find it again.
The reason it takes forever for videos to start playing in Flowshield is because of an encoding issue. Some encoders place all the metadata at the end of a video file. I can’t think of any logical reason to do that, but it’s something that has to be dealt with since videos won’t start playing until the metadata has been read. That means that the entire video has to be downloaded before it’ll play. Since that’s pretty much the antithesis to streaming, it’s really, really irritating. Here’s what Rapid Crush, makers of S3Flowshield, had to say:
The slow start is not an S3FlowShield or FlowPlayer issue. It is an encoding and Adobe Flash issue. In order for the flash player to start playing the video before it is fully downloaded, the metadata (information about the video) must be placed at the start of the file. Unfortunately, some encoders place this data at the end of the file instead, so the player cannot start playing the video until the entire file is downloaded and the metadata can be read. You can see more information and how to fix the files at these URLs:
http://chirale.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/video-on-flash-doesnt-buffer-maybe-a-flv-and-mp4-issue/
http://flowplayer.org/plugins/streaming/pseudostreaming.html#prepare
http://flowplayer.org/forum/2/12909
The information and proposed fixes on those sites above can get quite technical. Fortunately, there is a free and easy to use utility to fix the files that can be found here:
I used the tool linked at the bottom and it worked a treat. A video that was taking 47.5 seconds to preload before the fix now takes just shy of 5 seconds to start playing. I can live with that.
And since one never knows whether things will continue to live on the intertubes, I’m preserving it here for posterity: QTIndexSwapper
So that if we ever get around to writing a new widget plugin from scratch, we’ll know where to look for guidance.