Nothing much to say, but inspired by Himal‘s blogging from phone business, I just installed the official WordPress application for Android which is really cool.

Hopefully this will improve the rate of my blogging. Really hopeful..

Posted from WordPress for Android

Though I was a secret admirer of Apple products, simply because of it’s solid hardware and design that you immediately fall in love over with, it was never affordable, and I never owned one.

In the case of Nokia, it has been the device most of the time for me and Symbian playing a 40% role. The last Nokia phone I had was an E71, which is a by far the best phone I had. The QWERTY keyboard on that phone is something I couldn’t give up on and I had serious doubts over movings towards a phone that had a touch / soft keyboard. I knew I had to move on coz I was the only one left out.

I chose Samsung Galaxy Ace, simply for its minimalistic design. And it probably had the best hardware in the price range I was looking for. It has a 800 MHz ARM 11 processor which is faster than the desktop PC I had 12 years before. I was under the impression that Ace ships with Android 2.2 but to my surprise, it came with Android 2.3.4 (Ginderbread) pre-loaded. When I cross checked with older versions, Gingerbread had some major improvements, specially related to Applications. It provides better insights of what is running in the background, CPU and Memory usage, and the ability to kill apps. The Ace has only 158MB of internal storage which I was told can be the real problem when it comes to managing installed apps. But Gingerbread seems to have solved the problem as most of the apps gets installed on the SD card. Shed some light as I didn’t dig much on this.

The only drawback I experienced so far in the Ace is the battery life. 3G / HSPA usage simply drains the battery to its knees and I hardly could use it for a day. To save on that you can cut down the Auto-Sync, but I rather use the quick shortcut in Ginderbread which allows me to Deactivate the Network Mode, which I do when I’m not using it. Using Wi-Fi seems to be the best, as it hardly kills the battery.

Being a GNU/Linux user for almost 6 years, this is rather a late move. I regret not doing this much earlier, but happy that I did it at least by now. It has something to do with my inability to adapt.

Still early stages, will keep posting my reviews as it comes along..

* Update [17th October 2011 14:50]

• When under direct sunlight, the content on the screen is barely visible or readable.
• The voice clarity is quit low even when the In-Call volume is set to the max.

• Facebook announced to it’s developers that starting from October 1st, all apps must migrate to OAuth 2.0 for authentication and obtain a SSL certificate for use. Or else the apps would get disabled. Read more detailed explanation in the Facebook Developer Roadmap.
• Now this applies to Sri Lanka only. I got this SMS from Ada Derana today morning which has been the buzz for sometime. “Fastening of seat belts in front seats of all cars & dual purpose vehicles with English number plates is compulsory from tomorrow”. It’s a good move to make it compulsory, but I doubt for how long this will be enforced.
• Now into Cricket. As has always been the practice, changes to the playing conditions for Tests, One-Day Internationals (ODIs) and Twenty20 Internationals (T20Is) take effect from Saturday 1 October, the ICC has confirmed. Read More..

So what’s the deal with October 1st. Any other changes I might have missed?

Doing this using Legacy FBML code is very simple. The following code will display different HTML content based on whether the user Likes the page or not. If the user doesn’t like the page, a message to Like the page will be displayed. If the user Likes the page already, the full content will be displayed.

<fb:visible-to-connection>
    Show content to the user
    <fb:else>
        <div style="position:absolute; top:0; left:0;">
               Like the page inorder to view the content.
        </div>
    </fb:else>
</fb:visible-to-connection>

But the case is not that simple because Facebook has deperecated the use FBML since March 2011. This is what Facebook has to say.

While looking at alternate methods to get this feature working, I came across a very easy solution. If you are good with a server-side scripting language like PHP, this solution is for you. Of course you should build your own Facebook application and create a custom Tab in your application which could be added to a Page.

Goto the Facebook Developers Page and create a new application. Fill in the necessary fields and Save the changes. The URL entered on the ‘Tab URL’ field is the location where Facebook will fetch the content when the Tab is clicked. Technically this is where your script will be hosted. Now add the App you created to your Facebook Page. You will see the Tab visible on your page. Create a PHP page with a Hello World message in the URL you provided as Tab URL. When you cick on the Tab, if you see the Hello World message, then its time to write our script.

When Facebook requests our script, we need to extract the signed_request that comes along with the request. To do that we will need the Facebook php-sdk. Download, extract it and copy the src directory to the location where your script is. Here is the script that will provide content based on whether the user Likes the Page or not.

<?php
require 'src/facebook.php';
 
// Create our Application instance (replace this with your appId and secret).
$facebook = new Facebook(array(
  'appId' => '2324983201930103',
  'secret' => 'f5wjeu72hmxjf981da84jpwo02sdvge3',
));
 
$theRequest = $facebook->getSignedRequest();
 
if($theRequest["page"]["liked"] == 1){
    echo "The real content";
}
else{
    echo "Like our page to view";
}
?>

Happy Coding!

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.8.4">

To hide/remove the above, simply include the line below in the functions.php found in your theme files.

<?php
remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');
?>

It’s that simple..

From the WordPress.org Blog
Here in the U.S. we are observing Independence Day, and I can’t think of a more fitting way to mark a day that celebrates freedom than by releasing more free software to help democratize publishing around the globe. I’m excited to announce that WordPress 3.2 is now available to the world, both as an update in your dashboard and a download on WordPress.org. Version 3.2 is our fifteenth major release of WordPress and comes just four months after 3.1 (which coincidentally just passed the 15 million download mark this morning), reflecting the growing speed of development in the WordPress community and our dedication to getting improvements in your hands as soon as possible. We’re dedicating this release to noted composer and pianist George Gershwin.

Click Here for more info on this post..

Replace the appID with yours.

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script type="text/javascript"> 
  window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
        FB.init({appId: '123456789123', status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true});
        window.setTimeout(function() {
            FB.Canvas.setAutoResize();
        }, 250);
  };
  (function() {
        var e = document.createElement('script'); e.async = true;
        e.src = document.location.protocol + '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js';
        document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e);
  }());
</script>

After more research, I realized that this problem isn’t specific to Facebook, but iframes. Since the iframe was loading a web page from a different domain, IE8′s default settings prevented loading of 3rd party cookies. To get this working, I had to setup a P3P Cookie Privacy Policy according to P3P Specifications. In PHP, this can be done by sending this header on top of the script.

<?php
header('P3P: CP="CAO PSA OUR"');
?>

That’s it. All problems automagically solved..

Prior to WordPress 3.1, query_posts() can only be used to search a single key or value using meta_key and meta_value parameters. meta_compare parameter can be used to specify the comparison between them.

<?php
query_posts( array(
                            'meta_key' => 'price',
                            'meta_value' => '22',
                            'meta_compare' => '<=',
                            'post_type' => 'product'
                          )
                );
?>

With the release of WordPress 3.1, the introduction of meta_query parameter to query_posts() allows developers to extend the search across multiple Custom Fields.

<?php
$args = array(
	'post_type' => 'product',
	'meta_query' =>
		array(
			'key' => 'color',
			'value' => 'blue',
			'compare' => 'NOT LIKE'
		),
		array(
			'key' => 'price',
			'value' => array( 20, 100 ),
			'type' => 'numeric',
			'compare' => 'BETWEEN'
		)
)
query_posts( $args );
?>

Happy Coding!

When executed, the following PHP script will optimize the tables which requires optimization in your WordPress database. Place this file in your WordPress’s root directory.

You can run this manually or the ideal scenario would be to setup a cron job to execute it in a given time interval based on your requirement..

<?php            
include("wp-config.php");
mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD);
mysql_select_db(DB_NAME);
$selQuery = "SHOW TABLE STATUS FROM `".DB_NAME."`";
$resSel = mysql_query($selQuery) or die(mysql_error());
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($resSel)){
    if($row["Data_free"] > 0){    
        echo date("Y-m-d H:i:s")." - Optimized : "
                .$row["Name"]." ( ".$row["Data_free"]." )\n";
        $optQuery = "OPTIMIZE TABLE `".$row["Name"]."`";
        mysql_query($optQuery) or die(mysql_error());
    }
}
echo "---------------\n\n";
?>