Setting The Correct Sender Address In Postfix

My mac (work computer) is set up with usernames in the format of first inital, last name (lblue). We use Rackspace Email for our company email and our email addresses are set up as just FirstName@domain.com (Lee@domain.com). So, the problem with the default Postfix configuration is that it attempts to send mail based on the username on my mac. So when postfix attempts to send mail from lblue@domain.com our Rackspace Email server complains with a “Sender address rejected” error message. Fortunately, the solution is pretty easy.

Step 1: Edit your /etc/postfix/main.cf and add following line to your configuration.

sender_canonical_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sender_canonical

Step 2: Create the sender canonical file /etc/postfix/sender_canonical and set up the username / email address associations

lblue    Lee@domain.com

Step 3: Run postmap on your new sender canonical file

sudo postmap /etc/postfix/sender_canonical

Step 4: Reload Postfix

sudo postfix reload

1. Make sure you have :set cindent
2. Put your cursor on an opening { or closing }
3. Press =%
4. All the code in the block is nicely indented

Searching Through Projects With vimgrep

Search through all the PHP files in a project.
1. Make sure you are at the root of your project in vim (type :pwd to see) if you are in the wrong dir then type :cd /path/to/project
2. :vimgrep pattern **/*.php

Examples:

Find the pattern “findMe” and don’t jump to the first match. Use the j flag to prevent jumping to the first match

:vimgrep /findMe/j **/*.php

Find the pattern “findMe” but match on case as well (not case-sensitive)

:vimgrep findMe\C **/*.php

Find the patter “findMe” without regard to case (case-insensitive)

:vimgrep findMe\c **/*.php

Organize With Pathogen

This is the best plugin ever for keeping your other vim plugins neat and
organized. Gone are the days of shotgunning doc and plugin files in multiple
directories. Now a plugin and all its related files can stay together.
Go here to get pathogen from vim.org

function searchFilter($query) {
  if ($query->is_search) {
    $query->set('post__not_in', array(13,14,15));
  }
  return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','searchFilter');

Just change 13,14,15 to whatever page (or post) ids you would like to exclude from the search. Do not put the numbers in quotes.

1. Visit the page in your web browser
2. View the source code for the page
3. Search the source code for src

Click through all the instances of src and look for items that are sourced through http:// rather than https://. Look at all your images, javascripts, stylesheets, etc. They all need to be pulled through https:// in order for your page to be totally secure and for that warning to go away. Internet Explorer is particularly finicky about this message so be sure to check your site in IE to make sure you don’t get this message: ‘This Page Contains Both Secure and Non-Secure Items‘ The FireFox message that means the same thing is ‘Warning: Contains Unauthenticated Content‘ this is the same problem. Just make sure your page is pulling all it’s resources through https:// and that is how you fix the error about ’secure and non-secure’ items on your SSL pages.

What You Need

• A box of Emergen-C (or the Kroger/generic brand)
• A bottle of Vitamin D pills – preferably natural from fish oil (mine are 400 IU each)
• Listerine
• Colloidal Silver in a nasal spray bottle

What You Do

As soon as you feel the first symptoms coming on:

1. 3 sprays of colloidal silver in each nostril (blow your nose first if you need to)
2. Drink a serving of Emergen-C
3. Gargle with Listerine for about a minute
4. Take 2 Vitamin D pills (roughly 800 IU)

Repeat this process every 12 hours.

WARNING: You can overdose on Vitamin  D so don’t swallow 20 pills at once or anything dumb like that.

These doses are for adults. Kids can do the routine too. Just give them less of everything, especially less vitamin D. For example, I give my 4 year old son only 1/2 of a normal serving of EmergenC. Hopefully, this tip will help you out.

git archive -o ~/Desktop/project.zip HEAD

That will extract your most recent stuff in your current branch, zip it up, and drop it on your desktop. We do a lot of WordPress plugin development and with this single command we can get our plugin code ready for installation extremely quickly. Here is more information about git archive.

mysql_connect("localhost","username","password");
mysql_select_db("database");

// Change the category name to whatever category you want to use
$categoryName = 'Music';

$query = "SELECT post_title, guid
  FROM
    wp_posts,
    wp_terms,
    wp_term_taxonomy,
    wp_term_relationships
  WHERE
   wp_terms.name = '$categoryName' and
   wp_terms.term_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_id and
   wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id
      = wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id and
   wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id
      = wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id and
   wp_term_relationships.object_id = wp_posts.ID
  ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 3";

$q = mysql_query($query);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($q)) {
    echo "
";
    echo "{$row['post_title']}";
    echo "

";
}

1) Set up an account where you want to host your subversion repositories, perhaps use a domain like subversion.mywebsite.com

2) SSH into your new account and create a directory that will contain all your subversion repositories. For example, you might have a path like /home/<username>/subversion where <username> is the username you used to log into your account.

3) Set up a subversion repository by changing directories into your subversion directory you just created and issuing the following commands.

cd /home/username/subversion
svnadmin create myproject
sudo chgrp -R nobody myproject
sudo chmod -R g+w myproject

Note that we changed the group to “nobody” which is the user that apache runs as. You need to do this so that when you access the repository through apache, apache has permission to write files to your repository. By default, cPanel runs apache with the user “nobody” but not always. So, just be sure that you set the correct group name for your repository.

4) Next you need to tell apache about your new subversion repository. To do that, log into your cPanel WHM account and go to Service Configuration -> Apache Configuration -> Include Editor and edit the Pre VirtualHost Include file. Enter in a block like this:

<Location /path/to/repository>
DAV svn
SVNPath /absolute/path/to/repository
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Subversion Repository”
AuthUserFile /absolute/path/to/password/file.txt
Require valid-user
</Location>

The first path in the block above is /path/to/repository in the Location tag. This is the path you want to use when accessing the repository through Apache.  For example, if you wanted to access your repository at http://subversion.mywebsite.com/myproject then you would simply write /myproject as the path in the Location tag.

The second path is the SVNPath which is the absolute path to your subversion repository. So in our example you would use /home/username/subversion/myproject

The third path is the absolute path to you htpasswd file. We haven’t created this yet but we will in the next step. You may choose to put this file in any directory you wish perhaps at /home/username/svnpasswords.txt This is the file that will contain the usernames and passwords for accessing your Subversion repository through Apache.

When you are all finished click the button to restart Apache.

5) Now we need to create the htpasswd file. Change directories into the directory where you want to store your password file and issue this command:

htpasswd -c svnpasswords.txt

If you want more than one user, run the same command again but leave off the -c. If you don’t leave off the -c then a new password file will be created and all your previous entries will be lost.

6) Finally, you will want to create the normal trunk, tags, and branches folders in your repository. You can issue these commands from your development machine if you like since you are now able to access your repository through apache.

svn mkdir http://subversion.mywebsite.com/myproject/trunk -m “creating trunk”
svn mkdir http://subversion.mywebsite.com/myproject/tags -m “creating tags”
svn mkdir http://subversion.mywebsite.com/myproject/branches -m “creating branches”

Now you have your repository all set up and ready to receive your source code. So, normally speaking you would checkout out your trunk, add some files, and commit your initial set of files to the repository.

The Cloudsites control panel is very nice (when it is online). It’s very easy to set up sites, the interface is clean, and their built in email service is excellent. Their spam filter works exceptionally well. It is a bit confusing to set up email addresses that simply forward to another domain but it is possible. Even though the control panel is nice, that is pretty much the only redeeming quality Rackspace Cloudsites has to offer. There are many other factors that totally negate the benefits of their pleasant control panel.

No SSH Access

Since Cloudsites does not provide SSH access you can’t host your git or svn repositories on cloudsites. They recommend using ExpanDrive so that you can deploy your sites from your source code repository to your live site but it is extremely slow to the point of being virtually useless. We found that it was far faster to use Transmit to connect to the server than Expandrive.  We also started using Beanstalk for our subversion repositories. Beanstalk is awesome, works great, and has a very cool FTP deployment feature which enabled us to deploy our sites to Rackspace Cloudsites quickly and effectively. The only downside to Beanstalk is that they limit the number or repositories you can have. Most of our projects don’t require much disk space for the source code so we are going to run out of repositories long before we hit our disk space limit. Be that as it may, Beanstalk is a great investment and I recommend it to anyone looking for a managed subversion resource. If the lack of SSH access were the only problem Cloudsites had, we would still be using it. With Beanstalk and a few tweaks to our production work flow we were able to get around the lack of SSH access – although it was annoying. For example, it’s nice to transfer a large number of files as a compressed tarball or a zip file (such as a WordPress installation) then extract the tarball on the server. The Rackspace Cloudsites control panel has zip/unzip functionality but it’s a pain to use compared to real command line access. Likewise, anything else you would do from the command line, like testing cron scripts, is painful if its even possible at all.

Stability and Performance Is Miserable

The stability of  Rackspace Cloudsites is terrible. Just this week the control panel was completely offline for about 3 hours. It went off line right as I was transferring a site and consequently I was unable to complete the transfer and had to start all over again the next day. So, basically all 26 sites we had on Cloudsites were completely unavailable if I needed to do anything involving the control panel such as install an SSL cert, create an email account, reset and FTP password, etc.

Even worse than having the control panel offline, we run several e-commerce sites and 2 weeks before Christmas, our peak sales time of the year, our database was in “read only mode” ALL DAY due to a “degradation” in their service. So, to our customers, it appeared like they were buying things because the site was online and everything seemed to be working, but their orders were never saved to the database. This was a problem with several of our sites that day since multiple sites all use the same database server that was in read-only mode. Rackspace has offered us 1 free month of hosting for our trouble.

Performance is pretty crappy too. Because of all the trouble we had with Cloudsites, our friends on Twitter suggested that we look into VPS.net. After reading a bunch of great reviews and researching their product offering we decided to sign up for a small, 3-Node account costing a mere $54/month (compared to $120/month for Rackspace Cloudsites). We transferred one of our WordPress websites off Rackspace Cloudsites onto our new VPS.net setup and here is a report of the response time of Rackspace Cloudsites vs VPS.net running the exact same site. VPS.net is about twice as fast (half the response time).

We have run other benchmark tests and have found that a 3-Node, $54/month account with VPS.net is roughly twice as fast as Rackspace Cloudsites. For example, in addition to response time being about twice as fast, the VPS.net account is serving twice as many requests per second. Again, these tests are on the exact same WordPress website running on both servers.

Support

The main reason we signed up for Rackspace Cloudsites in the first place was because of the great experience we have had in the past with Rackspace “fanatical” support with our dedicated servers. The support is still good with Cloudsites but, unfortunately, since the platform itself tends to “degrade” frequently, there is not much the support can do for you other than perhaps hook you up with a free month of hosting. With Rackspace Cloudsites the unlimited support is included in the $120/month cost (Yes $120/month not $100/month: Cloudsites charges you and extra $20/month if you want to use SSL certificates).

With VPS.net you are free to manage your own account or you can elect to purchase their Pro-Active Managed Support package for $99/month. The managed support package gives you live chat with their support team and they will pretty much do anything you need including migrate over up to 20 of your websites from your previous hosting company. This also includes monthly security overhauls and 24/7 monitoring. If you don’t want to buy the $99/month package you can submit paid trouble tickets for $10/ticket. We have found that the we almost always have our support tickets resolved in less than one hour.

Both Rackspace Cloudsites and VPS.net offer excellent support. But, since the folks at VPS.net can actually do something to help, as opposed to the Rackspace support folks simply apologizing for their failing system, VPS.net wins out in the support department as well.

10. Wickett Twitter Widget

To help build up a following on Twitter, one thing you want to do is broadcast your tweets in as many ways as possible. The Wickett Twitter Widget is an awesomely simple way to get your most recent tweets on your WordPress site. It installs as a sidebar widget and you can specify the number of tweets to display and whether or not you want to hide “reply” tweets. There are several other Twitter related plugins, but this one makes the top ten list because of it simplicity and elegance. You go to alot of trouble to find interesting links and comments and so it is great to be able to share your tweets on your blog.

Visit Wickett Twitter Widget

9. WP Logic

Perhaps a tad technical, but well worth mentioning, the WP Logic plugin gives every widget an extra control field called “Widget logic” that lets you control the pages that the widget will appear on. Suppose you have a WordPress site that acts as both your main website as well as your blog and you only want to show your blog categories on your “posts” and not on your “pages” – it’s easy to do with this plugin. This is one of those plugins where your friends will be saying, “Wow! How did you do that?”

Visit Widget Logic

8. Page Mash

This is a simple WordPress page management plugin. The Ajax interface allows you to drag-and-drop the pages into the order you like, modify the page structure by dragging a page to become a child or parent and toggle the page to be hidden from output. You can also see the id of the page which is often helpful for theme developers. If you have a WordPress site with more than just a handful of pages, PageMash is extremely helpful.

Visit PageMash simple WordPress page order management.

7. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack plugin automatically optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engine by allowing you to fine tune things like your page title and meta tags. This plugin is extremely easy to use as it works great straight out of the box. If you are an advanced user, you can customize virtually everything. And if you are a developer, this plugin has an API so your themes can access and extend the functionality of the plugin.

Visit All in One SEO Pack

6. Google XML Sitemaps

Perhaps the most downloaded WordPress plugin, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin not only automatically creates a site map linking to all your pages and posts, it also notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com when you make changes to you site. If you want to include pages that are part of your site but not part of you WordPress managed content, you can do that to./p>

Visit Google XML Sitemaps Generator

5. WP Super Cache

If you have a popular WordPress website you should seriously consider running WordPress Super Cache to improve the performance of your website. If you are not caching your pages, then every time a visitor comes to your site, WordPress has to pull together various pieces of information out of a database to put your page together. If you have a high traffic site, this is can really become a problem. WP Super Cache will store a copy of each of the pages on your website so that after the page has been assembled from the database once, WordPress can rest and just keep serving the static html copy of the page. This might be a bit techy, but the idea is you can dramatically speed up your site and reduce the load on your server by using WP Super Cache. If for no other reason, use this plugin so you don’t have to panic when your friend says, “I just Dugg your site.”

Visit WP Super Cache to make WordPress faster

4. NextGEN Image Gallery

If you want to display a photo gallery, show a series of product images, or just publish a slide show from your most recent vacation, the NextGEN image gallery is the plugin for you. NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Among the many features, NextGEN Gallery includes a thumbnail generator, sortable albums, and a water mark function. There are also plenty of add-ons as well including the NextGEN FlashViewer and NextGEN ImageFlow.

Visit NextGEN Image Gallery

3. cformsII Form Plugin

If your looking for a free form management plugin, cformsII is an extremely powerful plugin for setting up contact forms on your WordPress site. You don’t need to know any PHP or write any code. You can visually build forms in the WordPress admin panel. Then, navigate to the page or post where you want to use the form and there is a button in the WYSIWYG editor that you click and up pops a list of forms that you have made. Simply click on the one you want and your form is inserted into your page. Update your page and you the form is live. You can specify required fields, default values, and there are plenty of styles to make your form blend in perfectly with your site.

Visit cformsII WordPress Form Plugin

2. Gravity Forms

If you want the best forms plugin WordPress has to offer, you need Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is an amazing plugin for managing online forms. Some of the incredibly useful features include conditional form fields which means you can show or hide a field or entire sections of the form based on a value selected in another field. You can pre-populate form fields using querystring, shortcode, function or hooks.You can even schedule when forms are available by assigning a start date and end date for when your form is live on your site. Supposed you want to run a contest where the first 50 people that fill out the form win a prize. Gravity Forms lets you set a limit on the number of entries a form can receive. Pretty much anything you ever wanted a form to do, Gravity Forms can do it.

Visit Gravity Forms

1. PHPurchase The WordPress Ecommerce Shopping Cart Plugin

Since this plugin can actually make you money, it get’s the #1 spot. PHPurchase let’s you sell anything you want, digital products or physical products. It is incredibly simple to use and the support and documentation is great. There are screencast tutorials to help you get set up and if you run into any trouble, the developers are very responsive and often available via live chat. PHPurchase stands out from the other ecommerce plugins because it let’s you use WordPress, and all of the other plugins on this list, to configure your online store exactly the way you want it. PHPurchase is very easy to use and extremely flexible WordPress e-commerce shopping cart.

Visit PHPurchase the WordPress Ecommerce Shopping Cart Plugin