On October 19th I headed off to London for a Tech night with Unruly Media, one of the advertising distributors I work with to bring some of the funkier ads to the blog.

I love attending any tech event and particularly love meeting people I work with online and it was a great opportunity to meet some of the Unruly guys and gals over some beers and nibbles before the main event – Building a cool bug!

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done anything remotely arts ‘n’ crafts like, so was different… NOTE: hot glue guns are rather hot. Particularly when you get the hot glue all over your fingers…. OUCH!

After a lot of fiddling and fun I finally made my awesome little bug.

Was great fun and certainly different evening, and I now have a cool little bug bot on my desk… shame he lost a leg on the train home… need to find some glue!

If you have ever tried to use square brackets (e.g. [ and ]) in your posts it can be slightly frustrating when WordPress thinks that it’s a short code and tries to process it or simply remove it.

The solution to this is simple! All you need to do is add the HTML code for square brackets in the HTML editor or Source view of the post and insert “[” for the left bracket ([) and “]” for the right bracket (]).

So for example if you wanted to display [twitter] you would put [twitter]

Hope this helps!

This video tutorial describes builds on the tutorial I posted previously for how to create an picture gallery and shows how you can build a Lightbox on this to enlarge images in a large form.

Here is a great tutorial on how to use Javascript to detect which features of HTML 5 enabling you to detect what the browser supports, so you can provide a good user experience without leaving users on older browsers left out.

One of the fantastic new features of HTML 5 is video functionality, this tutorial describes how you can use HTML 5′s video functionality to achieve custom video capabilities, as well as custom controls. Awesome video and well worth checking out!

Steve “Planky” Plank gives a brief walkthrough on how MSDN subscribers can correctly set themselves up with the Windows Azure Platform, and a little bit on the features that users can expect.

You can take a look at Steve’s post on this over on his MSDN blog.

This is a really fantastic offer for MSDN subscribers to really take advantage of what Azure can offer with a huge 750 hours/month free compute. This is something I’d very much like to take advantage with (if I can) when my MSDN subscription comes through! If you have MSDN this is definitely worth checking out.

This is a fantastic video which describes how you can use HTML 5′s Canvas to create a picture gallery, as used on Capital FM’s Website.

One of my favourite of the tools I have looked at is “Blackbird Pie” developed by @Robinsloan and hosted on Twitter.com. The tool enables you to simple enter the URL for the tweet which it converts to some shiny HTML which you can then paste in.

Example:

Based on the Blackbird Pie tool there is also a very handy Blackbird Pie WordPress Plugin which enables easy integration so all you need to do to embed tweets is add ‘[blackbirdpie id=”35794693342101504”]’ or you can use the full URL ‘[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/dansgalaxy/status/35794693342101504”]’

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/#!/dansgalaxy/status/35794693342101504"]

While there is little difference between them I do prefer the WordPress widget, seems to look just a little bit nicer and easier to use when writing posts. It also has the added benefit that it isn’t effected by WordPress constantly trying to remove the style tags, which can prove rather irritating when writing a post with them in…

I am as always keen to hear what you guys think! So leave a comment below on which you prefer, or if you have found an even better way to embed tweets in your own sites and posts.

SSL and secured connections is vital in our busy online lives and is key to ensuring the integrity of your private information.

This is an excellent video from Common Craft and explains in simple terms web site security in a clear way anyone can understand, and a really cool video for educating non-tech literate people into what SSL is and why it is important. Check it out over at VeriSign.

You should of course also check out my post on “What is SSL and why do I need it” on the UK2.net Blog here, which explains with a little more detail what SSL is, how it works and why it is important.

After making some changes a while ago to how I run the wp-cron on this blog I noticed some odd problems as scheduled posts weren’t being published.

This was getting to be a rather frustrating so I decided to debug the problem once and for all and eventually came to the conclusion that under a WordPress MultiSite setup the wp-cron runs slightly differently in that it also requires the domain for which it is running, which obviously has problems when calling the file directly via cronjob command.

Lets explain the situation and solution.

I had the cronjob as described previously in my how to disable wordpress cron post, but it seems when calling the wp-cron via cronjob using:

php /home/USER/public_html/wp-cron.php

It returns an odd response:

Status: 302 Moved Temporarily

X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.14

Location: http://dansgalaxy.co.uk/wp-signup.php?new=

Content-type: text/html

Now after some testing I managed to determine that the wp-cron wasn’t running correctly under cronjob but worked fine when run via url and I began to wonder if each blog within the MultiSite environment requires it’s own wp-cron execution.

So I did a simple test, schedule a post on both blogs, and run the wp-cron from one domain and see it both publish or just one – just one published.

I now knew for definite that each blog needs its own wp-cron to run, which when you are trying to call the wp-cron directly using its server path makes things a little awkward and probably explains the odd error.

Conclusion:

In a multisite setup of WordPress, where you want to run wp-cron from cronjob instead of on every page load you will need to structure the cronjob differently to the previous article. instead you need a cronjob command formatted as such:

curl http://yourdomain.com/wp-cron.php

Note you will need a cronjob for each blog domain hosted.

Simple. Now I shall go to bed and get some sleep and try and ditch the headache this has caused…