When you changed your WordPress Site Address, WordPress didn’t update your cookie path, which prevents WordPress from loading the Admin Toolbar.

To fix this, clear your site cookies by signing out of WordPress and signing back in.  Signing out and signing back in will set your login cookies with the correct path.

“Engineers instinctively measure their days by what they built.” – Rands

While I plan to continue full-time development and consulting, I will build and sell software as a service in 2012.

“Real artists ship” – Steve Jobs

These emails are useful for order fulfilment, but they are lacking a key piece of data that you may need to fulfill an order: the product’s SKU.

Fortunately, there’s a way to include the each product’s SKU in the Admin Report.  To accomplish this, you need to edit file within the plugin folder: wp‑e‑commerce\wpsc‑theme\functions\wpsc‑transaction_results_functions.php

In this file find the following code around line 235 (in version 3.8.6):

$report_product_list.= " - " . $row['quantity'] . " " . $row['name'] . "  " . $message_price . "\n\r";

And paste the following line in it’s place:

$report_product_list.= " - " . $row['quantity'] . " " . wpsc_product_sku($row['prodid']) . " " . $row['name'] . "  " . $message_price . "\n\r";

With this change, the SKU will be added to your Admin Report after each item’s quantity.

Please remember: you may need to edit this code with each WP eCommerce update, so please bookmark this page.

With their new website design, Lifehacker lost me as a reader.  And I wasn’t alone—the readership of lifehacker.com dropped almost 40% since the redesign.

Gawker and Lifehacker maintain an old “blog” layout at blog.lifehacker.com, but unfortunately there’s no way to set the “blog view” as your default view.

It would be nice if these URLs could be rewritten on the fly though, eh?  Well, they can be with the X-Rewrite extension for Google Chrome!

The URL Rewrite extension has a simple configuration screen with three input fields that allow you to use regular expressions to redirect one URL to another.

The “Pattern” is:
(.*)://lifehacker.com/(.*)

The “Rewrite” pattern is:

$1://blog.lifehacker.com/$2

And voila, Lifehacker is back to it’s old self and has me back as a happy reader!

Testing for a Custom Post Type from within The Loop

In this example, we will be using the get_post_type() function to determine whether a post is a ‘photo’ or ‘illustration’ Custom Post Type.

if ( get_post_type() == 'photo' ) { echo 'Post is type: photo'; }
elseif ( get_post_type() == 'illustration' ) { echo 'Post is type: illustration'; }

Testing for a Custom Post Type outside of The Loop

To test for a Custom Post Type from outside of the loop, we need to know the post_id.  In this example, the post_id we are testing is “1″.

if ( get_post_type(1) == 'photo' ) { echo 'Post is type: photo'; }
elseif ( get_post_type(1) == 'illustration' ) { echo 'Post is type: illustration'; }

Testing for a Custom Post Type within single.php

The built-in WordPress function is_singular() will test whether any of the following is true for a page: is_single(), is_page() or is_attachment().  The is_singular() function also has the ability to test whether a page is a specific type.  You can test whether a page is a blog post or a ‘photo’ type in the following example:

if ( is_singular('post') ) { echo 'Post is type: post'; }
elseif ( is_singular('photo') ) { echo 'Post is type: photo'; }
elseif ( is_singular('illustration') ) { echo 'Post is type: illustration'; }

You can also test a page against any number of Custom Post types by using arrays:

if ( is_singular(array( 'post', 'photo', 'illustration' )) ) { echo 'Post is type is either: post, photo, or illustration'; }

You can learn more about the WordPress functions used in this post (get_post_type() and is_singular()) at the WordPress.org Codex.

Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations. It was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core. Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination. The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections.

The (probable) reason for this is that your suhosin.post.max_vars and suhosin.request.max_vars options are set too low. Ask your host to increase the values on these options.

If you host the website yourself, you’ll need to edit your php.ini file (located in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini on Debian Linux servers). Simply add these lines to the bottom of your php.ini:

suhosin.post.max_vars = 5000
suhosin.request.max_vars = 5000

And voila, you should be able to save menus with more than 16 items!

• If a URL shortening service stops working (or is shut down, like vb.ly), the redirects are lost (commonly referred to as “link rot”).
• Cloaking a link’s destination using short URLs can be used to send a user to a malicious web site.
• Some web sites block users from posting links from URL shortening services for the above reasons.

Solutions: rev=”canonical” and rel=”shorturl”

The problem addressed above can be resolved if a web site’s publisher provides their own short URLs. With this in mind, the rev=”canonical” and rel=”shorturl” standards were proposed to allow publishers to specify a short URL for a web page.

These two standards offer different ways of saying the same thing:

Instead of using that service you like for shortening my URLs, I’ll provide you with my own short URL. The short URL I provide will (likely) be short enough for your needs and my URLs won’t be subject to the drawbacks associated with the URL shortening service you choose.

It doesn’t matter which standard is better—both are being used by major web sites. (Also, are there any others that I’m missing that are actually being used? Let me know by emailing steve @ this domain.)

Introducing isshort.com

Currently, there aren’t any tools to grab all of the publisher-provided shorter URL in a standards-agnostic way. Tools that will grab either rev=”canonical” or rel=”shorturl”, but not both.

That’s where isshort.com comes in. isshort doesn’t care what URL shortening standard the publisher uses, it will find them all. This user-focused design will hopefully spur more sites and apps to provide their own short URLs.

Supported Short URLs

Currently, isshort.com supports short URLs using the rel=”canonical”, rel=”shortlink”, and rel=”shorturl” standards.  Also, isshort shortens Amazon.com (amzn.com), YouTube (youtu.be), and NPR (n.pr) links.  Here are some links to try:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA90IlymdZ4
• http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reader-Wifi-Graphite/dp/B002Y27P3M/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/sjstrutt/3455773875/
• http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/starstruck
• http://wordpress.org/news/2010/06/thelonious/
• http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2010/10/21/130727951/tedprize
• http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820781

There’s an API, too.

The current version of the API is located at http://isshort.com/api.php. You can always access this version (version 1) of the API with the URL parameter “v=1″. Version 1 of the API can output a short URL in plain text (default), JSON or XML formats.