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Internet Explorer Caches Ajax Requests
Last night I was putting some final touches on an app I am developing and I ran into some issues in IE8. When I used jQuery’s $.get() to pull some content off the server it triggered the success function without ever requesting the page from the server. I was a little confused at first, but after I used the right keywords I was able to figure out that IE8, and probably IE7, cache ‘get’ requests. It seems like there are two workarounds that are pretty common: switch to post, this is what I did, or add a random number as a URL variable. I didn’t care if my request was get or post, so I just made the switch.
After that all was good, again.
Importing from Blogger ftp to WordPress
When I first heard that blogger was disabling its ftp service I figured I would just import by blogs into WordPress. It turns out that the WordPress importer for blogger doesn’t support ftp. Here is a simple solution:
- Log into blogger and select the blog you want to import into WordPress.
- Go to Settings->basic and export your blog.
- Create a new blog, in blogger, and import the export you just created.
- Import this new blog into WordPress using the WordPress importer (tools->import).
- Delete the blog you created for import/export purposes.
- Drink a Coke.
Goodbye, Blogger
For the past 6 years I have maintained my family’s blog using blogger, but they apparently decided to cut the ftp service. I have been thinking of moving the blog to WordPress for some time now, so I guess I have a good excuse to do so. I have enjoyed my time with blogger, and will definitely miss it. One thing I liked about blogger is that I could maintain separate blogs and ftp them all to my one web site. Now I need to find another solution.
Tech Support
I have a Kodak ESP 9 printer that I use for work. It should be a great AiO, but it has issues. I spent an hour on the phone with Kodak tech support this morning trying to get things straightened out. I spent about an hour talking with Davis, from New Delhi. Aside from my printer issues we also spoke about life in New Delhi, weather, his schooling, Iowa snow, and other off-topic topics. Most of this was while we were waiting for one thing or another.
A lot of people complain about foreign call centers, but I really enjoyed my experience. I had to talk slowly and there was a lot of ‘N as in Nancy’, but I think Davis and I both had a nice time chatting while we waited.
On another note, at the beginning of the call I had the option to receive support in Spanish. I wonder where I would have been redirected to had I chosen that option?
jQuery 1.4
jQuery1.4 has now been released. I just recently started using jQuery and have used it for a few projects. Now I am not sure how much testing I need to do before I upgrade my code or if I should even bother. I think for the time being I will keep my old projects at their current level and upgrade as I build new apps.
DrPic.com
I was helping my kids’ principal with the school newsletter and she was having an issue with a Word document that was too big (8MB). She was on her school computer with no way to resize the 3 huge images she was trying to insert. I was thinking about our options when she said, “What about picture doctor dot com?” I had never heard of such a thing, but after a little searching, I found it.
DrPic.com is certainly not going to replace PhotoShop anytime soon, but it worked great for her. I don’t know that I will ever use it, but it is nice to know it exists.
jQuery in a CMS
I have used jQuery twice in the past month to get some custom behavior from a CMS. In the first instance I used it to re-URL a site for Xavier, and in the second instance I used it for some custom menu options that weren’t available in WordPress. I like the results it produces, but I always worry a little bit about JavaScript as a solution. I would much rather keep things server-side, but sometimes client-side is just easier (and almost as reliable).
WP Events Calendar and Internet Explorer 7
UPDATE: I usually don’t like doing updates like this, but I want to keep this together. First of all, I realized this morning that I was using IE7, not IE8. I upgraded, and things worked better, but it threw a javascript error after it loaded the first event, so not much better. I decided to downgrade events calendar (by renaming the folder and uploading the code from the previous stable version) and it looks like everything is working now. Yea!
UPDATE: This fixed the error, but it also broke the tooltip, which is fairly important to the plugin functionality, so I undid my changes and am going to see if there is another way to fix this. What I haven’t figured out yet is why .tooltip does not cause a problem on the calendar in the actual site, but only in the administrator.
It looks like there is also some sort of issue with the jquery datepicker plugin. If I had to guess I would bet that it is the same issue.
One of the sites I help maintain was trying to use the WP Events Calendar plugin, and when we set it up everything worked great, but when our users went to use it IE8 kept denying them access to the page.
I looked at a lot of code and narrowed it down to the jquery tooltip plugin. Eventually I found the solution – change the createHelper function in the jquery tooltip code from .appendTo('document.body'); to .appendTo('document.anotherPageElement');. In my case I switched out ‘body’ for ‘wpcontent’. If you need to edit this for your WordPress installation the pathing should be something like /wp-content/plugins/events-calendar/js/jquery.tooltip.min.js. I actually pulled in the full code so I could understand it better. I can’t imagine that will affect performance too much.
Now I am getting the same error on the page where I edit the events, but I think this is a good start.
Google Wave Notifier
IMO, if you are using Google Wave, you need the Google Wave Notifier plugin for firefox.
One thing I don’t like about Google Wave is that it does not integrate with gmail. Since not many people are on yet, I don’t like to check it all the time because I don’t get a lot of activity. Google Wave Notifier puts a little notifier in your browser status bar, alerting you to a new wave. I dig it.
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