Wow this seems to be really great for the students in developing countries without broadband or high speed internet connections.
KA – Lite – An Offline Server for Khan Academy!
Thanks to the post at: ThimphuTech Blog (
)
Very very Happy New Year! 🙂
And as Cold is fully turned on here.. Enjoy the Falling Snow at this blog until 4th Jan 🙂 (Thanks to Good core developers of WP for making this happen 🙂
I thank year 2013 for solving the biggest puzzle of my life 🙂 and blessing with the company of a very awesome person!
Year 2014 is going to be awesome 🙂 Wishing you very happy new year and lot of happiness and growth both on personal and business level in this year.
-Mohsin
Upgraded to latest WordPress version 3.8 also named as PARKER. And loving its flat lightweight fast-loading admin dashboard interface. Really beautiful and very functional. Helps get job done faster.
There are so many small improvements like just today I could not help but thank new version for making Widgets organization better and easier when there are many Widgets area/sidebars are defined for a big custom site.
That is it for now. Probably will add more later but very busy right now. If you are thinking to upgrade… go ahead do it!
Thank you WordPress Core team for making this Open Source software awesome day by day!
Mohsin
Being a full time user and fan of Ubuntu/Linux, I find this news very interesting:
German City Starts Distributing Free Ubuntu 12.04 CDs to Windows XP Users
My younger brother, also a programmer 🙂 , shared with me this little nifty keyboard short-cut and introduced to Mozilla Firefox’s awesome Responsive Design View. I am happy to share it with my readers and for my future reference.
In the past I had to use plug-ins, or resize window manually. But Firefox has made it so simple and so great.
1. Keyboard shortcut is : Ctrl + Shift + M (when you are on FireFox)
2. And Your Firefox will tranform itself to awesome responsive design viewer, you can check different views and enjoy.
Also it really helps to test bigger screens sizes even on smaller screens. It really helps the developer to create responsive web design from their own laptop and quickly check the different screen views without needing any manual window resizing or third party sluggish plugins.
See my site in different views in below screenshots:
Hi,
In responsive web design, I often encounter this issue, and solve it with jQuery. However this time, it was little different took much time to get it right.. So i am posting here for future reference:
<code>
<script>
jQuery(document).ready(function($){
var currentHeight = 0;
$(window).load(function() {
currentHeight = $('#slider').outerHeight();
$('#slider-right').css({'height':currentHeight});
});
$(window).resize(function() {
currentHeight = $('#slider').outerHeight();
$('#slider-right').css({'height':currentHeight});
$(window).trigger('resize');
});
});
</script>
</code>
I had two column layout, with responsive slider at the left, and a div in the right.
As slider keeps changing its height, right div looked bad. So using above code, we can use Jquery which does:
1. Take size of slider (on load as real property in css is not set, and you need to let the page rendered to get the rendered height)
2. Now we have two functions, one changes the height of right div on first page load. And second does the same thing but on every time when window resizes… to keep the height same on every window resize/reload.
Now I would say GOOGLE & GoTrusted VPN rescued me.
Issue #1: Client Site will not Open at PTCL My ISP
A very loyal client of mine, who outsources all programming of her business to me, was having issues with order checkouts. I needed to look into this and fix it asap.
I could see that site was working fine as using proxy I could see it working fine. Problem was that I could not login to it and do the job as public proxies are unsafe…
I skyped my younger brother, Ismail, that can he open this site in his pc in office. He replied that site was not opening there too as they too were using PTCL. I told him my situation… he said why not use VPN and get rid of PTCL stuff. WOW, even I have paid membership with VPN for clients’ youtube work (as Youtube is banned in Pakistan). I fired VPN and there I was able to access the site and figure the issues.
Issue #2: WordPress Gives 404 Error to 1ShoppingCart Thankyou Page return
Buyers of my client reported that after successful payment and order they are being redirected to NOT FOUND 404 page. My client was really upset that what could be the issue…
I double checked all the links, thank you page urls, and settings. Everything looked fine.
Then I did a test purchase and got same error as others 404 on actual URL. I could see the issue,
as there were GET POST data variables being sent by 1ShoppingCart which had conflicting variable name with WordPress’s builtin reserved names.
Next job was to compare all the reserved variables by WordPress and POST variables sent by 1SC, I was able to find both lists, quite long lists. Next goal was to compare and find exact matches.. I used my newly learned Linux ninja skills of text processing through bash. And was able to find the three possible matches and one of them was exact and that was ‘name’ variable!!!
Job was almost done, as next task was to ask WordPress let 1SC send ‘name’ variable and please do not mess with it. Simple solution was to unset the variable which I did by adding simple php unset code in WP-config file. And it solved the problem instantly!!!
For future reference, I will be posting the code and varaibles of both WP & 1SC in the PS of this post.
Thank you,
Mohsin
PS.
0. Problem URLs in WordPress with ‘name’ as in GET:
See working url:
https://mohsinrasool.com/surprise-the-biggest-bonus-so-far-joy-of-working/
404 Error on Above Page with name as GET
https://mohsinrasool.com/surprise-the-biggest-bonus-so-far-joy-of-working/?name=adfdaf
1. The code to add in wp-config.php
unset($_GET['name']);
2. List of 1ShoppingCart POST postback variables on successful order
address1
address2
cardtype
city
company
country
email1
fax
grandTotal
gst
secondaryphone
name
option1
option11
option21
orderID
price1
product1
quantity1
shipAddress1
shipAddress2
shipCity
shipCountry
shipname
shippingAmount
shippingMethod
shipState
shipZip
sku1
state
status
tax
Total
UserName1
phone
zip
3. List of WordPress reservered variable names
_ajax_nonce
_page
_per_page
_signup_form
_total
_url
_wp_http_referer
_wp_original_http_referer
_wp_unfiltered_html_comment
_wpnonce
_wpnonce-custom-header-upload
aa
action
action2
active_post_lock
add_new
add_new_users
addmeta
admin_bar_front
admin_color
admin_email
admin_password
admin_password2
ajax
align
allblogs
allusers
alt
approve_parent
approved
attachment
attachment_id
attachments
auth_cookie
author
author_name
autocomplete_type
auto_draft
auto-add-pages
autosave
background-attachment
background-color
background-position-x
background-repeat
banned_email_domains
blog
blog_name
blog_public
blog_upload_space
blogname
bulk_edit
c
calendar
cat
category_base
category_name
catslist
changeit
changes
charset
checkbox
checked
clear-recent-list
closed
comment
comment_approved
comment_author
comment_author_email
comment_author_url
comment_content
comment_date
comment_ID
comment_parent
comment_post_ID
comment_shortcuts
comment_status
comments_listing
comments_popup
confirmdelete
connection_type
content
context
cpage
create-new-attachment
createuser
customize_messenger_channel
customized
customlink-tab
date
date_format
date_format_custom
day
default-header
delete
delete_all
delete_all2
delete_comments
delete_option
delete_tags
delete_widget
deletebookmarks
deletecomment
deleted
deletemeta
deletepost
description
detached
dismiss
display_name
do
edit_date
email
error
exact
excerpt
features
feed
fetch
fheight
file
fileupload_maxk
filter
find_detached
first_comment
first_comment_author
first_comment_url
first_name
first_page
first_post
found_post_id
fwidth
global_terms_enabled
GLOBALS
gmt_offset
guid
height
hh
hidden
hidden_aa
hidden_jj
hidden_mm
hidden_mn
hidden_hh
history
hostname
hour
html-upload
id
ID
ids
id_base
illegal_names
insert-gallery
insertonlybutton
interim-login
item-object
item-type
jj
json
json_data
key
last_name
limited_email_domains
link_id
link_image
link_name
link_rss
link_url
link_visible
linkcheck
locale
locked
log
logged_in_cookie
m
media
media_type
menu
menu_items
menu-item
menu-item-attr-title
menu-item-classes
menu-item-db-id
menu-item-description
menu-item-object
menu-item-object-id
menu-item-parent-id
menu-item-position
menu-item-target
menu-item-title
menu-item-type
menu-item-url
menu-item-xfn
menu-locations
menu-name
message
meta
metakeyinput
metakeyselect
metavalue
minute
mm
mn
mode
monthnum
more
move
multi_number
name
nav-menu-locations
new
new_role
new_slug
new_title
newcat
newcomment_author
newcomment_author_email
newcomment_author_url
newcontent
newuser
nickname
no_placeholder
noapi
noconfirmation
noredir
number
offset
oitar
option
option_page
order
orderby
p
pb
page
page_columns
page_id
page_options
paged
pagegen_timestamp
pagename
parent_id
pass1
pass2
password
permalink_structure
photo_description
photo_src
phperror
ping_status
plugin
plugin_status
pointer
position
post
post_category
post_data
post_format
post_ID
post_id
post_mime_type
post_password
post_status
post_title
post_type
post_view
postid
posts
preview
primary_blog
private_key
ps
public_key
publish
pwd
query
reassign_user
reauth
redirect
redirect_to
ref
referredby
registration
registrationnotification
rememberme
remove-background
removeheader
removewidget
reset-background
resetheader
review
rich_editing
robots
role
s
same
save
savewidget
savewidgets
screen
scrollto
search
second
section
selectall
selection
send
send_password
sentence
short
show_sticky
sidebar
sidebars
signup_for
signup_form_id
site_id
site_name
sitename
size
skip-cropping
spam
spammed
src
ss
stage
start
static
status
sticky
subdomain_install
submit
subpost
subpost_id
super_admin
tab
tag
tag_ID
tag-name
tag_base
tags_input
tax
tax_input
tag-name
target
taxonomy
tb
term
text-color
the-widget-id
theme
theme_status
thumb
timezone_string
time_format
time_format_custom
title
thumbnail_id
trash
trashed
type
undismiss
unspam
unspammed
untrash
untrashed
url
update_home_url
updated
upgrade
upload_filetypes
upload_space_check_disabled
use_ssl
user
user_id
user_login
user_name
username
users
verify-delete
version
visibility
visible
w
weblog_title
welcome_email
welcome_user_email
widget_id
widget_number
widget-id
widget-recent-comments
widget-rss
width
withcomments
withoutcomments
wp_customize
wp_http_referer
wp_screen_options
wp-preview
WPLANG
x1
y1
year
Yesterday, an interesting thing happened. A first time client of us, who trusted his website to us to build as per his mockups and ideas, sent me extra bonus on the top of the job… and Man it was the biggest percentage of Bonus I have ever gotten!
Guess what percentage? 5% of the original project amount? 10%, 25% ? 50%? Yes it was 50%!!!
My first thought was that client forgot the interim payment he had already made, lol for few seconds it was test of my integrity and honesty (Thank God I was able to cope my greedy instinct and was going to let him know that) so I opened the customer support center… and there I read awesome reply already posted by him. Let me quote:
With regards to payment, I am delighted with the work you have provided and the help you have given. Therefore, I am very happy to pay a 50% bonus for your work. I trust you find that acceptable and that we can continue to use you for our ongoing work.
I was really delighted to read above quote, as it gives you satisfaction on multiple levels. Yes you get happy to know that more money is in your account, but you also get happy that your work is accepted and appreciated and valued by your clients. This encourages more quality in your future work. I thanked him for his bonus and he kindly replied:
No problem Mohsin – it’s a pleasure. You have been extremely patient with the length of time this project has taken, and very helpful in the advice you have given. PLUS – you and your team seem to be able to design to our exact specifications… all without complaint! So that’s appreciated 😉
Now that is awesome, it proves that if you focus on your passion and work, you do not have to worry about the money. You just focus on creating wealth (value) and money will follow. Money should never be the goal but the value creation and wealth creation (oh yeah if you want to know what the heck is difference b/w Wealth & Money then read Paul Graham’s essay link is below.) I sign off now with Paul’s link and happy reading Paul’s essay & Good luck with your wealth creation.
* Paul Graham’s Essay: Wealth http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Thanks,
Mohsin
Insha Allah, I along with my friends will be attending next meeting as guest attendees at Lahore Toastmasters Club on Sat 24th. Do not let me forget this awesome event. Posting it so I can keep track of it and hopefully update this post when I come back from the meeting that day!
Hi,
If you are using Amazon S3 for storage, I recommend using IAM to create users with specific access to S3 only or to some specific bucket only. It is great way to give to your developer or client or partner access to specific bucket in your S3 without allowing access to whole Amazon or AWS or S3 account.
Using IAM service in AWS, you can create groups and users with specific permissions. In my case:
Policy Code for Specific Bucket View/Download/Upload/Delete Access:
Enable AWS Management Console access to an Amazon S3 bucket:
[code language=”css”]{
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": ["s3:GetBucketLocation", "s3:ListAllMyBuckets"],
"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": ["s3:ListBucket" ],
"Resource": [ "arn:aws:s3:::test"]
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [ "s3:PutObject", "s3:GetObject", "s3:DeleteObject"],
"Resource": [ "arn:aws:s3:::test/*"]
}
]
}[/code]
For Programmatic Access, following IAM policy grants programmatic read-write access to the test bucket:
[code language=”css”] {
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": ["s3:ListBucket" ],
"Resource": [ "arn:aws:s3:::test"]
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [ "s3:PutObject", "s3:GetObject", "s3:DeleteObject"],
"Resource": [ "arn:aws:s3:::test/*"]
}
]
}[/code]