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WordPress

Posted by on Jun 29, 2010 in Software

Every couple of years my personal web presence gets a major overhaul. This time it took a little longer, meaning wolfpaulus.com had the same look and feel for quite some time now and I had to use WayBack machine at http://web.archive.org/ to find out for how long …

This time to focus of the upgrade was mainly to make content creation and syndication easier but it also resulted in what I think is great look and feel. If you happen to read this in an RSS feed reader, I encourage you to go to http://wolfpaulus.com and take look.

Content Creation

Until now, I had rolled my own PHP driven content management and syndication system; a simple file based system that was looking for some proprietary tags in the text content. Building your own system certainly has a lot of advantages and I also learned a lot developing and running it. However, eventually I spent too much time in the PHP, time I would rather use to add content to this site.

Looking at all the available options, I ended up with WordPress. Instead of going directly to http://wordpress.com/, I’m running WordPress 3.0 at Arvixe, my web hosting provider, giving my at least the sense of being in control.

Using WordPress opens the door to a multitude of tools, supporting writing, editing, publishing, and syndicating.

Look and Feel

Some time back, all WordPress based sites looked pretty much the same. Not anymore, ever since professional theme creators got into the business of selling WordPress Themes, sites became more distinguishable and way more attractive.

Content Features

All the relevant content has been transferred over from the file based system into WordPress. However, all Permalinks changed. Recently added QR Codes are also available on the new site as is a great printing feature, allowing not only to conveniently print and preview but also to tweet, email, and convert into PDF.

I don’t know yet how useful the the display of recent tweets and the TagClout really are, but it certainly looks cool.

Browsing wolfpaulus.com with a Droid

Mobile Clients get special treatment

For the best possible experience, when visiting the site with a mobile client, like your Android or iPhone, a specially tailored Theme is used, showing content beautifully. It scales images, captions and videos automatically. Breaks up content with ‘Load More’ links that use ajax to make browsing snappy. However, there is also an easy way to get to the regularly formatted site, when visiting with your

Feedback

WordPress also has a great and easy to use feedback system and there are plugins that filter out spam automatically.

So if you like the new site and even if you don’t, why not leave a brief reply below.

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Running MySQL 5.1 on Mac OS X Client

Posted by on Mar 27, 2008 in Mac OS X

Mac OS X 10.5 Server comes with the MySQL pre-installed. However, the database server doesn’t ship with the client version of OS X 10.5 Leopard, which most of us Mac users run. Here are the notes I took, putting MySQL 5.1 on a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo based iMac (none 64 bit) running OS X 10.5.2 (Client)

Installing MySQL 5.1 On OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Client

Download the pre-compiled module package in form of a diskimage (dmg), available at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/ For the 2 GHz Intel Core Duo based iMac, I downloaded the 32-bit version mysql-5.1.23-rc-osx10.5-x86.dmg. Newer Macs, featuring a Core-2-Duo processor should work best with the 64-bit version.
Open (double-click) the dmg file, followed by running (double-click) the mysql-5.1.23-rc-osx10.5-x86.pkg package installer.

The package installer will install the mysql into /usr/local/mysql-5.1.23-rc-osx10.5-x86 and also create this shortcut /usr/local/mysql/

Installing the Preferences Pane won’t do us any good, it does not work anymore with OS X 10.5. Instead, the launchd mysql.plist file needs to be created and stored in /Library/LaunchDaemons/ and also given ownership to root:

sudo chown root:wheel /Library/LaunchDaemons/mysql.plist

mysql.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>GroupName</key>
<string>mysql</string>
<key>KeepAlive</key>
<true/>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.mysql.mysqld</string>
<key>Program</key>
<string>/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe</string>
<key>UserName</key>
<string>mysql</string>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

This command line can now be used to start MySQL:

sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/mysql.plist

and to stop it:

sudo launchctl stop mysql
sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/mysql.plist

From now on, the MySQL Server will be started at boot time and (re-)starting should not be necessary anymore. Here, a check was done with the ActivityMonior, showing MySQL running:

Entering this command line after starting the server, /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql should produce an output something like this:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1
Server version: 5.1.23-rc MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql>

.profile

Adding /usr/local/mysql/bin to the ~/.profile provides easier access to all of MySQL’s tools.
E.g. use pico ~/.profile to insert this line into your shell profile:
PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/mysql/bin

Setting root user’s password and creating more users

Since the MySQL’s root password is not set by default, this is one of the 1st things that need to be done like so:
mysqladmin -u root password myPassWord
Instead of using the command line, more users can now be added using a GUI tool like DbVisualizer

Using MySQL with PHP

PHP on OS X 10.5 is looking for mysql.sock at /var/mysq/mysql.sock. However, the mysql installer puts it at /tmp/mysql.sock. Creating the directory and a symlink, seem to be the best way to work around:

sudo mkdir /var/mysql
sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock

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