When I was using Firefox, this usually took care of that in terms of Adobe Acrobat:

Firefox > Tools > Options > Applications > Adobe Acrobat Document > Save to File

But other browsers, like Chrome, don’t provide as much customization options, so that calls for an Adobe Acrobat settings :

Acrobat > Edit > Preferences > Internet > Web Browser Options > Display PDF in browser

This should take care of it in all browsers.

[Silly little post, but… family asked, so maybe others need this]

In the following example, I had the Qualtrics date/time for the date+time the participant began to take the survey as well as the time the participant finished the survey. The goal was to get the number of minutes it took the participant to finish.

To do that it’s best to use Excel’s string parsing. Take a look at the following example where C2 and D2 hold the start and finish time for the second participant. Since Qualtrics outputs date and time in the same box we’ll separate those into different boxes for date and time. E2 and F2 parse the date (C2 and D2 respectively), while G2 and H2 hold the time (same). Excel then makes it very easy to calculate the time difference between the two time boxes.

E2=VALUE(MID(C2,6,2)&"/"&MID(C2,9,2)&"/"&LEFT(C2,4))

 

G2=VALUE(MID(C2,12,2)&":"&MID(C2,15,2)&"/"&RIGHT(C2,2))

So, essentially, it’s about using the functions left(), mid(), & right() to parse the text.

To make it appear the right way, the parsed boxes should be set to the right date/time display (right-click->format). Another simple example can be found in “Convert Dates To Excel Formatted Dates”. Once done with Excel, copy paste the results into SPSS and you’re done.

(post written as a guide for a colleague who was struggling with this)

Took me a while to figure out why websites were breaking in some pages, till I was finally able to figure out that Internet Explorer has a bug where it can handle only pages with under 30 CSS files. Anything above that and the page would go dead.

Don’t believe me? check Microsoft’s “All style tags after the first 30 style tags on an HTML page are not applied in Internet Explorer”

All style tags after the first 30 style tags on an HTML page are not applied. Occasionally, you may also receive the following error message:

The page you are looking for might have been moved or had its name changed.

If you use a network monitor tool to capture network traffic, you may notice that a TCP reset occurs when Internet Explorer is receiving the page. Internet Explorer then generates another POST request if the original request was a POST request. Or, Internet Explorer may send a GET request instead.

You’d think that Microsoft would fix such a bug, but looking at the Internet Explorer versions that are affected, the list starts back at version 4.0 and goes up all the way to the most recent version as of today – Internet Explorer 8. Brilliant.

If you’re developing Drupal based websites, 30 CSS files are nothing, especially with the more advanced themes and modules. It’s enough that you include the theme, views and panels to easily top this limit.

But, there are a few things that might help.

For one, the IE Unlimited CSS module saved me with the Drupal 6 installations.

In some cases, though not all, the built-in Drupal CSS aggregation/optimization may help (if it’s aggregated already, that is).

How to enable Drupal CSS file aggregation

1. Log in as your Drupal site’s administrator.
2. Go to the Administer » Site configuration » Performance page.
3. Check the Enabled checkbox for Optimize CSS .
4. Click the Save configuration button.

Another option, if you’re not in Drupal is using a CSS optimizer solution. Here’s from Nadeau Software’s list, and although they claim it won’t speed up by much, it might save you from IE.

CSS optimizers

Hand-editing CSS to make it more optimal is tedious. Instead, use a CSS optimizer application. Here's a few of the many available:

• Blumentals Software's CSS Toolbox (freeware)
• CSS Drive's CSS Compressor (freeware)
• Michael Bianco's CSS Optimizer (freeware)
• Robson's CSS Compressor (freeware)
• Lottery Post's CSS Compressor (freeware)
• CSS Tidy (freeware)
  • CleanCSS (freeware)
  • Code Beautifier (freeware)
  • CSS Formatter and Optimiser (freeware)
  • CSS Code Formatter and Optimizer (freeware)
  • ... and many more based upon CSS Tidy

It never ceases to amaze me how a serious company as big as Microsoft, with all the resources available to it, keeps getting the whole browser thing wrong. What’s even more remarkable, is that there are those among us who still use that thing.

Wordpress sometimes has the most annoying little bugs. Ones that don’t get fixed in minor version updates, ones that developers don’t seem to care about much but they could drive you crazy.

Wordpress 2.9 failed cron jobs and missed schedules are one such bug. This hasn’t started in Wordpress 2.9. Searching for “missed schedule” with “Wordpress” keywords, you’re bound to find endless forum threads about that.

Wordpress 2.9’s minor updates (upto Wordpress WPMU 2.9.1.1) didn’t seem to take care of that.

And the fix is so simple – it consists of modifying the timeout in wp-includes/cron.php.

Approximately around the line number 205 change :

wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (' timeout' => 0.01, ' blocking' => false)); 

To 20 seconds:

wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (' timeout' => 20, ' blocking' => false)); 

The simplest solution, assuming you don’t want to tweak this by hand or worry about future bugs overriding your changes is use one of the useful plugins that would check for missed scheduled posts like “Missed Schedule”.

This has been reported … again and again… take a look at the Wordpress bug tracker :

cron stopped working with standard configuration

Hi Guys,

After the update to wp 2.9 (from 2.8.6 where everything worked just fine) my cron-jobs stopped working. Looking inside the cron-array with crontrol http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-crontrol/ it looks like they are not executed at all. So I end up with all cron jobs waiting for execution (which seems to consume quite a bit of time on every page call). In crontrol this behavior is shown as all cron jobs have the execution status now.

I found the work-around in Otto's reply in this post http://wordpress.org/support/topic/296236which seems to work but produces dirty rewrites in the browser's address bar...

As my server configuration didn't change at all I assume that something else changed (e.g. could the statement Increase timeout on cron-based requests when checking for upgrades mentioned in http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.9 be the reason?)

greetz, berny

More? here…

• WordPress 2.9: three bugs, and how to fix them
• 2.9 Schedule Posts "missed"
• WP-Cron not working in 2.9

Hope that helps.

To tackle that, I would suggest setting Yahoo’s crawl rate to something very slow and blocking CUIL and Baidu altogether (unless you have a Chinese site).

To set a lower crawl rate for Yahoo’s slurp crawler and block their useless adcrawler, add this to your ROBOTS.TXT file :

User-agent: Slurp
    Crawl-delay: 300 

User-agent: Yahoo!-AdCrawler
    Disallow: / 

Please note that this sets the crawl rate to one page every 300 seconds. That’s very very slow and will impact how your new pages appear on Yahoo. But, since Yahoo doesn’t bring in that much traffic, I’d say that does matter. Still, if you’re concerned about it, set it to something lower, perhaps between 20-50

To block CUIL altogether add this :

User-agent: twiceler
    Disallow: /

Baidu ignores robots.txt and so you have the following options (source):

Block the Baidu IP range (list)

if you have mod_write on your apache enabled, add this to your .HTACCESS :

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^baiduspider [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F]

or this to you httpd.conf

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Baidu" bad_bot
    <Directory /> 

Order Allow,Deny 

Allow from all 

Deny from env=bad_bot 

</Directory>

Hope that helps, let me know if you ran into this problem and if you have any others way you tackle that.

Around the beginning of 2010 I saw an explosion of lists with various recommended Wordpress plugins :

• Best 16 WordPress Plugins For 2010
• The 15 Best Wordpress Plugins to Use in 2010
• 75 Best Wordpress Plugins That Make Bloggers Lives Easier
• 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
• Best Wordpress Plugins to improve the Security of your Blog

These are okay, but there are a few plugins that can really help boost things up for you. Following are some of my favorite plugins and recommendations for 2010 :

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins

1. SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin - The AllinOneSEO alternative.
2. SEO Super Comments – Index your comments as separate pages (thousands of added long tail pages).
3. HeadSpace 2 – Complete control over metas (overlaps with some of #1, complements #4, not recommended for WPMU)
4. Meta Robots WordPress plugin – All needed SEO tags (overlaps with some of #1, complements #3, not recommended for WPMU)
5. SEO Smart Links – ALinks reloaded. Auto internal and external linking
6. Hotlink 2 Link WordPress Plugin – Make it easy to link to your photos.
7. Wordpress Global Translator Plugin – Make translation pages of your blog in any language (thousands of added long tail pages with real added value for visitors).
8. SEO Boost from Google 404 Plugin – Best 404 page possible.
9. WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin – Make the most of incoming traffic.

Speed plugins

• DB Cache Reloaded – Projekty – Using WPSuperCache? try this instead (not tested on WPMU).
• WP Minify WordPress Plugin – Optimize JS and CSS files (not tested on WPMU).

Making money plugins

The only real way to make money blogging is direct advertising. This is the best no hassle direct advertising plugin I know:

• OIOPublisher (aff, I bought this plugin, if you do direct ads, you should too)

Happy 2010.

Cron has been running for over an hour and is probably stuck.

or

Attempting to restart Cron

That usually doesn’t leave you with much to work with, does it?

First thing to tackle this is try and get the cron unstuck and running. To do that, you can install the Devel module, goto the variable view, and delete the cron_semaphore variable that indicated a cron is already running. After flushing all cache you should be able to run cron again. Then, you might come across various types of the next strange message

MySql : " Warning: MySQL server has gone away "

Gone away where?

This indicates that MySQL is timing out. To tackle that you’d need to tweak MySQL a bit. Drupal has a great guide on that. Essentially, it’s opening your /etc/my.cnf and setting it to something that allows longer runs. Following is what I ended up with :

[mysqld]
skip-bdb
set-variable = max_connections=500
safe-show-database

Don’t forget to restart the server and after clearing the cron semaphore again rerun the cron. That should take care of things.

Still, if you’re a heavy Firefox user, there’s lots you can do to make your Firefox much faster. A few plugins emerged that help control the catastrophe and make sure Firefox memory leakage is reduced to a minimum, allowing Firefox to maintain a reasonable speed.

Personally, I use the following :

AFOM Firefox Addon

AFOM recovers Memory Leakage within a running instance of the Firefox browser application.

AFOM, focuses on two ( 2 ) types of memory usage and with flushing for memory recovery.

When resource requirements ( Stack and Heap ) have been reached, approximately twenty-seven ( 27 ) seconds afterward, the memory will be flushed and recovered from Fragmented Orphaned Ram memories.

Below are the two types supported for recovery.

1. Working Set: The set of memory pages currently visible to the process and is [ Shareable ] between other processes.

2. Private Working Set: The set of memory pages currently visible to the process and is [ Non Sharable ] between other processes

Note : AFOM has recently being converted into Memory Fox.

To see how much resources Firefox takes –inside- Firefox :

StatusBarEx Firefox Addon

Show some useful information on statusbar of firefox, such as the memory usage of system & firefox itself, network speed, system power status, etc

Other memory Firefox tricks

• I load all the Adobe files externally.
• Played with some of the about:config settings suggested by Mozilla (“Settings that can reduce memory usage”) and Detector Pro.