Now, I am definitely no Old Testament scholar and my mind is still a little sleepy. But for some reason when I heard this I was a little put off. Some immediate questions popped into my mind… and I am going to ask them of you.

• Do we have an example in Scripture of God judging agnostic nations by with their leaders? I think there might be, but I cannot remember.
• How does inflicting socialism on an agnostic nation result in turning people to God?
• Are other socialist nations, socialist because God is judging them?

Periodic Table of the HTML5 Elements – Josh Duck.

From Matt Mullenweg’s hands, to your eyes; read’em and weep!

You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain. – Exodus 20:7, Deuteronomy 5:11

A friend of mine posted a status update on his Facebook wall, where he called into question the use of the acronym OMG (Oh My God) by Christians and its apparent condemnation in Scripture. Unfortunately he had to delete his status update because so many of his friend were offended, feeling like they had been called out for breaking the Second Commandment.

I have a few thoughts on this topic and I would like to share them. I do not believe “God” is God’s name. In fact, a good theology teacher would admit to you that we do not really know what his name is. According to most, it seems to be YHWH which is usually pronounced Yahweh (Ya-Way). This comes from Exodus 3:14. There are no vowels in written Hebrew — well there weren’t any vowels when the Old Testament was written. So the pronunciation of YHWH is a tradition. Most decent theologians should admit that the true pronunciation of YHWH is lost. Many believe that the Jewish nation was so afraid of using God’s name in vain, that they used the vowel sounds of the Hebrew word for Lord and transposed them onto YHWH which is where we get Yahweh. They did this to be extra careful not to actually say his name (in case it was in vain).

There is one other place in Scripture where God refers to himself by name. But it is not YHWH, if you look at Exodus 34:14 God says, “for you shall not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” God’s name might not actually be “Jealous” it could be a “you are what you eat” thing. You can call God, Jealous, because he is jealous. I am not going to get into what he is jealous of or even if it is his actual name, it’s merely an interesting place in Scripture where he names himself.

Presently, we refer to God as “God” and treat that as if it were his real name — but it clearly isn’t. So I have a couple of questions…

1. Is saying OMG breaking the 2nd Commandment? In other words, is the mere reference to God breaking the 2nd commandment if it is done in vain?
2. Is saying OMG but meaning “Goodness” or “Gosh” more acceptable?

I would love to hear your input on this. I am really torn on this subject. Personally, I try not say “God” in vain… but I am not entirely convinced that it is wrong either.

I found out a couple days before soft-launch that PayPal has this arbitrary 20% limit on increases to subscriptions. So, if I have a customer who wants to increase their basic membership to a plus membership, PayPal will reject the transaction automatically. The only “work around” is for the customer to cancel their basic membership and sign up for the plus membership. In other words, a real pain in the butt!

This was the conversation log I had with PayPal customer support via email:

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

Subject:  Amount  can  only  be  increased  by 20%

I  just  found  out  that  it  is not  possible  to  increase  a  subscription  by  20%.  My  web  service  has  two account  types,  the  Basic  account  is  .99$  every  three  months  and  the  Plus
account  is  2.99$  every  three  months.

Obviously,  20%  of  .99$  is  .20$,  so  I  am  well  exceeding  the  20%  limit.  I want  to  allow  my  customers  to  upgrade/downgrade  their  accounts  as  they want.  What  are  my  options?

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Dear Lew Ayotte,

Hello, my name is ***** and I am happy to assist you with your question regarding the subscription amount.

In this case, you need to create another subscription button indicating the current amount.

Note: You can create a basic button without logging in, however for advanced button customization you will need to log in. To use the button designer, your web browser must be JavaScript enabled.

1. Go to the PayPal website and log in to your account.
2. Click “Merchant Services” at the top of the page.
3. Click “Subscribe” under Create Buttons.
4. Enter your information to customize the button to your needs.
5. Click “Create Button.”
6. Click “Select Code” to select the button code.
7. Copy and paste the button code into your own web page code.

Note: After creating your first button, click “Go to My saved buttons” and bookmark this page for easy access to your saved buttons.

Thanks for sharing your concerns with us. We value what you have to say, and we know situations like this can be difficult. If you have more questions, visit our Help Center by clicking “Help” in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

Sincerely,
*****
PayPal Consumer Support
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

My issue is with the 20% increase limitation on current subscribers wanting to upgrade.

If a current subscriber is paying .99$/mo for a basic account and wants to change their recurring payment to 2.99$/mo PayPal won’t let them, because it is over the 20% limit on increases.

Thank you.

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Dear Lew Ayotte,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

Hello my name is ****, I am sorry to hear about the situation regarding the limit that you would like to impose for your subscription, and understand your frustration and concern over this issue.  I am happy to assist you with your questions.

If you have customer who would like to upgrade, you can create another subscription with the upgraded amount by going to the Merchant Services tab and click on the Subscribe button. This will generate a new html code, however, instead of using the button code, there will be an email
tab on your “You are viewing your button code” page where you can copy and paste the link and send that link to your customer via an email so your customer can just click on the “Subscribe” button once he receives the email from you.

Thanks for sharing your concerns with us. We value what you have to say, and we know situations like this can be difficult. If you have more questions, visit our Help Center by clicking “Help” in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

Sincerely,
****
PayPal Consumer Support
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

Hello,

I am confused; sending the customer a new subscription code will upgrade their current recurring payment from my .99$ plan to the 2.99$ plan without the 20% limit error (https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_WPRecurringPayments#id086530108PM__id08653060UE6)?

Thank you.

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Dear Lew Ayotte,

If you have an issue with integrating PayPal on your website and are in
need of assistance, please open a Merchant Technical Support Ticket by
following the steps below:

1. Go to www.paypal.com and log in to your account.
2. Click ?Contact Us? at the bottom of the page.
3. Enter ?How do I contact merchant technical support,? and click
?Find.?
4. Click ?Developer Support,? and then click ?Developer Support?
again.
5. Click ?Merchant Technical Support.?
6. Enter the required information and click ?Continue.?
7. Click ?Finish Submitting Question.?

Thanks for sharing your concerns with us. We value what you have to say,
and we know situations like this can be difficult. If you have more
questions, visit our Help Center by clicking “Help” in the top right
corner of any PayPal page.

Sincerely,
PayPal Customer Service Department
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

Hello,

I created a subscription service for my website. The “basic” level is 99 cents, the “plus” level is 2.99$. I want my subscribers to be able to upgrade their accounts from “basic” to “plus”. However, when I tried to do this I got the error message:

Amount can only be increased by 20%

I have read that there is some arbitrary “20% rule” and I’d like to know what my options are. Obviously there is a big difference between .99 and 2.99, I’d like to make the upgrade process as easy as possible for my subscribers.

Thank you.
Lew A

P.S. This will be the fourth time I’ve asked this question. The first two answers told me to create a new subscription button. The third answer told me to contact you, “Merchant Technical Services”.

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Hello Lew Ayotte,

Thank you for contacting us about Website Payments Standard Subscription on the PayPal Live Site.

We are reviewing your issue and will get back to you when we have an update.

Sincerely,
Merchant Technical Services
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Hello Lew,

thank you for contacting MTS Technical Service.

It is indeed true that you can only increase the amount by 20% which is not the case for you. That’s why you get this error message. Unfortunately, there is nothing what we can do about this.

Feel free to contact us if you have further questions.

Kind regards,

*******

Today I ran into this problem with a WPMS site that I am developing. I needed to pull posts from the “news” site onto the main site. I used switch_to_blog() to do this, but when I tried to get specific category permalinks with get_category_links() it would automatically include “/blog/” in the URL.

This is because of the way that the $wp_rewrite variable is initialized and an attempt to reduce overhead when using switch_to_blog(). So, John’s plugin does come with a risk of added overhead, but I’m currently dealing with a 30 site installation and don’t see much of  a cost. If you were really picky, you could modify his code a bit to only work in real specific situations.

If you get  a chance, jump on over to twitter and thank him for this little plugin. It saved me a little more development work, although it also meant I wasted 2 hours tracking down the problem :).

Generally speaking, in WPMS / WPMU you can get the content of one site by switching to that site ID using the switch_to_blog($id) function. However, this does not work with Event Calendar 3, because of the way it builds it’s global $ec3 variable.

The problem is, when you are on site id 1, the $ec3 creates a variable that points to the schedule table for site id 1. Even if you run switch_to_blog(2), $ec3 still tries to get the schedule from site id 1. So it was returning an empty calendar. The easiest way to fix this (until EC3 updates their code) was to re-instantiate the global $ec3 variable. Basically this is what I did:

switch_to_blog(10);
global $ec3;
$ec3 = new ec3_Options();
ec3_get_calendar();
restore_current_blog();

This re-instantiates the $ec3 variable for the schedule I needed to get from that specific site ID. It should be a fairly simple fix for EC3. Until then, this is the easiest fix if you need to do what I’m doing.

Thanks again!

So, I have been using Rackspace Cloud Sites for about a year now and there are a few things grating on my nerves about this service. We use it as a hosting solution for our customers. Before I begin explaining what is wrong, let me explain what is right.

It is (for the most part) really simple to use. You can easily create a new site with custom plans in just minutes. Everything is white label, including their billing integration and customer support. You pay a monthly fee for a certain amount of Bandwidth, Disk Space, and Compute cycles. You are able to break it up as many different ways as you want and offer your customers plans based on packages. It is really quite simple and really great for hosting small to medium sized business websites.

One of the greatest things about Cloud Sites and Rackspace in general is their support. They have GREAT customer support reps ( GREAT = really friendly). They also have multiple ways to reach their support, like live chat, phone, tickets, email, etc.

These aspects of Rackspace is why I continue to do business with them. Unfortunately, there are other issues that I have with Cloud Sites that frustrate me to no end. Here they are…

1) Cloud Sites does not support SSH. This is a HUGE let down in my opinion. In fact, it was number one on my list as to why we should not go with Rackspace. Luckily for Rackspace, the other pros outweighed this con. However, the cons are starting to pile up. SSH is majorily important for a SysAdmin, especially if you need to do complicated thing to files. Just about every shared hosting provider offers SSH access for Linux servers. Rackspace’s knowledge base claims, “Shell access (Also commonly known as SSH access) is not offered on Cloud Sites based primarily for security reasons.”

Really? What are the security reasons? Why do you allow FTP access (one of the most insecure protocols) but do not allow SSH (a secure encrypted protocol)?

2) Limited Special Characters in passwords. A few months ago, Rackspace Cloud Sites introduced new security measures to prevent unauthorized access to their systems, namely, a “security question”. Yet they do not allow special characters in their passwords and they do not allow Secure Shell (SSH)! What really got me, was that we use Rackspace Cloud Sites for business purposes, so we share a username/password for the business. A “security question” hardly applies to us, so we had to pick a generic question/answer that everyone in our company knew. Regardless, not allowing special characters in a password is not just a problem with Rackspace Cloud Sites… they have a number of systems that do not allow special characters in their passwords. Adding special characters to your password, as well as the length of your password, greatly increases the security of your password. Basically it should be long enough and random enough to be unbreakable. The fact that Rackspace does not allow all Special Characters to be used for a password is very concerning to me.

Now, for the straw that broke the camel’s back.

3) Rackspace Cloud Site’s implementation of SSL is not well thought out, at all. We recently had a client who needed an SSL Certificate installed on their site. Rackspace charges an additional 20$/mo extra to enable SSL on a Cloud Site account. That is not a huge deal, and somewhat understandable, since most SSL Certs require a static IP associated with the domain name. Instead of a shared IP address, which is quite common (and cheaper) for web hosting.

We enabled SSL on our account and tried enabling the SSL Cert on the account. This is where things get hairy, really really hairy!

First, if you are using a shared IP address, it must be changed to a static IP address once you enable SSL for a specific site. I know this, this isn’t the problem. The problem is, Rackspace doesn’t change the IP address to a static address until you actually upload an SSL cert! NOT when you enable SSL for the site.

At first, this did not seem like a big deal… however, we had a small issue… let’s chase this rabbit for a while. Our client already had an existing SSL certificate, so we just need to copy it over. The SSL interface for Rackspace has two fields you can fill in, the Certificate and the Key. However, they have the Key field set to “readonly=true” via HTML. This wasn’t a problem for me, because I used firebug to remove that restriction and was able to upload the customers current Cert and Key without a problem. (by the way, the fact I could do this is just insane – the fact that they try to prevent people from doing this is even worse).

Ok, great, we have the cert installed but the cert was about to expire, so we needed to update the cert a short while after installing it. I went in to the back end to see about updating the cert and noticed there was no way to get the current CSR. I decided to wait until it expired, removed the current cert, get the CSR and generate a new cert. Sounds like a half-way decent plan? Nope, not with Rackspace Cloud Sites.

You see, because the IP address is tied to whether or not the site has a cert installed, when I removed the cert they automatically changed the IP of the site to a shared hosting IP. Essentially taking down the site for 2 hours! What’s worse, when I added the new cert back into the site we got a completely different IP from the one we had previously. This is completely nonsensical!

I wrote a ticket to their tech support services about this issue. They replied “I apologize for the inconvenience, when is time to renew the SSL cert we usually recommend that you let us know about it so that we can update the certificate from our end . . . . If the certificate is removed then the IP will change.”

Brilliant.

Rackspace, you really need to fix these things… I am not sure how long I can live without secure shell access, secure passwords, or an SSL system that works properly. Sorry for being a troll…

I apologize for the inconvenience, when is time to renew the SSL cert we usually recommend that you let us know about it so that we can update the certificate from our end, looks like your SSL IP is 98.129.227.192 If the certificate is removed then the IP will change.

During the debate, Pearson admitted that he was “arguably one of the top three most important people in the history of WordPress” — Mullenweg and Mark Jaquith being the other two. Well, many people in the WordPress community took issue with this, so I decided to create a t-shirt design of this quote as a parody. I think it is safe to say that anyone in the WordPress community can wear this t-shirt with pride… because the people are the most important people in WordPress. That is one of the main reasons WordPress is so successful!

It is currently available at CafePress (where you can get the design as more than just a t-shirt):

I am one of the three most important people in WordPress by lewayotte