Matt Jones Blog

XML sitemap add-on for sNews CMS v1.7

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:55:10 +0000

Here is an add on for sNews CMS v1.7 to generate a valid XML sitemap for search engines to use. If you're not familiar with XML sitemaps, you should read up at sitemaps.org. Sitemaps are an extremely useful way for search engines to index all of your content.

The way this sitemap mod is set up, you can simply edit the variables in the script and drop it on your server and it should work. There is some optional extended functionality covered at the end of this article as well.

Set it up

To get started, download & extract the file;

sitemap_1.0.0.zip

Now edit the variables to match your site;

$server = 'localhost';
$dbuser = '';
$dbpass = '';
$dbname = '';
$dbprefix = '';
$site = 'http://www.mysite.com';

That's it! Now upload to your site, preferably in the root public_html directory. Now visit the page and you should see the XML sitemap generated from your articles, categories & pages.

Extending the sitemap mod

As I use this sitemap mod on my sNews sites, I have added a "last modified" field to my articles table, so that when I edit an article, the last modified time is reflected within the sitemap. Adding this functionality is quite easy. To start with, you need to add the field to your database, so open up PhPMyAdmin or whatever DB tool you use and add the column;

ALTER TABLE articles ADD last_mod datetime NULL;

Now you just need to edit your snews.php file to update the last_mod field when you edit your articles. Open your snews.php file, and within the function processing, around line 2951, find the following;

artorder = '$artorder'

Now replace it with this;

artorder = '$artorder',
last_mod = NOW()

Upload your edited snews.php file and now when you edit an article it should update that field and the sitemap.php add-on file will reflect the changes.

Notify the search engines

Don't forget to notify the search engines! Add your sitemap to:

And while you're at it, add the sitemap location to your robots.txt file;

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.php

Setting a solid color wallpaper for Android devices

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:11:50 +0000

Recently when I upgrade my little Dell Streak 7 to Honeycomb 3.2 I lost my favorite wallpapers. I don't really like the default wallpapers available & most of the downloadable wallpapers are just too "busy" for my tastes.

So to get started again I decided I just wanted a simple solid color for a background. Having a heavy graphic wallpaper on a PC is one thing, where much of your actions are menu driven, however on my tablet I have my "desktop" loaded with all my favorite apps & widgets & the live wallpapers seemed to take away too much from the experience for my tastes.

The problem is... there is no easy way to set the default background as a solid color in Android. At least, not in the default settings. There's 2 ways to accomplish this task, what I used to do... create a solid color jpg in the GIMP, put it on my device, open it, and finally set it as the wallpaper. As an example, I would make an 800x800 square image with a solid hex color of #252525 for my Streak 7, as it has an 800x480 resolution.

Well, that got to be a pain in the ass, especially after making 3 or 4 backgrounds that I just wasn't happy with.

So during my Christmas break from work I set off on a quest for an easier solution, and I found the app Colors. This nifty app allows you to set any color for your background, and includes a fairly exhaustive list of pre-made colors for you to choose from, though they could be better organized... alphabetically or by color range perhaps? Anyway, this app is probably one of my most used during the last 2 weeks.

Scan this QR Code to download the app.

I hope someone else finds this as useful as I do.

Debian & XFCE 1024x600 netbook wallpapers

Tue, 24 May 2011 17:21:03 +0000

Here's a couple of 1024x600 netbook wallpapers I made today for my netbook running Debian Linux & the XFCE Desktop.

I'm including the Gimp .xcf files in the .zip download for anyone that wants to modify the wallpapers, remove/change logos, etc. I typically make my wallpapers dark and avoid too much contrast, so feel free to change them to suit your tastes.

To save the images to your hard drive to use as a wallpaper, simply click on a thumbnail to open the viewer and then right click on the image and select "save image as", or "set as desktop background", or download all of them in a zip file;

debian_xfce_wallpapers_1024x600.zip

Debian 1024x600 …

XFCE 1024x600 …

Automatically add auto-generated short URLs to your sNews CMS

Thu, 19 May 2011 14:43:00 +0000

This is my first sNews CMS mod/hack to be made public in quite some time, I hope someone finds it useful. This modification will add rel="shortlink" & rel="shorturl" tags to the head of your published items.

What do I mean by published items? Basically all your articles & "pages", not the default category/home page views or hard-coded sNews pages (contact, sitemap, etc). We don't really need/want shortlinks to ever-changing pages (home, category views, etc) anyways.

Why?

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've no doubt used or at least heard of Twitter, and the 140 character limitation for Twitter entries. So when posting URLs, people have relied on URL shortening services, such as bit.ly to reduce the long SEO-Friendly URLs into as few characters as possible. With this mod you can skip using bit.ly or others services for publishing shortlinks on your own site, for any published items (articles/pages). Another big plus about using these short urls is they never change, as they are based on the unique article IDs from the database. Helps prevent linkrot and eases redirect management.

Adding the code

We will be editing 2 pages for this one, index.php & snews.php. So make a back-up of these files now & let's get started. Now open snews.php and add this function to the very bottom of the file, just above the closing PHP tag;

function redirectShortUrl() {
    $url = trim($_GET['category'],"/"); // fetch & trim the category
    if (ctype_digit($url) && strlen($url) < '7') { // url is a short number, let's process it
        $url = clean($url);
        $query = 'SELECT a.id AS aid,a.seftitle AS asef, c.seftitle AS subsef,x.seftitle AS csef
                FROM  '._PRE.'articles'.' AS a
                LEFT OUTER JOIN '._PRE.'categories'.' as c
                    ON category = c.id
                LEFT OUTER JOIN '._PRE.'categories'.' as x
                    ON c.subcat = x.id AND x.published =\'YES\'
                WHERE a.published = \'1\' AND a.visible = \'YES\' AND a.id ='.$url;
                       
        $result = mysql_query($query); 
        $num_rows = mysql_num_rows($result);
        $row = mysql_fetch_row($result);
        if ($num_rows == '0') {
            $error = true;
        } else {
            if (empty($row[2]) && empty($row[3])) { // found a matching page
                $goto = '/'.$row[1];
            } elseif (!empty($row[2]) && empty($row[3])) { // found a matching article w/cat
                $goto = '/'.$row[2].'/'.$row[1];
            } elseif (!empty($row[2]) && !empty($row[3])) { // found a matching article w/cat & subcat 
                $goto = '/'.$row[3].'/'.$row[2].'/'.$row[1];
            }      
        }
        if ($error != true) {
            header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
            header ('Location: '.$goto.'');
            exit;
        }
    } // not a number, pass to snews as-is
}

That function will sniff out the shortlinks and check for them in the database, perform the redirect if necessary, or simply pass the url on sNews. Now within the function title(), and the following code below the meta keywords output;

// BEGIN SHORTLINK 
$query = 'SELECT id FROM '._PRE.'articles WHERE title = \''.$_TITLE.'\'';
$result = mysql_query($query);
$numrows = mysql_num_rows($result);
if ($numrows == '1') {
    $row = mysql_fetch_row($result);
    echo '
    ';
}
// END SHORTLINK

That little bit of code checks for a matching title and inserts the shortlinks if there is a match. Now lastly, open index.php, and add the redirectShortUrl fucntion just below the snews.php include;

include('snews.php');
redirectShortUrl();

That's it! Now upload your modified files and you should see the shortlinks on your articles & pages now. Clicking a valid shortlink should redirect you to the SEO Friendly URL on your site.

Extending

So now you've got short URLs for your pages & articles... what do you do with them? Well obviously you can post the shortlinks by hand in your Twitter/SMS/Facebook posts, but I've also created a simple script that will generate a shortlink for 3rd party services. I use TwitterFeed to automatically post all my articles to Twitter. How? Simply sign-up, add your rss-articles feed to TwitterFeed & link your account to Twitter. Now, to use your own sNews site for short URLs, we have to do a little magic, OK, not magic, we have to convert the URL back to a shortlink for TwitterFeed.

This is how we will do this. Download shortenurl.txt, save it as shortenurl.php, edit the database variables and upload to your server. Now, after you have linked your Twitter, Facebook, etc. accounts to TwitterFeed, go to the TwitterFeed dashboard and do the following;

click the edit button to edit your feed.
click the "Advanced Settings" option.
on the "Shorten link through" dropdown, select "custom"
in the "Custom endpoint" box, type "http://site.com/shortenurl.php?url=%@"

Obviously change site.com above to whatever your domain is. Now whenever you post a new article to your RSS feed, TwitterFeed will pick it up, post it to Twitter and use your own short URL as the linkback.

Caveats & Gotchas

There are 2 major considerations that might cause problems for users;

This script uses the unique IDs from the articles table in the database to generate the shortlinks. This works well, I have allowed up to 6 digits in the code, so unless you've created 1 million articles/pages, you should be fine. However, if you started the MySQL auto-increment at a large number, this could be a problem, but there are work-arounds for that.
Because this script uses the unique table IDs, if you have an article or page with a name of just digits, under 1 million (ex. mysite.com/24312), it will conflict. Do not use this script as it is, or consider adding a letter to your article/page names.

Wrap up

Well, if all goes according to plan (this is my first real post using this new shortlink system), then I should see this article posted to twitter soon, with a linkback containing my domains shortlink. As always, any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment.

HTC Droid Incredible keeps disconnecting from Wifi

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:40:31 +0000

Recently I noticed that my HTC Droid Incredible was constantly disconnecting from my wireless router at home. It would connect if I went into the wireless settings page, and then drop off within a minute or two. Using a widget, I could see it was constantly stuck at "establishing a WiFi connection...". Naturally I searched all the Android forums and Google for a solution.

I had just recently replaced my home router with a Netgear WNDR3400, however it has been working seamlessly for several weeks, so I assumed it was something messed up with Android. After having no luck finding a solution in any of the forums, I simply set the b/g channel setting to 6 (the least congested in my area) from "auto", and I haven't had a dropped connection since.

While I'm still not sure if this is a phone or router issue, all seems to be well again in Android land, so I'm happy. Hope this helps someone else having a similar issue.

Getting back to work on my site

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 04:15:41 +0000

Well, time sure flies, I haven't posted a single thing in nearly 6 months. Not that I haven't been busy, that's for sure. I've been extremely busy actually with my "real job". Considering the economy of late, I'm not complaining.

Though I haven't been entirely absent from maintaining the site. As several of you know, I still answer emails as best I can given my time constraints.

I have a couple new ideas floating around in my head for sNews, though I'm not yet ready to even discuss what they are as I'm leery of putting out vaporware.

As always if anyone has some good ideas for any sNews mods or hacks, please feel free to leave a comment.

The first thing I'm going to be working on is a bit of a site refresh, I wasn't happy with the home page after my last major overall and plan on making it look more like a home page... or at least what I think a home page should look like, more informative rather than the default blog/list of latest articles format.

That is all for now :)

Creating better search suggestions with Sphider

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:29:48 +0000

The problem

If you use the PHP web Sphider, you may or may not have noticed that the "did you mean" function isn't very accurate much of the time. Why is that? Simple, here is what it does with the search terms:

Use MySQL's SOUNDEX function to find the close matches
Use PHP's levenshtein function to find the first closest levenshtein distance.

Well, this is OK, but often gives poor results, especially as it keeps the first closest result & stops, even if better matches exist later in the result array.

The solution

So what I have done is to add two additional levels of matching, after getting the levenshtein distance, we then try and match the metaphone keys, and finally check the keywords using PHPs similar_text function to see if there is a better match than the current one. So this is what we end up with:

Use MySQL's SOUNDEX function to find the closest matches
Use PHP's levenshtein function to find the closest levenshtein distance.
Use PHP's metaphone function to match keys, if they match, then we perform the next step (#4).
Use PHP's similar_text function to see if this result is better than the last one.

The code

OK, how to implement? Easy, open the include/searchfuncs.php file, around line 333, find the following;

$near_word ="";
while ($row=mysql_fetch_row($result)) {
    
    $distance = levenshtein($row[0], $word);
    if ($distance < $max_distance && $distance <4) {
	$max_distance = $distance;
	$near_word = $row[0];
    }
}

Now REPLACE that with the following code (indent as appropriate);

// BEGIN BETTER SEARCH SUGGESTION FIX
$near_word ="";
$max_similar = 0;
while ($row=mysql_fetch_row($result)) {
    $distance = levenshtein($row[0], $word);
    if ($distance = $distance) {
            if (metaphone($row[0]) == metaphone($word)) {
                $similar = similar_text($row[0],$word);
                if ($similar >= $max_similar) {
                    $max_distance = $distance;
                    $max_similar = $similar;
                    $near_word = $row[0];
                }
            }
        } else {
            $max_distance = $distance;
            $near_word = $row[0];
    }
}
// END BETTER SEARCH SUGGESTION FIX

Finish

Now save and upload, and now your "did you mean" search suggestions should be much much more accurate.

Red Dead Redemption netbook wallpapers

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 02:55:45 +0000

Here are wallpapers for the game Red Dead Redemption, these are the official wallpapers, all 25 of them. I've just modified them to fit cleanly on the 1024x600 screen of most netbooks. These aren't simply crop jobs, these are high quality & as liquid smooth as possible.

If you like the westerns or western themed games, you will most probably enjoy these. Some of these were a bit difficult to get looking good at 1024x600, due to the elaborate designs (patterned backgrounds and graphics top to bottom), but I think I did a good job.

red-dead-redemption-netbook-wallpapers-1024x600.zip

Red Dead …

Iron Man 2 movie netbook wallpapers

Thu, 27 May 2010 11:27:11 +0000

By request, here all of the official wallpapers from the Iron Man 2 movie. These wallpapers are from the official Iron Man 2 site, the only major change was I removed the date (May 7) from the wallpapers, as the date has passed and the movie has obviously already been released.

As always, the wallpapers are re-sized and liquefied to fit the 1024x600 screen resolution of most netbooks without being heavily distorted or chopped (crop-jobs).

download

Iron Man 2 …

Borderlands netbook wallpapers

Mon, 24 May 2010 13:18:46 +0000

OK, I have very little free time lately, but I must admit... what free time I have had the last month or so, I've spent playing Borderlands. This game is simply a blast to play with friends, especially if you like both shooters and RPGs, it's something of a mix of both, with great weapon/item variety.

So I've been using some customized Borderlands wallpapers on my little netbook recently, I've decided to modify all of the official ones and post them here. These wallpapers are from the official Borderlands site.

As always, the wallpapers are re-sized and liquefied to fit the 1024x600 screen resolution of most netbooks without being heavily distorted or chopped (crop-jobs).

download

Borderlands …