Turns out WordPress supports updating via SSH – you just need to have the libraries installed for PHP. To enable auto-update using SSH on Debian-like systems follow the instructions below.

Install the SSH2 extension for PHP:

Restart your web server:

Next time you log in to your WordPress admin panel you’ll be able to update WordPress and any installed plugins with a couple of button clicks. Handy!

Which was pretty annoying. My tests didn’t pick up the bug earlier as the application only depends on one API function which in the typical use case is called once per session. After checking that all was well with the request and API I headed for Google. Googling the above error turns up a couple of solutions that didn’t work for me.

Solution 1

Add the below to your app.config:

This disables the validation performed on HTTP requests. Although I trust the server providing the API this didn’t really sit right with me.

Solution 2

Set the following property on your request:

This again didn’t work for me. Reading the MSDN entry it doesn’t even seem relevant.

What worked

Set the following property on your request:

Issue goes away! When KeepAlive is true keep-alive is sent in the request’s header to the server. This indicates a preference to keep connections alive saving having to tear them down every request.

As I am sending one API request per session my users and the server have little to gain by keeping the connection alive. But I do wonder, this should work magically, so where is the issue arising? The API host is still running IIS6, so perhaps its a legacy thing? Anyway, problem solved for now! I hope this proves useful for someone else.

You can read more about keep-alive and persistant connections over at Wikipedia and more about HttpWebRequest’s KeepAlive property on MSDN.

The fix for me was running the available Windows updates. After a reboot the Visual Studio 11 beta installer ran smoothly and all was well. In fact, Windows 8 runs beautifully on a MacBook Air!

When executing:

I would get:

from:

After some research I found that this was due to the fact that sometimes different web browser describe a file with the same extension with a different mime type upon upload.

Luckily the fix is simple. Internet Explorer sets the mime type of an RTF to ‘application/msword’. All we need to do is add this mime type to our mimes.php config file. CodeIgniter accepts an array of mime types per file extension, so all we need to do to fix is open up application/config/mimes.php and replace the line:

with:

You will now be able to upload RTF files in your CodeIgniter application via Internet Explorer. I hope that helps somebody!

In the above example the first non NULL value passed to the COALESCE function is selected. if site_settings.value is NULL then settings.value will be selected. If settings.value is NULL, then the site_settings.value will be selected. If both values are NULL, then NULL will be returned.

Here is the MySQL reference page for the function: COALESCE

Worth keeping in mind. Came in handy for simplifying some SQL at work.

Didn’t soak the pasta sheets enough so was a little dry. Other than that, yum!

The real reason I’m re-setting up WordPress is to help me focus.  By writing down and thinking about the ideas and the resulting code I can make it the best it can be.  If it helps someone else along the way, great!  I’m likely to focus on PHP and Python as day to day thats what I’m work with.  I’m likely to plan out my project on paper over the next couple of weeks.  When I am focusing on something such as an API or a Python library I’ll use this blog to explain what I’m up to and why I’m approaching a problem from that angle.

I’ve not done much web work with Python before, so when I get to it thats where I’ll start.