noel alanguilan

this is what i saw when i logged in to my yahoo mail this morning. new interface. and that’s not the only thing that’s new. if you look closely near the bottom left, partially covered by the pop-up window, is the applications section. you’re already familiar with calendar and notepad but there are new things there. the first one (covered) is called big sender–tagged as “The better way to send files – large files, videos, photos, and entire folders.” next is edit photos–“Connect right to your Yahoo! Mail and Flickr for basic photo fixes, collages and amazing effects, plus touch up tools, tons of fonts, oodles of shapes and stickers.” then there’s my photos–“See, share, and organize your photos right inside your Yahoo! Mail.” then the last one is the paypal application.

there are a couple more applications–automatic organizer, flickr, photobucker and yahoo! greetings–that you can add to the section. and i’m almost sure that more will be added in the coming months.

the new interface is not available with yahoo! business mail yet. but i expect to follow in a couple of months.

looks like i have something new to play with, at least for a couple of hours.

p.s. a happy birthday to lito

just a quick note before immersing myself in work again. its good to know that yahoo webhosting is somehow keeping up. they’ve made wordpress 2.6.2 as the default wordpress install.

its been A terribly frustrating day. i’ve seen enough of “error establishing a database connection” to last me until the next version.

i was just trying to post something on one blog and experimenting on another and i keep getting this message. i have several wordpress blogs in different subdomains under alanguilan.com. one setup shouldn’t affect another but in this case its site wide — i get the same message on all the blogs at the same time. once for a few minutes things go well and i can access the sites but it goes south again soon after.

when i get an opportunity to check the sql databases with phpmyadmin the databases for each blog checks out fine. so my guess is its the main mysql database that’s getting messed up. there are utilities to repair the database and several backups of the thing via yahoo’s control panel so i’m not terribly worried. its just inconvenient for the moment.

so far the database seems stable and i haven’t seen the error message for an hour now. i hope it stays that way.

i created a test blog earlier and noticed that yahoo now installs version 2.3.3 of wordpress. previously they used version 2.0.2 as their default wordpress install. or was it 2.0.3? i don’t remember.

well, wordpress is currently in version 2.6. yahoo is still a little late but its better than nothing, yes? its certainly better than staying stuck at 2.0.2.

update: 2008.08.09: i don’t think that wp-cache works with wordpress 2.3.3 — i got database connection errors all over the place. heck, i couldn’t get it to run on 2.5.1. wp super cache might work but the folks at yahoo doesn’t let the users have access to .htaccess so that plug-in wouldn’t work with wordpress sites on yahoo webhosting. disabling the test blog and wp-cache solved the database connection problems. i’m going to try again later.

update: 2008.08.09 part 2: i took out the test blog but the database connection problems remain. so maybe the cause was not wp-cache after all but i do maintain that version 2 of wp-cache doesn’t work with wordpress 2.5.1 and newer under yahoo webhosting. i tested that fact, at least. maybe something’s up with yahoo.

every wordpress blogger, me included, assumes that everything in his/her blog will go right or at least the blogger hopes and prays that things will go right. most times, it does. but occasionally, the sun burps a weird flare at the exact time a cosmic solar flare concentrator is pointed at your server and your wp_options table gets corrupt and marked “in use” so nothing else can touch it with the exception of dropping it. “dropping a table” in sql terms is equivalent to deleting a table of the database — a database is composed of at least one table.

anyway, one of the tables got blitzed — as my brother would call it — and it had to be replaced with a backup. unfortunately, the last backup was last july 16 — the table got blitzed somewhere around july 24.

one documentation i read was that i had to drop or delete all the wordpress tables in the database and then recreate and repopulate them using the backup. this made me a little queasy simply because i’m deleting the guts of a database and there’s no undo button to be seen within a 10 kilometer radius. so yes, that fact alone got my heart pumping a bit. but after the ‘x’ button was pushed there was this calmness that usually preceded a storm — i have to perform a restore. now.

the dang server does a 500 whenever i tried uploading the .sql backup. error 500 is a server error. uh oh. this is not good. uncompressed, the backup file is about 3.2 megabytes and that’s just text. my guess is that the server is timing out. the suggested solution was to copy-paste the .sql backup file in smaller parts — its just a text file so you can open it in a text editor — into the sql command window in phpmyadmin. its seriously tedious but it worked.

i eventually got the whole backup uploaded in about an hour. that was good.

what was bad was that a week’s worth of posts and comments were lost. some were recovered through google cache but there are still some that were missing. we do have the wp-db-backup plugin installed and enabled but unfortunately, scheduled e-mailing of the backup to a predefined e-mail address does not work. i’m not sure if the problem stems from my using a subdomain instead of a subdirectory for my blog. i don’t even get notices that there’s a comment awaiting moderation even though my wordpress is set to do so. i know its not the fault of the plugin because i have the same thing installed in another wordpress blog with the same host and it is installed in a subdirectory and not a subdomain and that setup works perfectly. so far its a toss up between wordpress being the culprit or my hosting provider — yahoo. i still have to do some more investigating.

in the meantime i can still use the plugin to perform backups for download to my computer. very manual and inelegant, i know, but at least that part works.

i have been using yahoo! groups to send out newsletters. in the pursuit of making these newsletters look a little more attractive i wanted to have some small images with the text wrapping around them. easier said than done. yahoo! groups only allows a small, specific subset of css and html to be used in posts. if your html and css tags are not in that specific subset then your code either gets stripped out or replaced by their “safe” tags. that made things a lot more complicated.

adding css style tags to an image tag doesn’t cut it. its not allowed. i checked the docs. wrapping the image tag in spans or divs doesn’t work either. the end result would be that the text will be placed below the image instead of wrapping around it.

the solution i found is to go retro and table the image — wrap the image tag in a single cell table, i.e.:

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" align="left" hspace="10" vspace="10">
<tr><td valign="top">
<img src="url/imagename.ext" width="150" height="150" border="0" alt="" />
</td></tr>
</table>

of course, you replace the url/imagename.ext with the address and name of the image you are using and, depending on your alignment inclination, replace the align=”left” to align=”right” in the table tag if you want the image to either be on the left or right side of the page.

one other quirk with regards posting/sending out newsletters in a yahoo group that you have to watch out for is the margin to the right. because of an advert, the width of the upper part of the newsletter is limited to about 500 pixels, give or take a few (arrows 1 and 2) . you’d have to set the width of your text table to about 490. if you go over that, there a large possibility that the advert will overlap and cover your content (arrows 3 and 4).

links:
list of allowed css and html code in a y! groups post

yahoo mail suddenly acted up — web access to both the free yahoo mail and the bizmail part is not working. i don’t know if its a maintenance thing and if it is then yahoo should really inform their user base. as of this writing, there’s no mention of the downtime in the yahoo mail blog. logging in to yahoo mail classic doesn’t work either.

other services — at least, the ones i use like webhosting, yahoo groups — appear to be working fine. only the mail services appear to be down.

bummer. really.

update: 2008.06.26: Y! mail is back online. from what i have gathered, yahoo mail moved the javascript serving duties to another domain (yimg.com) which noscript — a firefox add-on for the paranoid — was blocking. i just unblocked the site and everything’s good again.

i have been using amaury balmer’s simple tags plugin to extend wordpress‘ tagging feature since wp 2.3.x and it has been great so far. i recently had a glitch which prevented me from installing the latest releases of simple tags. to be fair, its not the plugin’s fault. the problem stems from my hosting server, yahoo — it doesn’t allow a dot (.) in a subdirectory’s name. the plugin has two subdirectories named “2.3″ and “2.5″ and when the ftp program tries to create those subdirectories it receives an error. the result is the plugin doesn’t work because some of the needed files doesn’t get uploaded.

as a workaround, i dove into the code of simple tags and just changed the directory references from “2.3″ or “2.5″ to just “23″ and “25″, respectively. of course, i had to rename the directories as well before uploading the whole simple-tags directory to my wordpress plugins subdirectory.

i noticed this today. i started receiving bounced mails from yahoo! groups. it appears that spammers are now trying to spam the yahoo! mailing lists. cute. they would invent an e-mail address and add that to my domain name and then use the result e-mail address to try and join a group, send mail to another group, etc.

nice try. but no dice. fortunately those guys at y! groups keep trying to improve the service.

it also noticed something in two or three of the groups i manage. an e-mail address would either subscribe via web or mail and after a few days it would unsubscribe. i would assume that the person was trying to mine the group for e-mail addresses or send out spam to the group. in all the groups i manage, database is only viewable by the owner or moderator of the group. they are also the only ones that can send to the group. no one else.

a couple of years ago one of my hard disks crashed. it wasn’t a major crash but i lost a good number of files nonetheless. i do have backups but since then i have tried to offload most of my files from my desktop and/or laptop to the internet.

at the time, one of my fast growing files was my e-mail. i used outlook express and it fit my needs then. but as more mail slowly crept in i realized that i was hitting outlook express’ limits and the space being occupied by my mail was getting uncomfortably bigger.

so i decided, off with the pop mail and go with web-based e-mail. there are definite advantages to this move:

pluses

• i can access my mail from anywhere and on any computer with an internet connection.
• i would think that all my mails would occupy approximately 3 gigabytes of space. maybe 4. i get plenty of pictures, videos and documents and i do not delete them. that’s a lot of space for just e-mails and none of that is occupying space in my local system. outlook’s (not the express version’s) default capacity is 2 gigabytes.
• should my local hard drives or system fail my e-mail data is still safe and i can still access them.
• should i refresh or change my system i do not have to worry about restoring my mail setup and files from backup.

minuses

• no internet. no e-mail. i will not be able to access even the one’s that i’ve read already.
• security is dependent on the service provider and strength of the password. so i use several passphrases and rotate them regularly and i got (i think) a pretty good webmail service provider — yahoo!

i would think that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. if you want more info on service providers there is a comparison of webmail providers from the wiki.