Posted by Randy on 10th March 2010
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Posted by Randy on 9th March 2010
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Posted by Randy on 7th March 2010
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Posted by Randy on 5th March 2010
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Posted by Randy on 4th March 2010
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Posted by Randy on 3rd March 2010
I wrote early last month on an employee workplace feedback tool we launched using our WordPress MU installation and the Survey plug-in. Overall the plugin worked well. Here is a screen shot of one of our forms:
The main issue was a problem in the table that holds the responses. The field that stores the user answer is limited to 255 characters, but no limit is enforced on the form. And when users are invited to submit free form comments they quickly exceed the 255 limit. The result is that a number of the responses were cut off in the database, and some of the user response was lost. Not the nicest thing to realize after the fact, but luckily the fix is easy.
To make the alteration change open the plugin’s surveys.php file and find the create table section. Right around line 101 you’ll see the code that creates the surveys_result_answer table. Alter the ‘user_answer’ column to use the blob data type — you’ll see it is set to a text(255) type, which is too short for many users.
CREATE TABLE {$wpdb->prefix}surveys_result_answer ((
`ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`result_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`answer_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`question_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`user_answer` blob NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`ID`),
KEY `question_ID` (`question_ID`),
KEY `answer_ID` (`answer_ID`),
KEY `result_ID` (`result_ID`)
) ;
This small change fixes that problem. The only other note is we used this tool on a members-only site. I’d want to give it a thorough security check before using this on a public site. I did note the user-text was escaped, so it looks like some protections are in place. But these days you can never be too security conscious.
Surveys < Plugins < WordPress < Tools < Bin-Co
Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to your blog. You can let the visitors take surveys and see the result from the admin side. The user who take the survey can enter their details at the end of the survey – or leave it as an anonymous result.
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Posted by Randy on 3rd March 2010
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Posted by Randy on 2nd March 2010
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Posted by Randy on 1st March 2010
A new plugin allows automatic backup of a WordPress site to an Amazon S3 store. This functionality seems most useful to me for a multi-user installation, where the amount of data AND the risk of loss is much greater. At the moment there doesn’t seem to be support for MU, but with the coming merger of the single and MU WordPress versions that exclusion should be short-lived.
Backing Up a Wordpress Blog to the Cloud Using Amazon S3 – ReadWriteCloud
The plugin makes it pretty simple to back up your blog. All you need to do is provide an Amazon S3 account key.
Automatic Wordpress Backup
Captures your ENTIRE site (Wordpress database, themes, plugins, uploaded files and settings files), which means minimal downtime if you need to restore.
WordPress MU compatible?
We haven’t tested it yet but the answer is probably “No” because of how MU stores files. Since Mu will be getting merged into regular Wordpress in the near future, we probably won’t be spending time on adding compatibility for mu. Sorry.
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Posted by Randy on 1st March 2010
My latest favorite tool for reading newsfeeds is feedly. And since FeedDemon dropped their mobile version I haven’t found anything I like in the mobile space — but now feedly is making a mobile move. The biggest mobile piece I miss is the save-for-later feature. I often use items from the newsfeeds as fodder for a blog post (kind of like this post!) The save-for-later functionality let me read on the mobile, save it, and then follow-up with it later on the desktop in writing a blog post. The feedly demo looks great, but with mentions of iPhone, Palm Pre and Android, I don’t see any BlackBerry mention. I might have to switch — and Verizon is now supporting Palm Pre….
Feedly iPhone – Prototype 7 – Quick Tour « Building Feedly
We have been working on feedly mobile for a few months now. After a few iterations, we have reached a design which we felt had an interesting mix of fun, simplicity and speed in it. It is now time to open the door and let the community in.
f | Cover
…letting us in on a few more details of what to expect, such as a “Save for Later” function, releases for both Android and Palm Pre, and transparent syncing with Feedly Desktop.
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