• The blog’s front-end is still working fine, nothing seems out of place or broken
• I got to the login screen, but as soon as I logged in, it was completely blank
• I could not access any of page in the admin such as by typing: /wp-admin/plugins.php – all blank

1. I checked blog’s front-end and was still running fine – checked if any page is broken or funky stuff showing up on the pages.  A broken plugin might have be the culprit or you simply got hacked
2. So far so good, nothing seems broken or out of place. Login, page goes blank. I run the plugin Login Lockdown, so I FTP in and deleted the folder to see if that’s the culprit – nope. Put it back in.
3. Checked the error log and see what threw error(s) recently – did the same thing above. No go.
4. Found some people said that empty returns on functions.php or wp-config.php  in your theme can cause that – make sure no blank space on top or bottom…
5. Some said check files for weird stuff got append on top of some php files – checked all files inside wp-admin folder – nope
6. Fast forward 3 hours later – finally re-uploaded a new copy of the /wp-admin/ – fixed!  Son of a…

Description

If you want to customize your VIM a bit more, you just have to create a .vimrc in the root. Even if you create/edit the .vimrc in VIM, better than Notepad right? NOT! Apparently, by default, VIM doesn’t set the file format for you. So it leaves a “trailing ^M” and VIM doesn’t like that…

Symptoms

• Windows: it shows a blank screen and has “Hit enter to type command” or something like that before VIM starts. It doesn’t show any errors.
• Ubuntu (see screenshot): it actually displays the following errors: “Invalid argument on^M” OR “Trailing characters ^M” OR “Not an editor command: ^M”

To fix this, it’s actually pretty easy.

While in VIM and in command mode type:

:set fileformat=unix

Of course the setting depends on your system, if you’re on Mac, set it to fileformat=mac. I set mine to unix because I use Git Bash and set it to use unix style, so if you are on Windows and set it to dos commands… set it to dos. Now you’re safe to edit .vimrc, when you :wq and vim again, the blank black screen (on Windows), and “Invalid editor commands” should go away.

If you are in Minnesota, or probably heard about the annual Overnight Web Challenge hosted by a group of  local generous web agency: The Nerdery. Which was an event to redesign websites for local non-profits. I have to say at first I was very nervous about it, but I had a blast and learned a lot of things. So here are the details.

The goal

The goal of the challenge is each team can have up to 10 people (strangers or friends), and each team will pair up with a non-profit chosen by The Nerdery. In 24 hours time we are to redesign and build a new website for our designated local non-profit client.

Outcome

In my case, my team was Team Venture – we were a mixed of former and current co-workers. Not everyone knows everyone, but we bonded quickly. Our client was Someplace Safe. Even though we couldn’t finish 100%, so we are still continuously working on it and provide support in the next 6 months.

Before

After

Rules

Anything goes… PHP, WordPress, Ruby, whatever. We could even prepare codes ahead (in which I hope we can prepare better next year).

What we did and lessons learned

We chose WordPress as our platform, the lessons I learned from it were:

1. Don’t build anything from scratch if not necessary, frameworks, frameworks, and frameworks.
2. Pre-installed plugins  – take them out if not needed. It’s easier to remove than add
3. List of jQuery components, snippets to generate WordPress page contents (sidebars etc…)

I am totally going to do the challenge again next year and because the winning team: TST Media pulled off some very amazing stuff in one night, they’ve inspired me to push a lot harder than just using a WordPress platform. So hopefully I’ll start posting more updates on what this “pushing harder” in the next few months.

Other than that, I encourage all web nerds in MN to try this challenge at least once. It’s thrilling, learn to work faster, and put our web nerdiness skills to use in a very meaningful way. Besides that, you get to meet maybe a Senator such as Al Franken, and the Tronguy. Foods in every 3 hours, massage, Yoga, live action Angry Birds and a whole lot more nerdy fun stuff.

1. Localhost Timeout Error

As many sane developer would do, you want to test almost everything on a Local server if you’re using Xampp Lite. I have been experiencing timeout error. Maybe it’s due to the firewall at work, but I am going to investigate more using a full verison of the Xampp server

2. “public_html” vs “www” Folders

This may sounds crazy, but I think it might have something to do with the configurations of the server. I tried uploading to my own server, everything works fine. But I couldn’t get it working on my client’s server, it couldn’t CHMOD properly. Crazy enough, I deleted everything and re-uploaded everything to the public_html folder, CHMOD the proper files, then it worked… I know both folders are basically the same thing, but why it happened the way it did, CRAZY! I tell you. So I’m going to try to reproduce this “bug” if it is even a bug or just me…

3. jQuery + zimplit = Site Explosion!

Unfortunately, today I found out zimplit will blow up your some parts of your layout if you have some sorts of scripting going on in the background, such as slideshow, hidden divs. As soon as you insert an editable area, it automatically inserts its own div and classes inside ALL OF YOUR DIVs! Drove me insane for over an hour why my simple page stopped working with a simple slideshow. I mean it’s not the end of the world, you just have to rework your CSS to fit it in. But it would be nice IF SOMEONE TOLD ME BEFOREHAND!!

Overall, zimplit is still an awesome idea, but it’s quite intrusive. It works well if you have a very simple website or planned ahead to use it at the beginning. If you decide to implement afterward, it is much more difficult because you’ll probably have to rework lots of CSS. But I think I will try my hands on it again next time when I build a site from scratch.  Just my 2 cents.

I was trying to “brand” myself in a way, what’s better than a made-up word that describes perfectly of what I do, right?  I love the lime green colors, but I thought it was getting too boring with the light gray and white.

So I spiced things up this time with dark brown and hot pink.  I was loving the fun colors as I was designing, it looked almost “hippy” which fits my personalities – I never did drugs in my life, but I seem so…

At the moment, it’s still in Beta with basic functions, hoping to AJAX-fy it in the next few days.  Right now, it is xHTML 1.0 Transitional validated, and with only TWO hacks to make IE6 looks pretty.  So I was very thrilled that it turned out well and only with minimal hack works needed to be done with IE6.

So check it out, and please give me feed backs!

Software Note: :pods: 1.7.3 / WP 2.8.4

Documentation: http://pods.uproot.us/codex/magic_tags

What are Magic Tags

From Pods CMS’ documentation: Magic Tags are used exclusively within Pod templates to dynamically pull in column values.

Usage: {@column_name} / {@column_name,display_helper}

In addition to the documentation: {@column_name.another_column_name}

The above method allow you access a different Pod’s columns when it is a PICK column inside a pod.

Let’s say you have to two pods. The Person pod, and Country pod. The Person pod has a PICK column of the Country pod to identify the nationality of that person, and you want to list all the people as: Person’s Name, Country (where you want to access by: http://domain.com/person). So inside the Pod Templates you would have something like this to show:

{@name}, {@country}

The above displays something like below on the Person list page (http://domain.com/person):

Mon Lu, United States
John Smith, Canada
Ken Yamamoto, Japan

Now you want to get a bit sophisticated that you want to link the person’s name to its own detail page, and the country is linked to its own page listing all the people from that country or something like that. Not only that, you want to link the page using its own slugs/permalinks like this: http://domain.com/person/mon_lu and http://domain.com/country/usa – assuming you have a column named slug in the Person pod, and or abbrv in the Country pod. Before I figured this out, I used a Display Helper to grab the abbrv from the Country pod. But the easier way is the following, assuming this is still http://domain.com/person listing all the people where the Country pod is a PICK column inside the Person pod:

{@name}{@country}

Simple enough, yeah?