Basically we need to go into a js file that was given to us, in order to change a few DOM-based functions. I opened up the file, and lo and behold, this was the first few characters…

eval(function(p,a,c,k,e,d){…

This is the trademark sign of the packer by Dean Edwards. I’d seen this a few more times, and used it myself too, but never had to decode it before. So I did a little searching and found a nice method of decoding it:

1. Use the bookmarklet found here whilst on the packer encode/decode page. This will enable the decode button and remove the read-only limitation on the bottom text area.
2. Paste your encoded code into the bottom textarea and press decode. In theory, you should get the original code, but without line breaks, whitespace etc.
3. To put the whitespace back in, I used ‘Javascript Tidy‘. Whilst not 100% successful (depends on your browser it seems somewhat), is did tidy up the majority of the code.

So yeah, that’s how to decode the p,a,c,k,e,r compressor. Theres other ways too, apparently replacing the eval function with alert works too, didn’t seem too for me unfortunately.

It’s a wonderful feeling as you pull the knowledge out of your head from all that experience without even realizing it, and the hugely impressive improved documentation really helps. One of the reasons it’s become easier is I’ve just discovered a few new functions to utilize. First one is get_page, which does exactly what is said on the tin and returns an array or object with the ID specified. Very useful, especially as before I was always using the WP_Query system, which was nice and bulky, not to mention buggy if I ever used more than two on the same page.

Another great function is get_avatar, which is a new feature as of 2.5, and this little beauty actually get the Gravatar that matches the e-mail you put in. And all because the same sharp minds built both Wordpress and Gravatar. I just feel sorry for all those people who made the plug-ins before it was included.

Last one I’m going to document isn’t actually new, but I’ve only just discovered it: wp_tag_cloud. Now, I’m not the biggest purveyor of tag clouds when it comes to my own sites, but the amount of times clients have seem them and gone ‘I want that one’ is endless. Always talked them out of it mind¹but it’s nice to know that the option (with lots of settings too) is now there without having to search for a plug-in for it.

So yeah, all this rediscovery of this wonderful system has really lightened me up. The improved documentation has quite a bit to do with it, as for the last 2 months I’ve either been creating my own system, or using a shopping cart with no documentation. Good on you, Wordpress!

1. Either that or they realize there’s not really much to tag in their 10 page CMS site with no blog [back]

This particular redesign is important. This one needs to put more emphasis on my work since soon I’ll be moving into part time freelancing while at University., Needs to be visually enticing. Needs to be professional yet personable. Needs to be ‘the shit’. And it needs to be on my own terms and it will be only be there when I remember to have fun designing.

Is this an excuse? Not sure, but I need to record the justification for leaving the redesign for now for my own benefit, to let me relax. Basically fighting against myself.

Sidenote: The Omega Man

Finally watched I Am Legend last night, and personally I thought it was pretty good. The book, which I read a few months ago, was very enjoyable morbidly powerful. I describe it in that way because you do really live through the desperate isolation of Robert Neville, the main character, which is an interesting trick seeing as you do in some way become his companion. One of the most moving parts of the both the movie and the book for me, being a dog lover, was the death of Sam (the dog) and I’m glad they kept that in the movie because it is such a pivotal event. Overall, a good film, but I must suggest you do not watch it after 1am, it’s not one of those movies that will soothe you to sleep, as I should have known.

Part 1: Search Engine Friendly Property URLS

One of the most enjoyable (or challenging, depends on what day it was) tasks was creating a unique identifier for each property with using the ID. I took tips from a fellow programmer and from the Wordpress method and created a field for each property which contained what that property’s rewritten URL would look like. For this site, each property has a name, island, and accomodation type, so I used: island/accomodation/name, so for example:

st-lucia/villa/la-mer.

So instead of the URL for the property La Mer being found at www.site.com/property.php?id=3 which is all I’ve used so far, the pure unrewritten URL now read www.site.com/property.php?id=st-lucia/villa/la_mer. All the fun with checking for duplications every time a new property was added or edited aside, the next step was the rewriting, which in this case was nice and simple:

RewriteRule properties/(.*)/ property.php?prop=$1

This would be found in the root directory’s .htaccess file. This rule actually works both ways, i.e. it can start for the rewritten statement or the normal statement, depending on what the browser requests. I like to explain it as the rewritten one: The server detects when someone has gone to view a property at a page such as www.site.com/properties/st-lucia/villa/la-mer/ , and then kicks into action. The (.*) bit in the rule is the clever bit: this is a little bit of rewriting regex that is designed to catch everything and anything¹, and it takes the information as the full string that is found between the forward slash at the end of properties and the last forward slash of the URL. The brackets mean that this value is to be used as a reference, and since there is only one set of brackets, this references to the number 1. And hey! Look at that, there is $1 over in the other statement. So the captured value is then set at the prop value in the second statement. Not all that difficult eh?

So for example, if someone put in this URL:

http://www.site.com/properties/barbados/hotel/john-smiths-house/

They would actually get sent here:

http://www.site.com/property.php?prop=barbados/hotel/john-smiths-house

Part 2: Content Managed Pages and Files

That was the gentle first step, the next hard bit in the specification was that they wanted stand-alone pages, which would have the URL structure www.site.com/page-name/. Ah okay, doesn’t sound to tricky, so I set up a little line like this in the .htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ page.php?title=$1

Similar to before, but theres two new characters shown here. The ^ signifies a start of the string, and $ the end of the string. This stops the module trying to rewrite every URL with a trailing slash at the end, and only affects thos with one slash, and only have the base domain preceding the required part of the URL. So this worked nice and fine, but I wanted to also rewrite my search.php file as search/, and the error came blaring up all over my search section. Why? Because the rewrite rule was rewriting search/ as page.php?title=search. Not so good. So I turned to ye olde Wordpress and found exactly what I needed:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

Brilliant! This goes before the rewrite rule, and basically says ‘if the name of the page you are rewriting actually matches a file, don’t rewrite it’. Problem solved. But what about for a directory, such as admin/. Well, this is not quite a simple one-line job like with files, you need to a line for every directory. Nice easy format, so here’s an example for the admin:

RewriteRule ^admin/.*$ - [PT]

So this means that anything (.* again) following admin/ will be completely ignored by the rewriting module.

Part 3: Multiple Variables on Island pages

Another interesting hurdle I found was when I tried to do pagination on a page that’s already being rewritten. I have individual pages on five specific islands running, which show all properties on those islands. The URL structure used is www.site.com/islands/island-name/, so for example, www.site.com/islands/barbados/. The rewrite rule used was:

RewriteRule islands/(.*)/ island.php?name=$1

Now to set the pagination in motion, I needed to put another variable to island.php called offset. I’m using a PHP pagination class that generates all the links and things with just a few input variables, but the problem was when I sent the variable to the URL as it was, errors came up because I was already rewriting based on the one $_GET variable ‘name’, so two messed it right up. And even then, I counlt just append ?offset=x at the end either for a similar reason, so it had to be written taking both into account. But technically I needed two rules, one for when there are pages, using the structure islands/islandname/page/pagenumber/, and one for when page-browsing hasn’t happened yet, i.e. only one $_GET variable. So, I used two rules:

RewriteRule islands/(.*)/page/(.*)$ island.php?name=$1&offset=$2
RewriteRule islands/(.*)/$ island.php?name=$1

The 2nd rule’s technicalities should be fairly familiar now, with the variable capture (.*) and the $ terminating the string. The 1st rule is similar, but this time we have two variables to capture, and each occurence is given a reference number, starting from 1 unlike most PHP iterations, which start from 0, so we get $1 and $2 in the rule in the second bit. Technically this could go on forever, as long as the numbers of bracketed statements in the first statement was equal to the number of variables in the second.

That’s all folks!

Hope you enjoyed me documenting my small foray into the intricacies of mod rewriting with PHP and Apache, I think I’m going to go find how the regex for my own genetic code because I can.

1. To be be specific, the . means any character that is not a line-breaking character, and the * means as many characters matching the preceding statement as you like. So In theory, I could have used ([a-z][\-]*), which matches the charcters between a and z, and a hyphen, as many times as needed. But that may have been too clever. [back]

(This all validates too funnily enough! Checked the validator yesterday for the first time for a long time. Probably not SEO friendly though eeek)

Personally, this time I blame the over-saturation of nice websites from numerous CSS galleries, which I’ve had to catch up with while I was away, and the fact that my design has been up all of, say, 5 months or whatever it was. But anyway, I’m doing it, no sure when, but definitely cracking it out. What I will probably do is simply modify this existing theme, since most of the features I want to implement have already been done. Still exciting though!

At the moment I’m torn between a couple of design concepts, as I’m tempted to go minimalist and clean, but also dark and grungy, or simply arty-farty and ‘out there’.¹ Currently flickering between those three sort of styles, but I think I have found an amalgamation of the styles i.e. I’ve been sketching furiously when I really be working.

Jotting this down for evidence.

Watch this space!

1. Incidentally, all this linking is also a little SEO experiment, been digging extensively into this recently. [back]

The title of this post is one of his three ‘laws’. Wiki it, foo!

I wonder what I could blag being a 1/8 Welsh, 1/8 Irish, 1/4 Greek, 3/8 Norwichian, 1/8 Israeli web developer? Suggestions are welcome.