Fixed The “Illegal mix of collations” Error In My TERRIBL WordPress Plugin

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Well, I finally found a server that would reproduce the “Illegal mix of collations” error that MySQL troughs when executing some queries in my TERRIBL Plugin. See, I guess alot of servers use latin1_swedish_ci as the default collation for their MySQL databases. This seems to cause an error in some queries, especially those that use foreign characters. So I have patched  my Plugin by explicitly setting all my database collations to utf8_general_ci. I also added an error handler that looks for this error in database table that may have been created by older versions of the Plugin and the new version will now fix the old tables using an “Alter Table” statement. So upgrade to version 1.1.12.21 now.

My TERRIBL Plugin Just Got Terribler

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I released an update a couple of days ago with some more stats and another attempt to work around the whole Search String URL problem with Google’s new SSL Search. However, in the process of changing some field aliases in the database queries I inadvertently broke the Widget. So today I released another update to fix the Widget and it all seems to be working.

I really thought this Plugin has a lot of potential to be very popular but it still has less than 700 downloads and my other Plugin, Related Posts Links and Widget already has more than 2,600 downloads. Oh well, Maybe if I find a solution the the SSL Encrypted Search String issue it will be a great Search Engine Optimization Tool.

How I created my own level for Luola

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My kids and I like to play this game on Ubuntu called Luola, but it only comes with 5 or 6 levels. After we had gotten board with those first few levels included I started looking around for some more level and found out that it really is that hard to create your own level from scratch. So, after a little searching and reading trough the limited documentation I created a few experimental levels. Ayrica and Quin even created some levels of their own. This is still a work in progress but here are the level I have created so far:

This level maps out the 16 colors you can use to create a Luola map
My first real level using all the colors in a Hawaii Like theme

Download my Luola levelpack here.

You just have to put these extracted files in your luola/levels directory. On my Ubuntu system the path to the levels folder is `/usr/share/games/luola/levels/`.

Collatz Conjecture

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The conjecture states that if you take any number, and if it’s even you divide it by two and if it’s odd multiply it by three and add one, and you repeat this process indefinitely, no matter what number you start with, you will always end up at 1.
Here is a little JavaScript function that you can use to wear out your computer trying to prove this conjecture.
Enter any number here:




					

		
		
	


				
					
	

				
					
	

		

						
Update 1.1.11.17 of My TERRIBL Plugin

			
						

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A week or so ago I started noticing some “sketchy” sites popping up on my TERRIBL Widget. When I checked them out I found no links to my site at all. After looking at my reports and log files and doing some experiments of my own, I figured out that most of these entries were coming from proxies, Perl scripts, and CURL calls and were completely bogus. So I started working on a way to automatically detect and block these and other invalid Referer’s from showing up on the sidebar widget. What I came up with was to do a callback to their site using the file_get_contents() function and scan their page for a link to the page in question. Then, only if the link was verified would the Referer be approved and added to the widget. After some testing on a few different sites using multiple methods for invoking these entries I felt satisfied that my new filtering technique was ready. So download this new version and let me know how it works for you!

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
New! version 1.1.11.08 of My TERRIBL Plugin Just Released

			
						

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I just released a new vertion of my TERRIBL WordPress Plugin today. Thanks to a tip from “Futureproject” at silvercyborg.com I was able to track down I and eliminate a bug that caused the whole site to load lowly after installing my TERRIBL Plugin.


I also add a few handy things to the Admin page like a field to change the default path to your site when sharing you link. And thanks to Anthony at securehostinghawaii.com I discovered a need to block certain sites from showing up on the Widget, which is now possible in the new version. You can also manually add a site to be displayed on the Widget, which is helpful for getting started after your firs install when you haven’t gotten any In-Bound Link yet.


As always, if you like my plugins, don’t forget to rate them with 5 Stars at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/profile/scheeeli


If you don’t like my plugins, just quietly let me know and I’ll see what I can do ;-)

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
deactivate_plugins not working in my register_activation_hook function

			
						

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I just figured out for myself, after not being able to get the deactivate_plugins function to work and not finding any helpful documentation on it, how to prevent my plugin from being activated under certain conditions.

My new workaround is to use die() in my register_activation_hook, under the desired condition. Now, I know you are not supposed to put any output in your register_activation_hook function, but it just works perfectly for me. It successfully stopped the activation of my plugin, and it even put the text from my die statement nicely into the box at the top that tells the user that the plugin could not be activated. I had also tried using wp_die() but it really did die with nothing on the screen but my message in a box. I liked it better just using die().

In my install function I put:


global $wp_version;
if (version_compare($wp_version, "2.6", "<"))
	die("This Plugin requires WordPress version 2.6 or higher");


This way people can only install my plugin if they are not running a really old version of WordPress.