Michael Helm's Technology Blog

• “@Littlesheep: blogging about my lovely book keeper @ihelmenterprise http://t.co/JPPwHk2C” One of my Wifes client kindly tweeted about her! #

• “@Littlesheep: blogging about my lovely book keeper @ihelmenterprise http://t.co/JPPwHk2C” One of my Wifes client kindly tweeted about her! #

Regular visitors to this blog (which posts less regularly than you deserve) will have noticed I change designs regularly.
Normally I choose a design that intrigues me, or that might allow me to experiment with something new. However this doesn’t always help you, the real “customer” of this blog.
After reviewing the visitor stats I have settled on this as the new look, and I don’t plan on changing it for a while.
The main advantage of this new look is mobile or rather smartphones and their related devices. It look pretty good on both a normal browser and a mobile sized screen, with easy to focus on areas for the good old (new) double tap to zoom.
Why not a truly mobile theme? These turn a site into rectangles that expand as you interact ( see wiki on your phone). Basically I hate them… Part of the point of a website is to show people things creatively, the standard ways of making a site suitable for smartphones seems to be to strip everything away.
Nowadays with relatively generous bandwidth limits and 4G networks around the corner the Internet should be used as it was intended.
Exceptions… Yes only one though – online payments – a nightmare on a normal site it’s extremely painful on a mobile device. If we want people to interact outside of an “app” store we really need to sort that, so far amazon seems to be the only online retailer where repeated purchases are a breeze. Luckily for me I don’t need to take payments , unless you think I deserve money for this sporadic essay writing.

Talking about mobiles and other devices, after a couple of weeks of using an iPad, many mobile sites think I need a washed out dull experience, however the iPad is not a phone, it has a better resolution than many laptops, and even high-end screens.
This means you really want an iPad to see your site as you originally wanted it to be seen – so don’t hide it…. the only thing that really does not work on the iPad are sliders, and that is now on a minority of sites – there are ways to get them to work and when they work – it works fine. The iPad is arguably what mobiles will end up being.

Small screens are only here for a short while, 5 years ago no one really thought larger screens than the maximum 320 * 240 arenas that used to be used would be improved to the resolution and size of a modern phone. With glasses like google’s Augmented Reality project possibly becoming available, the screen real-estate will expand to those devices. Flexible displays are also getting closer, so soon we will be able to expand displays larger than default sizes, already you can send your smart phone screen to a tv or other devices – this may become the default way of viewing data, an the smaller screen used only when truly mobile (which is not when most phones are now used!).

Anyway that’s my rant and opinion made public – read it and ignore at your peril.

• Tsunami ship drifting off Canada. Very Mary Celeste. http://t.co/iwWCCEdq #

• The new iPad is pretty good. Working on a presentation right now and it's v nice looking! #

Yesterday I found myself in Manchester after a business meeting. The meeting ended on time (good for a Friday!) but there was still the problem of getting home.
I know manchester and have no problems after extracting myself from the one-way streets in going the right way. I do have a problem with the traffic, in Manchester it suddenly stops and it feels like driving through treacle and no matter how you twist and turn you just hit more traffic.
As well as traffic you get doubt, especially when you need to get to your daughters nursery to pick her up, get home, get her ready for swimming and get out all within an hour of the meeting…
Enter waze a nifty little gps app for the iPhone. It’s directions aren’t always spot-on (but it’s getting better) but it excels in one area. avoiding or informing you of delays. Waze uses crowd-sourcing, this means just by using it you send data about the roads you travel on.

The app has been around for a while now and has a decent user base – as a result it’s extremely good as knowing how the roads are doing.
In this case 25 minutes I didn’t have we’re at risk, a few seconds later the app re-routes me down roads other users (you can see Icons where they have been recently) have shown clear traffic. The end result five minutes of delays instead of 25! This is an app I cannot recommend more for people who find themselves travelling during peak times.

I’ve come across this problem a number of times, of course each time I think “this will be fixed next time”.  Unfortunately it’s not the case.  What’s the problem then?

You have a directory that you want to password protect, lets call it “secrets”.  It resides in /home/mysite/public_html/secrets/ on the server.  Now fortunately you are using a hosting control panel like cpanel and you’ve password protected directories before (if not then have a hunt on this site or on google!).

Before you activate the protection you can view the contents fine, so you activate protection – driven by a .htaccess file… and then rather than being asked for your username and password, you get a 404 or a 403 message from wordpress “Sorry the page you are looking for cannot be found”.

Intrepid system administrators hunt through error logs, and sure enough the access log is recording a 404… however the error log is recording something different.

Permission denied: /home/mysite/public_html/secret/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

This error message has had a number of solutions in the past, including the infamous “reinstall frontpage extensions”, except these are long gone – not supported and never will be again, please don’t go installing them just to get past this problem! – It will end in tears.

Instead you just need to add a couple of lines to the wordpress .htaccess file in the root of your site (e.g. /home/mysite/public_html/.htacess). Go to the file and just before the main WordPress part

#BEGIN wordpress – add the following

ErrorDocument 401 /%{REQUEST_URI}/errors.html
ErrorDocument 403 /%{REQUEST_URI}/errors.html

This should set the site to working, now why does this work?

Simply put wordpress is often run with a pretty url mode (permalinks) where the addresses for posts are made to look more pretty.  When you request your secret directory the server tries to access it, looks at the .htaccess file and promptly tries to do a redirect, this invariably ends up at a page wordpress cannot access – this doesn’t happen without the .htaccess as wordpress allows access to existing real files, but the htaccess security says the file doesn’t exist until the password is entered and so it intercepted.

It’s all a bit confusing, however adding these lines essentially means wordpress can get out of the way when those errors occur, 401 and 403 are authorisation required or failure codes, so wordpress will ignore and the htaccess can safely challenge your.

Hopefully this will help if you come across this problem.

• The Benefits of Soul-Crushing Boredom http://t.co/52PlS74 via @WSJ #

• My personal data has not been leaked. Phew! @gizmodo #hackcheck http://t.co/ktgINAX #

• using #cloudme for the first time since apple bought icloud domain.. If anything it seems faster! #