Firefox 77 and Awesome expanding address bar

Posted on Jun 5, 2020 by Serguei Dosyukov

Awesome design decisions

I do not have much time to write these days, but this situation made enough annoyance for me to warrant this content.

Kudos to Firefox team for well maintained browser. In general, I am one of the dinosaurs who do not like fluidity of Chrome and its ever changing behaviour. In the past, IE and Microsoft was the one breaking standards, now it appears that these great minds moved to Google and every new version of Chrome will give you something new and unexpected from great wisdom of all-knowing and all-seeing company. 🙂

Firefox team seems to feel the pressure and joined the party of making users happier by delivering surprising features.

In last few months one of the great things to appear was expanding/enlarging address bar.

There is probably some great reason for it to behave this way, and I respect the decision Firefox UX team made, but it is really distracting.

In Firefox 75 and 76 advanced users could use about:config settings to suppress this behaviour, but it was taken away in Firefox 77, so I will skip referencing solution there and instead focus on awesome 77+ build and we would need to do some coding.

Taking control back

Chrome is creeping in. No way to avoid its influence these days.

As with Chrome, you can define your own CSS styles for Firefox as well, if you know the tags.

First, you need to enable CSS styles overrides for Firefox.
Visiting userChrome.org will help you with step by step instruction on how to do that here.

Once you give yourself tools, next step is to start using them – override how address bar is styled.

From the same site, you can grab ready to go userChrome.css file which will return your bar under control here then drop it into chrome folder under your Firefox user profile folder. It is important that you create chrome folder if it does not exist before placing CSS there.

After making sure toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets is set to true in your about:config and restarting the Firefox, you will get your address bar back.

PS: Additional candy is that reviewing the CSS will tell you exactly how to modify the bar in any other way you like. Fave fun, give it color, make it big to take half the screen, go crazy. Just kidding.

Posted in Technology | Leave a comment

SearchWP and XPDF support

Posted on Apr 5, 2018 by Serguei Dosyukov

Introduction

SearchWP is a nice WordPress plugin which allows to extend WordPress search capabilities to various content format beyond just page text.
Here I am focusing on PDF indexing specifically. If you have any PDF files published and want them be indexed SearchWP-XPDF extension can be deployed.

Issue

Problem is that SearchWP developers decided to rely on deployment of direct code from FooLabs.  If it is not deployed as a drop-in, functionality would be disabled.
Drop-in option is not always possible and in fact unnecessary for this plugin to function.

In distros like CentOS  PHP XPDF support is available out of the box and can be enabled by installing poppler_utils.

Solution

    • Install SearchWP Xpdf extension as you would normally do
    • In WP Dashboard warning would appear – “SearchWP Xpdf Integration requires you to download and install Xpdf…”
    • SSH to your server
    • Install poppler_utils using yum# yum install poppler_utils
    • Refresh your WP Dashboard page. Warning would not go away because code specifically looking for physical location instead of verifying XPDF support by OS
    • Now we do some hacking:
      • in your WP installation, navigate to /plugins/searchwp-xpdf/ and open searchwp-xpdf.php for edit
      • Look for “// see if Xpdf exists”
      • Comment out what follows 
        /*
// see if Xpdf exists
if ( $continue && file_exists( $this->xpdfPath ) ) {
echo 'Xpdf (pdftotext) was found, continuing<br />';
} elseif ( $continue ) {
echo 'Xpdf (pdftotext) was not found, aborting<br />';
$continue = false;
}
*/
      • Next look for function admin_notice()
      • Comment out content of the function to suppress Admin notice 
        function admin_notice() {
/*
...
<?php }
*/
}
    • Refresh WP Dashboard
    • Warning would now go away
    • Run indexing, PDF files should now be indexed properly

Footnote

I did actually reach out to SearchWP team back in May 2017 and solution was acknowledged, but almost year later plugin still relies on custom drop-ins.

Enjoy.

Posted in CentOS Maintenance, Scratch Pad | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Was: GoDaddy is dead… or should go away and stop pretending – Update

Posted on Aug 18, 2017 by Serguei Dosyukov

This is follow up update on original post here

I was doing maintenance today and WOW! I now see that PHP 7.0 and 7.1 are now supported by goDaddy

THANK YOU

Off course we have to check site to run under latest PHP version and off course there could be some work required to fix issues if detected, but one need to move with the progress and be modern.

It is unfortunate that it takes goDaddy months of complains to catch up with rest of the industry, but better later than never.

Posted in Gallery 3 Development, Piwigo, Web-design | 1 Comment

GoDaddy is dead… or should go away and stop pretending

Posted on Jul 13, 2017 by Serguei Dosyukov

SPOILER: This is intended to be rant

Yes, GoDaddy was around for many years and have thousands if not millions customers using them.
Yes, I am using and was helping with their hosting on number of sites and for number of years, hence first hand experience.
Yes, pricing could be considering being good.

No, I would not recommend them to anyone.
No, they are not competitive offering anymore.
No, I would not trust them to represent my best interest hosting my site.

This is why:

  • No PHP 7.x support for shared hosting
    • 5.6 is only highest available option
    • 5.6 is EOL for number of months with end of security updates support in few months when counting in activities which need to be taking place for people to move to higher version
    • 7.1 is core official version
  • No MariaDB support. While mySQL is still great, mariaDB becomes de facto a default for many hosting companies
  • cPanel, goDaddy is using today, was supporting 7.x since Feb 2016
  • If one wants to take advantage of security, resource utilization and performance improvements, goDaddy would attempt to push switch to dedicated server package, i.e. asking for more money for the same set of features
  • Then there are discussions like this and comments from “GoDaddy Pro Trusted Advisor”
    While everyone is entitled to their own opinions based on their own previous experience, it is ridiculous to argue that all people essentially should be driving old gasoline hungry cars because they can still be driven and one still like their own nice 1990 Buick.
  • From personal experience – goDaddy representative was saying “php 7 would be soon available” since last quarter of 2016
  • Any questions about up-to-date feature set ends with “time to upgrade and pay more” pitch.

<end of rant>

Conclusion: if you are looking for web hosting, don’t look at GoDaddy, look elsewhere. There are more modern offerings around there from other reputable companies and with more bang for the buck

Posted in Gallery 3 Development, Piwigo, Web-design | 3 Comments

GreyDragon v.1.2.28 has been released

Posted on Dec 30, 2016 by Serguei Dosyukov

+ Translation improvements: CZ, LV, NL
+ Bootstrap CSS updated to 3.3.7
+ ADMIN: Small css improvements
+ Fixed issues with menus in various modes
+ CSS: Fixed issues with login page colors for controls
+ Added ID for download link

Posted in Piwigo | 6 Comments

WordPress Network and sub-domain setup

Posted on Sep 26, 2016 by Serguei Dosyukov

This is really a short note but may require some thinking when one run into it… so there you go.

Let me start by saying that I do have strong preference sub domain based WordPress Network instance over sub-folder.
In my opinion it is easier to maintain, and allow to manage stronger security.

Ok, “what is the problem?”, you ask.

Let’s say you have setup your blog as sub-domain to your main site. It may be the same machine or different instance altogether.
You run it for a while and there come time when you decided you want to host second blog and want to share the same WordPress instance.

Multi site support in WordPress is for a while and it is easy to setup and easy to maintain.

For most part that is it – simply follow these steps.

But there is a catch, if you run blog on the sub-domain, network setup wizard would warn you that you cannot enable network using sub-domain.
Not a problem – modify your wp-config.php by adding the following lines

/* Multisite */
define( 'WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true );
/* Multisite */
define('MULTISITE', true);
define('SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL', true);
define('DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', '<your-domain-name>');
define('PATH_CURRENT_SITE', '/');
define('SITE_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1);
define('BLOG_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1);

Now you can logoff and log back in and you should be able to create new sit using different sub-domain.

This is not all – what you will most likely run into is inability to use the same users across both sites.

Note: It is important to understand that by using the same names across multiple sites you may slightly reduce your security protection.
So make sure that you are:

  • Keep your Network instance up to date with updates
  • Using Security plugin like iThemes Security
  • Change admin user to something other than “admin”
  • Protect site from brute force attacks

What could happen is that when trying login to second site or switch between sites from Admin panel you would get message that your browser does not support cookies or you will not be able navigate to second site’s Dashboard.

What is the problem? Problem is how WordPress maintains user session using cookies.

To fix it add one more line into your wp-config.php file

define( 'COOKIE_DOMAIN', $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_HOST' ] );

Now you should be all set

Posted in Web-design | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

GoDaddy and domain management

Posted on Apr 30, 2016 by Serguei Dosyukov

If you one lucky user of GoDaddy shared hosting, well… you are in luck…

GoDaddy uses most awkward Control Panel setup on the market when it comes to site setup.

Usual site setup consists of two common tasks:

  • managing site code
  • managing site URL

Usually if one wants to have more than one domain one would make deployment of each site in sub-folder of the root FTP.

Grand idea of GoDaddy is that they want you to have only one site per one domain associated with any hosting package by disallowing association of the top level domain with sub-folder as mentioned above.

Technically you are not prohibited from  acquiring more domains or doing anything else, but you would run into situation that support team would play coy about how to set everything up.
You will be out of luck of trying and escalate issue – “this is how it is done, and you cannot do anything about it”…

Once in a lifetime you may run into support tech who may spill the secret steps:

  1. Start by going to http://gateway.godaddy.com. Select record associated with domain
    ss-2
  2. Click Settings
  3. In popup screen, enter any other domain name than one you would want to use
    ss-1
    This could be considered strange, but do it. Come up with some strange name and give it a go. That is most important step. Complete it all the way and let system simmer for some time between 5 and 30 min to allow DNS changes to propagate.
  4. After applying, you will be back in previous screen and you can click Manage to go to cPanel
  5. Scroll down to Domains and click Addon Domains
    ss-3
  6. Now you can use your real domain and create proper record to point at sub-folder on your FTP – ex: /public_html/my_domain
    where /public_html/ is your root
    ss-4
  7. Save it and let DNS to propagate
  8. Now you should be all set

Enjoy

Posted in Technology | Leave a comment

  • About

    From a junior developer through Sr Manager position, I was always interested in new technologies. Passionate speaker, IT junky, developer, architect, team lead, and development manager - many hats, one goal - making software better and being closer to people’s needs. For the most part I am using my blog as a scratch pad, writing small articles on things which I came across, was asked about more then once, and which would otherwise require additional research again and again.

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