Talk about Technologies, Software Architecture and Management

Making your network connected HP ENVY Photo 7855 print again

HP printers seems to always being stop-and-go solution. Anything from upgrading to new version of Windows, switching local to network or Wi-Fi can throw them off. Over years I had number of HP and Canon printers and latest device is HP ENVY Photo 7855. It started all great – new printer arrived in good condition. Installation went well, Windows 10 recognized it and Store has proper apps to use. It appeared we have had a winner. Note: Printer was connected over Wi-Fi with dedicated IP provisioned on secured locked down network. After a while I started to notice that printer will not always register properly on restart/wake up and would become unresponsive to print requests. As a scanner it would Read more…

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Firefox 77 and Awesome expanding address bar

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. First, kudos to Firefox team for well maintained browser. Then… In general, I am one of the stubborn one, 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 Read more…

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

SearchWP and XPDF support

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 Read more…

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

WordPress Network and sub-domain setup

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 Read more…

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

GoDaddy and domain management

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 Read more…

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago