Extra Topics (Joe’s Blog Site)

Elgg is an open-source social networking platform. I was installing it lately when I encountered this error. I thought there was an error in the installation script because there’s a folder named “actions” not “action” as indicated in the error message. I even tried renaming that folder to remove the “s” but I got a ‘Call to undefined function‘ error. I checked my PHP version and its 5.2.6. I realized it has something to do with the directory access.

Solution
Read the INSTALL.TXT included in the root folder of your installation. It says:

A note on settings and .htaccess

The Elgg installer will try (yeah try harder!) and create two files for you:

* engine/settings.php, which contains the database settings for your installation
* .htaccess, which allows Elgg to generate dynamic URLs

If these files can’t be automatically generated, for example because you don’t have the correct directory permissions, Elgg will tell you how to create them. If, for some reason, this won’t work (Yup, this didn’t work alright!), you will need to:

* Copy engine/settings.example.php to engine/settings.php, open it up in a text editor and fill in your database details
* Copy /htaccess_dist to /.htaccess

That’s it, simply copy or rename htaccess_dist to .htaccess and it will work. My advice to all of you reading this article, next time read the installation manual first. And that includes me, darn!

Oh yah, after doing this, try to restart the installation by going into your site again. Elgg’s installer is NOT very user-friendly.

jEdit is an excellent programmer’s text editor. It has an auto-complete feature, code parser, intelligent bracket matching which skips quoted literals and comments, and lots of keyboard shortcuts. Best of all, since it’s Java-based, it’s portable so it can run on any operating system. It’s also very small, about 11.2mb when installed with the necessary plug-ins.

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I have Google Analytics installed on my website since this site is created. As we all know, these Analytics scripts are placed at the bottom of the page just before the </body> tag. A few days ago, I tried putting some Adbrite ads in different places here on my site. I also placed an ad at the bottom just before the analytics script.

The next day, I noticed that my Analytics report dropped to 0 or 1 visitor. I thought it was normal, maybe I really didn’t have visitors that day. But when I tried to check my cpanel’s aswtats and my Adbrite stats, it indicated that I did have visitors that day. I double checked the code to see if I accidentally deleted some lines but everything’s ok. I assumed maybe it has something to do with the Adbrite ads I placed.

What I did to make Google Analytics work again

I Google searched for a solution about this matter but unfortunately did’t find any solution. So I tried fixing it on my own. It thought maybe somehow, the Adbrite  script is causing a conflict with the Analytics script. So what I did is I simply switched the positions of the two scripts. I placed the Analytics script before the Adbrite script at the bottom and it worked.

I still don’t know why this worked considering that I still have Adbrite ad scripts at the top of the page and which are still above the Analytics script. Anyway you can check  this page’s source code and go to the bottom see what I did.

If you’re looking for a portable web server, you can use XAMPP. XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.

The good thing about XAMPP is that it can easily be run on a USB portable drive. So you can bring your server or scripts with you all the time. This is very convenient if you need to make a web project presentation somewhere. But best of all, it’s free!

How to install XAMPP distribution for your USB drive

1. Go to XAMPP for Windows download page.
2. Download XAMPP ZIP or XAMPP Lite ZIP archive package, not the executable installer, to your computer.
3. Extract the package to your USB drive.
4. Once extracted, find and run setup_xampp.bat. It will automatically configure XAMPP.
5. Run xampp-control.exe to open the Control Panel.
6. Start the services that you need like Apache and Myql, then exit.

That’s it! The services will not start automatically when you restart or use another PC. You have to manually start the services described in steps 5 and 6. If you copy or move the XAMPP package, you must execute the setup_xampp.bat described in step no. 4 to update all configuration files on the new location.

If you forgot your Super Administrator password for your Joomla/Mambo, you can never recover your password because the passwords are hashed using MD5 algorithm. In other words, the passwords are encrypted.

However you can reset the value in the password field in the database. Set the password to a known value and then you may log-in using that new password. You can try to paste the following hash code to the password field. The password is ‘secret‘:

5ebe2294ecd0e0f08eab7690d2a6ee69

But to do this, you would have to find the field entry in the database. Some people have difficulty in locating the table or the database. That’s why I created a simple PHP script. All you have to do is to run the script from your server and it would allow you to specify your own password then it will automatically reset the password for you. You’ll have no hustle on finding the field from your database!

The script's interface to reset Joomla/Mambo admin password

How to use the script to reset your Joomla/Mambo password:

1. Download and unzip the package to your computer (adminreset.zip)
2. Upload the file adminreset.php into your server’s main folder where your Joomla/Mambo is installed.
3. Execute the script like

   http://yourserver.com/adminreset.php

4. Follow the simple instruction in the script.
5. After using the script, delete it from your server as other people might use it.

Did I emphasize that this script works for both Joomla 1.0.x and 1.5.x? Well it does…