Alex Le’s Blog

My blog’s been up and down (mostly down) for the past few days. The reason was that I was running out of files quota. I’m still hosting my site on 1and1 despite the fact that 1and1 and I we had some conflicts. 1and1 imposes a hard-limit of the number of files you can have on your account( ~260k). I didn’t move the blog to my dedicated servers because I know I won’t have enough time to maintain the servers myself (make sure DNS doesn’t go down, mail server up and spam-free, etc.). I don’t want to be a fulltime sys-admin just to make sure my blog is up. So as much as I want to be independent and in total control, I’d rather leave my site on 1and1’s server and pay them $10 to do so.

Since with 1and1 you can host multiple domains, I host a few other sites together with alexle.net under 1 single account. Suddenly there were a large number of files on my hosting account and I didn’t know what was happening. My ~260,000 files quota was quickly used up. I SSH’ed in to the account and did some searches (just do find ./ | wc for different suspicious site folders). It turned out that the joomla portal for www.warsofearth.com began to generate a huge amount of cache files. I originally had Page Cache on for WarsOfEarth to speed up the site (sometimes 1and1 server is not the fastest one. You can tell, alexle.net’s speed is terrible without cache) and thus for each hit to the site, a cache file is generated. My guess is that the site was crawled by some bots and the OpenSEF link component I used was generating cyclic links. I was aware of the OpenSEF issue for WarsOfEarth.com portal but just never bothered to fix it. And once the bot crawled the site, it kept on indexing and following the cyclic links, thus generating the huge amount of cache file.

Anyway, I rm’ed all the cache files for warsofearth.com and was able to reduce the amount of files on the server to roughly 40k, instead of more than 260,000. For now, the problem is fixed.

Sorry for the inconvenience that may have caused to you.

If you ever run into the issue of Joomla’s tinyMCE Edit HTML Source popup window being blank, showing only “{$lang_theme_code_title}” on the Title bar, here is the explanation and solution:
The popup window is a HTML file located in

http://your-joomla-site.com/mambots/editors/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/source_editor.html.

When you click “Edit HTML Source“, tinyMCE will open up this source_editor.html file using the URL defined in $mosConfig_live_site (in configuration.php), and this file in turn will execute some javascript to allow you to edit the HTML code. Due to some cross-site scripting security restriction, if you happen to visit your site with a slightly different URL than the URL in the $mosConfig_live_site, e.g. with or without the www, then the javascript in source_editor.html will not be executed properly.
For example, if your set your $mosConfig_live_site to be “http://your-joomla-site.com” and you access the Joomla admin page via “http://www.your-joomla-site.com/administrator” (notice the additional www), then the “Edit HTML Source” popup will not work due to the cross-site scripting security restriction. Because your-joomla-site.com and www.your-joomla-site.com are not considered the same, the javascript from the main tinyMCE editor cannot interact with javascript in the source_editor.html file, which is being opened through a different domain (in this case without the www).
To solve this issue, you just have to access your Joomla site via the URL that is being used in the $mosConfig_live_site variable. Another more convenient way to solve this issue is that your can write a simple redirection to redirect traffic from http://your-joomla-site.com to http://www.your-joomla-site.com (in this case your $mosConfig_live_site is set to the www domain)
Cheers!

I’ve been working with VirtueMart 1.05 for a while and there’s one specific feature of FF that really annoys me. Copy and Paste results in a “Unprevileged script” error. I’ve made a quick video of my screenshot so you can see what I mean … This is really annoying.

More details of this are here at http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/securityprefs.html. This is just crap, Mozilla! Why do you make me to switch to IE? I hate this. But the rich-text editor for my WP is still working just fine. Meanwhile, at http://neosmart.net/blog/archives/181, it was said that the copy&paste bug had been fixed in 1.5.0.4. What’s going on then?

I think the whole under/unpriviliges crap just stupid. Firfox, -1 for you.

I’m working on customizing this component for Joomla to use for my business venture with my friend Syed.  It turned out that VirtueMart’s code is pretty crappy - badly written I mean.  Yes VirtueMart (may) works but customizing it is like separating black and red beans from one another.  If I can rate the readability of the code, I’d vote for a -1:  PHP code is mixed with HTML and with a bunch of tables, for instance the file shop.browse.php.   VirtueMart also lacks the flexibilty in terms of front-end module customization.  I have to write a few custom modules just to format the categories listing the way I’d like.  The bundled category listing module is just too bulky to be rewritten.  Looking at the code I have to go through to customize virtuemart for my template, I can only say #$#$%@&.  I wonder why there are still so many people using VirtueMart out there.  Or it’s just the least sucky of the worst?  VirtueMart needs to be rearchitected if it wants to be more popular.
Compared VM to the Hoavui.com e-commerce engine that I co-written with my friend last year, Hoavui’s code is much better.  Currently we used a MVC approach with OOP design from the ground up.  My plan for later is to convert Hoavui.com’s code to Joomla to take advantage of the CMS features of Joomla.  The missing parts of the engine is taxation, more payment gateways (Hoavui.com only supports PayPal IPN for now), and a more modular architecture.

The VirtueMart site I’m currently working on is http://www.refillprinting.com.  Come have a look and leave me some comments.  I like the logo most, took me at least 5 hours to get it.

Well, 999 hits and counting over extensions.joomla.org. This is quite a success for me considering the work that I put in(not much actually, :wink;)

I am planning on improving the javascript part of EiP to use createElement instead of the innerHTML thing as I tested on FF1.0x, the component somehow fails. I’m also thinking about a edit-in-place on-steroid version: instead of 1 form element at a time, how about being able to update the entire form in one click? The developer can only need to make a div to wrap around, then do some javascript initialization and everything is good to go. Why am I doing this? Well, writing a web-app is tedious sometime. You have to develop the front-end, the the backend with additional adding/updating features. So the work is trippled. With this on-steroid ajax form, the developer can just write the frontend and easily add the updating features to it.

If you have used and happen to like Edit in Place, let me know what you think.