Posts Tagged ‘Software’

I came across an odd problem just the other day that caused the visual editor to go haywire on a brand new WordPress installation.

Whenever I tried to write a post, the visual editor would load, but then the buttons would disappear. On top of that, none of the text I typed would show up either. A “select all” showed that my text did in fact exist, but it was displayed as white text on the visual editor’s white background. Stranger still, the HTML editor worked just fine.

I tried working through all sorts of solutions offered up online including a reinstall of WordPress, troubleshooting plugins, and even checking file permissions on the wp-includes and wp-admin directories.

None of these solutions worked, but as I dug through the blog’s admin pages, I saw something strange. As you can see in the picture below (click to enlarge), the WordPress and Site Address fields both show a colon appended to the URL. The problem is a strange result of how WordPress was installed as well as how the web host has configured our account. Removing the colons fixed the problem immediately, and will likely remedy your issues as well.

As a final note, this fix works on WordPress 3.2.1 but should apply to any past or future releases of the software.

Until recently when I needed to download media, either from Usenet or torrents, I searched for it manually. This usually involved either using a web based service or an IRC channel, searching for keywords and sifting through results that include spam as well as resolutions and file-types that were not what I was looking for. After successfully downloading the files, I would then manually sort them into their respective folders in my media collection, and rename them if necessary. This was especially tedious for items released on a regular basis (such as television shows), as the process would have to be done weekly for each item.


I realized there must be an easier way.


I had already been using SABnzbd for a while, as it was the only binary newsreader I could find with support for iPhone remote management, and I have to say, I loved it. SABnzbd has a very clean, intuitive interface, and although it doesn’t have quite the features of applications like Newsbin, it has many addons, such as the chrome and Firefox extensions, and a number of iPhone apps. Also, SABnzbd is free, open source, and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. All the applications that will be used in this article utilize the extensibility of SABnzbd. Some can be used without it, but much of the functionality would be lost.

Sick Beard is a program that will periodically search for specified shows on various usenet search sites. When Sick Beard finds the episodes it is looking for, it downloads the NZB file, and sends it to SABnzbd for downloading. Sick Beard also comes with a script for SABnzbd post-processing, allowing for automatic renaming and sorting of downloaded media.

Sick Beard also supports downloading of NZB files to a “black hole” folder, rather then sending them directly to SABnzbd. This allows for other applications to pick the files up for downloading. In addition to usenet download support, Sick Beard also provides some torrent support, although there would be no provided post processing script so some extra configuration would probably be required to get file renaming working properly.

CouchPotato is similar in concept to Sick Beard, only it works with movies. Simply search for a movie using the application, and select the movie you want from a list of movies matching your search query that CouchPotato pulls from IMDB. The application will then search for all the movies in your queue at specified intervals, download the NZB file, and then either send the file to SABnzbd for downloading or send the file to a “black hole” folder, similar to Sick Beard.

These programs are the best I have found for the job, but off course these are just a couple suggestions. Episodebutler offers similar functionality to Sickbeard, although I have no personal experience with this one.

Also, a completely different route to go would be simply using RSS feeds. This can cause an issue however, as reposts will be downloaded multiple times.

If you have not been by the site recently, I have updated a few my applications this week, and I have added a pair of new apps as well.

The newcomers include AudioX and RAIDFix.

AudioX is a labor of love several years in the works. A process born in batch files, migrated to Perl, and eventually rewritten in C#, AudioX converts songs between audio formats including FLAC, APE, AAC, MP3, and WAV. I really needed an application to convert my APE audio to FLAC for archival, and to compress my FLAC audio to AAC format for my iPod and MP3 format for my car. AudioX does this for me, managing tags and album art, all while taking advantage of PCs with multiple cores. It’s a great app, give it a try!

RAIDFix is an application I wrote to help the countless people that visit my site looking for a way to enable RAID on their Intel ICH-based Windows PC after they have installed Windows with RAID disabled. I have published walkthroughs on how to accomplish this, but RAIDFix makes it extremely simple. Patching your computer to allow you to enable RAID in the BIOS is now one-click away.

Additionally, Suction received updates to allow the user to specify the text they want used when renaming duplicate files as well as the ability to specify whether this text is prepended or appended to the file name.

MailBin had a bit of work done on the back-end, in order to do away with the flat configuration file used by the program. Instead, MailBin now uses Windows’ standard user config files like the rest of my applications.

All of the applications listed above now take advantage of my new web-based update system. The programs will check this web site to see if there is an update version of the application automatically, alerting you if a new release has been published.