John Congdon

Solved: vBulletin Quick Reply Not Working (ckeditor.js unable to get value of the property ‘label’)

John Congdon — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:26:19 +0000

I have a vBulletin board that I manage and while recently had users complain about the Quick Reply not working. They had to go into the advanced editor to make it work.

Doing my due diligence as an IT professional quickly narrowed it down to…. IE of course. I spent hours digging, using a debugger I kept getting the error in the title of this post. I kept going through the Call Stack trying to figure out what was going on, but the javascript is minified very tightly, so following it became daunting.

Two days later another user complained about not being able to update their profile. While debugging this, both problems became very clear.

I had recently put in some rewrite rules to make the forum more SEO friendly. However there are a couple situations where the rewrite rules broke down. I was missing the two lines colored in green below.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/videos.html /forums/36-Bowling-Videos-amp-Pictures
RewriteRule ^/threads/ckeditor.php /ckeditor.php?t=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/threads/(.*) /showthread.php?t=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/forums/(.*) /forumdisplay.php?$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/entries/(.*) /entry.php?$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/blogs/(.*) /blog.php?$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/members/ajax.php /ajax.php?$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/members/(.*) /member.php?$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/list/(.*) /list.php?$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/list/author/(.*) /list.php?$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/$ http://www.bowlingboards.com/forum.php [R,L]

It was that simple. I am sure I am missing some other rules, and will try to get them corrected in due time.

Just had my first GitHub pull request put…

John Congdon — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:09:24 +0000

Just had my first GitHub pull request put into a project. Happy to contribute, even in small ways.

https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/jQuery-animate_from_to

jQuery Mobile Select Box Not Showing Up

John Congdon — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:12:55 +0000

jQuery Mobile is a great framework with lots of great out-of-the-box magic.

I am in the middle of converting a site over from a full website to a mobile version. I was really frustrated when I tried to click on a select box and nothing would happen. If my header/footer were fixed, they would just toggle on and off. I assumed it was the fixed positioning, and I was wrong.

Through some FireBug debugging, I found the problem. It probably won’t affect many people, but it’s worth pointing out. I had a set a width through CSS on the select item for the desktop version. When I ported into the mobile version, I left the CSS width in there. So if I happened to click on the very far left of the button, it worked.

I removed the width and all is right in the world again.

Running Apache Benchmark (ab) and receiving apr_socket_recv: Connection reset by peer (54)

John Congdon — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:12:38 +0000

I was having this issue and was getting quite frustrated. All of my researched turned up nothing. Finally I decided to run this from another machine instead of my Mac, and it worked just fine. So this had nothing to do with my server, it was a client side related issue.

I still don’t know what caused it. I was just able to identify the issue and thus find a work around.

Google +1 Button Shows Zero (0) Count When Not Logged Into Google Account

John Congdon — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 14:09:01 +0000

I had a situation that my boss pointed out yesterday that was very confusing.

He was on a competitor’s website and their +1 button was showing a count. However, the same product on our website was showing 0. I knew that I had +1′d it.

So I go to my machine and I see (3) +1′s. I logout of Google and sure enough the 3 went away. ?!?!?!?

I was so confused that I went as far as copying the +1 code from the competitor’s site and theirs showed a number and ours still did not until I logged in. My mind was boggled.

Next step: ask another person in the office to create a Google Profile and +1 our product. Bringing our +1′s up to 4. There you have it, it showed whether I was logged in or out of Google.

I hope this save someone else time from searching hours for an answer. It was ridiculously confusing. Why is 4 the magic number?

I am coining a new term “Arsonistic Firefighter”

John Congdon — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:55:13 +0000

I find myself putting out fires in my code base all the time. The problem is, I set the fires to begin with.

Lazy Loading Images with JQuery

John Congdon — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:17:54 +0000

I am trying to speed up a website every way that I can. I decided to look into lazy loading which I have read about numerous times.

Lazy loading is basically not wasting time loading images that are off the screen, or out of the viewport.

This got me thinking, why do the browsers not do this for us? They would be better equipped to handle this than a JS developer. Especially since the browser is doing the rendering, it knows what it needs in order to display the screen.

Git Flow Bump Version Script

John Congdon — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:29:56 +0000

I wrote a simple bump version PHP script that does quite a bit of lifting for me.

It maintains my version number, very basic
It takes an argument on whether I need my templates updated due to CSS/JS changes.
- If necessary, creates a new assets directory based on version number to fix caching issues
- Pulls latest css/js into that directory
- Updates template to new assets directory
- Adds and commits new template
Optional second argument overrides the version #
Starts a new release branch
Opens my RELEASE notes for editing
Adds and commits my release notes
Finishes my release branch

Below is specific to my situation. PATH_TO_TEMPLATE_FILE would need to be changed, as well as the preg_replace lines to suite your needs.

if (!in_array($argv[1], array('y', 'n'))) { print "Usage: {$argv[0]} (y/n) [version]\n y=update css/js\n n=no update\n"; exit; }

if ($argv[2] && !preg_match('#v\d\.\d*\.\d*#', $argv[2])) { print "Invalid version (should be v\d.\d.\d)\nUsage: $0 (y/n) [version]\n y=update css/js\n n=no update\n"; exit; }


chdir(dirname(__FILE__));
$fileName = '.Version';
$v = file_get_contents($fileName);
 $a = explode('.', $v);
 $minor = $a[2]+1;
 $v = "{$a[0]}.{$a[1]}.$minor";
 $fh = fopen($fileName, 'w');
 fputs($fh, $v);
 fclose($fh);
 `git add $fileName`;
 `git commit -m "Increased version to $v"`;
 echo "Version updated to $v and added to git\n";
if ($argv[1] == 'y') {
 $asset = "assets/v{$a[1]}.$minor";
 mkdir($asset);
 chdir($asset);
 `sh ../../update_css_js.sh`;
 `git add .`;
 `git commit -m "Increased css/js version to v{$a[1]}.$minor"`;
chdir('../../');
 $template = file_get_contents('PATH_TO_TEMPLATE_FILE');
 $template = preg_replace('#data-style="sI" href=".*?" media#', 'data-style="sI" href="/assets/v'.$a[1].'.'.$minor.'/style.css" media', $template);
 $template = preg_replace('#jQuery.getScript\(".*?" \+ pluginPack#', 'jQuery.getScript("/assets/v'.$a[1].'.'.$minor.'/" + pluginPack', $template);
 $fh = fopen('PATH_TO_TEMPLATE_FILE', 'w');
 fputs($fh, $template);
 fclose($fh);
`git add PATH_TO_TEMPLATE_FILE`;
 `git commit -m "Increased css/js version to v{$a[1]}.$minor"`;
 }
`git flow release start $v`;
 $date = date('Y-m-d');
 $command = << /tmp/out && mv /tmp/out RELEASE
 EOF;
system($command);
 system("vim RELEASE > `tty`");
`git add RELEASE`
 `git commit -m "Updated RELEASE notes"`
system("git flow release finish $v > `tty`");

Making WAVs play in Chrome for Mac

John Congdon — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:04:34 +0000

I was really frustrated that our voicemail was not working in Chrome. All it said was Missing Plug-in.

Through some research, I found that the voicemail system was loading the files via ajax to a PHP script. Because the extension was not .wav, Chrome was confused.

How did I solve?

Well, this is an internal box with very little traffic and I have complete control of it.

I first told Apache to treat all .php.wav files as PHP. In httpd.conf of php.conf you will see
AddHandler php5-script .php

Add this right below it.
AddHandler php5-script .php.wav

Restart Apache.

Then I symlinked the .php file to a .php.wav file. So that they were identical. Then in the file that pulled in this php file, I changed the filename there as well.

Fixed my issue.

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in

John Congdon — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 01:56:27 +0000

I was receiving this error and did a quick Google search to figure out why. Most posts referred to a missing curly brace “}”.

I went through about 3-4 posts when it hit me. My code was from an older server that allowed the short tag

I know it’s not recommended, but to fix the error, I just changed php.ini.

Change this link from Off to On, and restart Apache.
short_open_tag = On